Lilex: Pox on Pax

Sorry, couldn't resist the Variety style headline on this one. James Lileks, great man that he is, today has had the courage to do what so many of us have wanted to do for so long: call bullshit on "Salam Pax" for being the smug, snide, petulant, whiny, self-serving, callow, pretentious, immature ass and moral weakling that he is. He writes most directly in response to "Salam"'s ridiculous reply to The Guardian, when they solicited what various people would like to say to George Bush, in which he adapts on cue the tone of sneering contempt of his current euro-lefty benefactors, just as he kowtowed to his Baathist patrons in the old regime:

I hate to wake you up from that dream you are having, the one in which you are a superhero bringing democracy and freedom to underdeveloped, oppressed countries. But you really need to check things out in one of the countries you have recently bombed to freedom. Georgie, I am kind of worried that things are going a bit bad in Iraq and you don't seem to care that much. You might want it to appear as if things are going well and sign Iraq off as a job well done, but I am afraid this is not the case.

Listen, habibi, it is not over yet. Let me explain this in simple terms. You have spilled a glass full of tomato juice on an already dirty carpet and now you have to clean up the whole room. Not all of the mess is your fault but you volunteered to clean it up. I bet if someone had explained it to you like that you would have been less hasty going on our Rambo-in-Baghdad trip.

To tell you the truth, I am glad that someone is doing the cleaning up, and thank you for getting rid of that scary guy with the hideous moustache that we had for president. But I have to say that the advertisements you were dropping from your B52s before the bombs fell promised a much more efficient and speedy service.

Lileks's response is perfect:

Hey, Salam? Fuck you. I know you’re the famous giggly blogger who gave us all a riveting view of the inner circle before the war, and thus know more about the situation than I do. Granted. But there’s a picture on the front page of my local paper today: third Minnesotan killed in Iraq. He died doing what you never had the stones to do: pick up a rifle and face the Ba’athists. You owe him.

Let me explain this in simple terms, habibi. You would have spent the rest of your life under Ba’athist rule. You might have gotten some nice architectural commissions to do a house for someone whose aroma was temporarily acceptable to the Tikriti mob. You might have worked your international connections, made it back to Vienna, lived a comfy exile’s life. What’s certain is that none of your pals would ever have gotten rid of that “scary guy without the hideous moustache” (as if his greatest sin was somehow a fashion faux pas) and the Saddam regime would have prospered into the next generation precisely because of people like you. People who would rather have lived their life in low-level fear than change your situation. I understand; I would have done the same. I’m not brave enough to start a revolution. I wouldn’t have grabbed a gun and charged a palace. I would lived like you. Head down, eyes wary. When the man’s too strong, the man’s too strong. But let me quote from a Guardian story on your life:

“Like all Iraqis, Salam was familiar with the dangers. At least four of his relatives had gone missing. In the past year, for no apparent reason, one of his friends was summarily executed, shot in the head as he sat in his car, and two others were arrested; one was later freed and another, a close friend, has never returned.”

The rug was soaked before we got there, friend. Cut the clever café pose; drop the sneer. That “Rambo” crap is old. Iraq needs grown-ups. Be one.

This righteous fisking of an overrated sacred cow has prompted much rejoicing for those not beholden to the euro-weenie left or to pious multiculti sensibilities. See here, here, here, and here.

Daniel Drezner, the famous professor-blogger who claims to be a "conservative", but genuflects before every liberal he can find so that he can continue to work in academia, however, tells the lefties what they want to hear yet again.

Comments

[John Bruce]

I'm glad someone has finally pointed out what's been occurring to me ever since I started visiting Drezner's site now and then: the guy is a "conservative" or a "Republican" like I'm a space alien. He strung out this weird psychodrama about the Valerie Plame case and how it was causing him to have a crisis of faith of some sort over being a "Republican", and he got weeks and weeks of posts out of it.

What this brings back to me from my long-past days in grad school is how some people seem to succeed in academics with the most amazingly transparent kiss-up ploys. A mildly aware second-grader can tell when somebody's buttering up the teacher by saying "I'm not LIKE those others who get their clothes dirty on the playground", but whatever facility this involves, it sure impresses the teachers or the profs or the hiring committee. Drezner -- no different from many other PH.D. academic bloggers who claim to be "conservative" -- is simply one of the kissups we learned to recognize in the second grade.

[Eric Deamer]

Exactly right John. I made a point of not going to the site anymore after the Plame thing, because I just found it to infuriating. I only went back because a commenter in another thread pointed out his response, and I thought I'd give it a fair shake, but I couldn't believe his post. It was even worse than I remember.

Does anyone even believe the schtick that he's anything other than a typical liberal academic at this point? I mean, first the constant kowtowing to Josh Marshall/Kevin Drum/Atrois et al and the oh so respectful readings of Krugman and Friedman, then the obsession with the Plame "scandal", and now this! Maybe he's "conservative" by the standards of academia, by which I mean he's slightly to the right of Chomsky, but has he even talked to people in the real world and seen what they think about things? I'm suspecting not.

