--------LATER---------

I'll be taking an extended break from blogging as I concentrate on Arabic language study and writing my thesis.

SPEAKING AS A UKRAINIAN-GERMAN-SCOT MUTT

This article in today's Washington Post gives some needed historical context to the current immigration debate. Shorter version: Claims that immigration was somehow more "orderly" in days past are nonsense. Immigration into this country has always been something of a free for all. Wage-depression has always been a genuine concern. And fear of cultural dilution and "race-mongrelization" have always been used to incite hatred toward newcomers.

I think John Winger put it well:

We're all very different people. We're not Watusi, we're not Spartans. We're Americans, with a capital A, huh? You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We're underdogs, we're mutts! Here's proof: his nose is cold. But there's no animal that's more faithful, that's more loyal, more loveable than the mutt.

Indeed.

A WHIFF OF DOUG...

Wow.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush on Monday nominated Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden as CIA chief, setting up a battle with some members of the U.S. Congress over having a military man head the civilian spy agency.

[...]

Some Congress members have said a general heading the CIA could give the Pentagon too much sway over U.S. intelligence gathering. Others have said he is too close to the White House and lacks experience building a clandestine service.

The CIA is in charge of gathering human intelligence and Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency, has most of his background in technological intelligence gathering.

As head of the NSA, he was in charge of eavesdropping operations. Bush has said Hayden was the one who proposed the domestic eavesdropping program after the September 11 attacks.

As a matter of politics, this may be Bush's way of engineering a showdown over warrantless wiretapping. As a matter of practical, responsible governance, this is such a dumb idea that I strongly suspect it originated with Doug Feith.

LUUUUUUCAAAAAAAAASSSS!!!

A few years ago, there was a rumor about that agents of the evil Lucas empire were going around buying up all prints and copies of the original versions of the Star Wars trilogy, because Lucas felt that his new versions represented the fulfillment of his true vision, and didn't want those of us for whom the originals have meant so much to be able to enjoy them without feeling his cold, clammy, digital claw upon our shoulders. Perhaps this rumor was not true. I'm not sure, I can't find anything about it on the web. The point is that it certainly could be true, as this sort of Stalinist airbrushing is completely in keeping with the controlling cultural despot George Lucas has become. This is, after all, the man who signed off on Greedo shooting first. You know, Evil.

After hearing that the original films would soon no longer be available anywhere in the galaxy, I hunted down the best versions of them available, and transported them in secret to be kept safe by my relative in the country, