“The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..54_pf.html

Too bad he can’t draw the logical conclusion.

Perhaps that was supposed to read “of communal 9/11 BUT the”

Sreedhar

The missing option here is victory. Don’t worry, it will be invented. “You have to define win,” Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, who is about to return to Iraq, told the New York Times.

I think victory would be for Bush to serve out his term unimpeached (blathering all the way about the wonderful progress we’re making); dump the whole sorry mess into the next president’s lap; and then complain that we could’ve won if only he’d had a third term.

To tell the truth I still find the level of intellectual cowardice and dishonesty (or is it just stupidity?) amazing. I had no reason to defer to his friend’s judgment but Cohen had just described him as fair and expert. The closest I can come to understanding Cohen’s reaction is to assume that he saw our disagreement as a wager rather than as a disagreement about a real situation. I had not ‘put my money down’ by agreeing to abide by his friend’s judgment so he did not have to ‘pay up’ by modifying his perspective on Israeli policy.

fast and bulbous — digby and I have tossed back and forth the notion that people came together and watched the events of 9/11 happen in a way that was like watching disaster porn.

I sometimes wonder if I’ve been able to look back on that time more dispassionately than others (and react a bit more sensibly to those events, to my mind) precisely because I don’t have television, and wasn’t subjected to day after day of endless repetition of the video of planes crashing and the towers collapsing. In that time, I was reading about what was going on, not watching. The effects of the media–in some psychosocial sense–can’t be separated from that phenomenon….

fast and bulbous @
79

“communal 9/11 porn”

I may be thick, Jane, but while I think I know what you are referring to, I’m not sure how (even metaphorically) it’s porn. Help?

For me, the avatar of communal 9/11 porn was the NYC GOP convention that renominated W for his “second” term.

fast and bulbous — digby and I have tossed back and forth the notion that people came together and watched the events of 9/11 happen in a way that was like watching disaster porn.