All Posts Tagged With: "Bomb"
New Yorker Obama Bomb
The whole world has weighed in on the New Yorker cover controversy and there seem to be two points of view. One, as admirably expressed by Chief Hypocrite on this site, is that a line was crossed, a line of appropriateness, a line of taste, maybe even a line of greed. “Arrogant, elitist and money mongering,” was how he put it, and it’s hard to argue with those accusations.
Dress up our next prez like a mullah, make his wife look like the love child of Rambo and Angela Davis, warm the oval office with Old Glory roasting in the hearth under a half-portrait of Osama looking wise as Honest Abe and a couple of things are going to happen. You are going to piss a lot of people off, and you are going to be misunderstood by a lot of folks who live on the “farm”—meaning anywhere west of Manhattan—making the folks who are already pissed off at you even more pissed off.
The second, minority point of view is that the New Yorker cover was satire and satire is supposed to stretch
the envelope. The NY’er was making a point about the ugly smear tactics used against the Obamas by exaggerating them, by satirizing them, and there’s nothing wrong with that, they say. Everyone who reads the mag would “get it,” and it’s not the New Yorker’s problem if Aunt Betty sees the cover at the Tulsa airport on the way to visit the kids back east and is “confused” by the image.
That line of reasoning would be easier to take if it didn’t reek of snoot, but okay, I hear you. I don’t expect the New Yorker to limit itself to monosyllabic grunts comprehensible to everyone in America, even mullet-headed, Ford-driving, morbidly obese trailer trash in the flyover states. That would simply be too much to ask.
I can, however, as a card-carrying satirist, expect this: BE FUNNY. That’s the point of satire, you frigging morons, that’s what makes satire work. You can explain and complain all you want, David Remnick, editor of the World’s Most Literate Magazine, you can scream first amendment and the hallowed traditions of Harold Ross and William Shawn, you can name-drop every genius writer you’ve published since Dorothy Parker hit the rag and it won’t change the pure, existential truth of the matter.
You bombed. You told a joke and it wasn’t funny. Not even in the wry, knowing, tongue-in-cheek, smarmy in-joke smirk that passes for humor in the New Yorker. You laid an egg.
There was nothing original about that cover, there was nothing surprising about that cover, there was no meta-narrative about that cover that wasn’t obvious to a sophomore, and I don’t mean a college sophomore, I mean an eighth-grader.
What you did, New Yorker, was take things too far and hope you were redeemed by the
brilliance of your humor. It would have worked, if it was funny. It was not. Instead, what you published was seen for what it was, the graphic equivalent of using the N-word. Funny thing about N-bombs, when you drop one and it’s a dud, it blows up in your face. Just ask your fellow bomber, soul mate, and new BFF, Michael Richards.
When a standup comedian tells a joke and it falls flat, he stands there with his face hanging out and takes it like a man. He doesn’t get to go on Charlie Rose and explain 
himself. He gets booed.
Booooo.
Iran Has the Bomb - Now What?
Israel to Bush - Attack Iran Or we Must.
Israel’s message to President Bush was either attack Iran or we will. Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen will hear the same simple message while he’s in Israel this week — : If you don’t, we have to - and will before the U. S. administration changes.
Frankly Israel’s fears an Obama Presidency could mean an Israeli-US rift, and that thinks Belgium born and International reporter for Newsmax Arnaud de Borchgrave could mean a bigger calamity than the 1956 Suez Canal crisis and the Soviet’s savage reconquest of Hungary. Those punctuated the earliest chapter in the Cold War moving the doomsday clock to a minute before midnight.
Simply put a conflagration in the Middle East that could spread across the world could be triggered by the outcome of America’s November Presidential election.
First, even if he wants to Bush can’t attack Iran before the November elections because it would be a political catastrophe domestically, and Israel knows that.
Second, Israel believes - I think knows - Iran is tantalizingly close to or already has a nuclear weapon. After all Iran has had 23-years since Pakistan’s nuclear midwife A. Q. Khan handed over a-bomb plans I agree with Arnaud that it would be a miracle if Iran doesn’t have at least one city busting nuke. But, using one A-bomb while useful for terror and wrecking Israel only ensures Iran ’s utter destruction.
Third, there is a chance the U. S. will not vote itself into oblivion and could elect an experienced moderate in the person of John McCain who has said “There is only one thing worse than bombing Iran, and that is an Iranian nuclear bomb.
Borchgrave says Israel is convinced it is living an existential crisis and that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s extremist threats to snuff out Zionism could destroy the Jewish state with one city-busting weapon in the nose cone of an Iranian missile. Obama says he will go to Iraq and Afghanistan but it will be nothing but a political press opportunity generating platitudes, and notable in its circumventing Israel.
U. S. and European diplomats say there is leeway for diplomacy coupled with increased sanctions pressure. Also says Arnaud verbal bomb-thrower Ahmadinejad does not control Iran’s nuclear establishment, which is in the hands of Supreme Religious Leader Ali Khamenei. Also encouraging is that one of Ahmadinejad’s bitter political opponents, former chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, was recently elected to the powerful position of speaker of parliament and may unseat Ahmadinejad in 2009 elections.
Depending on an Iranian election and diplomacy as a last chance is twitchy at best. What’s excruciatingly clear is the whole game turns on what happens in America’s November election and relies on respecting the admonishment that diplomacy is the art of saying nice doggy until you find a big rock. But, you must have the big rock.
U. S. To Attack Iran’s Nuclear Bomb Plants.
A leading member of the American Jewish community told NEWSMAX this week to expect a U. S. attack on Iran this summer. Although Israel will not be directly involved it expects retaliatory strikes and heavy casualties and told Iran to expect a “prompt severe reaction … which will destroy the Iranian nation.” On Sunday Iran “abruptly cancelled” a meeting with the International Atomic Energy Agency that was set to investigate allegation Iran has already tried to make a nuclear bomb.”