I sure hope he was unpaid as an "informal advisor" to Bush/Cheney 2000. That's the only way they could have gotten what they paid for.

[bill&ted]

I think most Iraqis, no the world, realizes we never went there for Iraqi freedom and liberation. That reason is just as true as WMDs, Al-Quada, nuclear programs, and all of the other creative "truths" we used to get there. In the end the only reason we went there was to control oil. Saddam had not been on the American payroll for a decade and we need a new stooge running that country that obeys us. The only people who do not realize this are Americans.

Did you know that the Constitution does not give people rights?

People’s rights preexist both the Constitution and the federal government. The Constitution sets barriers to the power of the government in order to prevent it from taking away people’s preexisting rights.

It seems to be the case that some would rather nag and bitch about other citizens in other countries not being grateful about being handed something they themselves did not give nor do they even seem to understand.

We seem to lecture Salam about something that is inherently his. Or are inalienable rights contingent on lonely bLoggers getting their nationalistic egos stroked?

I don't think the Iraqis are impressed with American blowhards, whether they are soldiers or bLoggers. The Iraqi's are going to turn on us like Vietnamese farmers.

[KMK]

A pox on Pax? Cute Eric.
Out of all 60 letters to the President I zeroed in on this one too. Sensationalism sells, Salam has a book to push and he works for the Guardian. I personally would have like to have seen him on the news in a pink boa singing the spice girls "who do you think you are." I think it would have fit the scene. Drezner got almost 400 comments off his post. Sensationalism sells even in the blogshpere.

[John Bruce]

Drezner's blog is a fascinating thing. One of the games he plays, it seems to me, is "gee, I'm on the verge of converting from 'Republican' to Angry Left", so he gets a lot of traffic from people who want to facilitate this process or watch it. It also sells with other Ph.D. bloggers like Brad de Long -- there is a sort of high-tea-at-the-rectory in-groupery here, I think.

If all you want is traffic, that's fine. I am thinking about starting a blog and already have a hobby-related web site that isn't a blog, but I do have fun looking at Site Meter, seeing where the visits come from, and so forth. So I've got no problem with someone who comes up with an idea on how to get traffic and gets nearly 400 comments on a post.

A bigger issue is the side perks that can come with a successful blog, like book sales (if you're selling a book), Tech Central Station, conferences, etc. While I've got no problem with someone whose goal is a million hits a month, I do have somewhat more concern about someone selling things, getting other perks, etc., under what are arguably false pretenses -- in other words, constructing an interesting/appealing/intriguing public facade that makes you out as something other than what you are (in Drezner's case I think, a garden-variety overachieving academic careerist, a Stanley Fish wannabe). Actually, I think there's a lot of this in other Ph.D. bloggers, like Erin O'Connor, whose interest in academic freedom and putatively conservative views is secondary to her own advancement and promotion of an idealized version of herself, it seems to me.

But this in turn is just a version of what you have to watch out for on the web, which is simply people who misrepresent themselves, from FBI agents who pretend they're 13 year old girls on up the ladder.

[Eric Deamer]

Wow, in Bill & Ted I've attracted my first troll. He/they/whatever even says "It's all about oillllll!!!!", and uses childish, insulting fake e-mails and names, just like the trolls on LGF. I'm truly honored. Maybe this means I've arrived.

[Rex Stetson]

Rex:'Lilex: Pox on Pax'Rox!

Nice to see a good punchy, Variety-style headline now and again. Was a time when you saw that kind of thing everywhere, now it's just in The NY Post occasionally, and of course the British newspapers which are far more interesting than our C-SPANish American papers...

R

[Sally]

Hey Eric,

I truly don't know that much about what's posted above - references to other blogs, etc... The one thing I do note is that many people are calling each other childish names, cursing (like in the post you quoted from in your post)at each other, etc.. However, it only seems to be ok when the poster does it.

Why is that?

And what is a troll? (Not joking, just not up on blog terms)

[Eric Deamer]

Hi Sally:

Thank you so much for reading this site and for leaving a comment. This is a very insidery post, that's really only understandable for people who are into blogs and stuff so I can understand your confusion.

In terms of the cursing etc. The blogger and columnist James Lileks got the ball rolling by using the dread f-word to begin with. This is extremely, extremely rare for him. I mean, maybe once a year he uses any kind of profanity whatsoever. This gave it real power when he did use that word. Unfortunatley it also lead to other bloggers who were responding to use more profanity, and then on to more profanity in the comments etc. Generally, if the blogger is of the intemperate sort who uses profanity etc. it is seen as more acceptable to use profanity in the comments.

A "troll" generally means someone who leaves comments on a site with which they disagree, not in the spirit of honest debate, but merely for the purpose of provoking, calling names, using profanity etc. Trolls are almost always anonymous or pseudonymous.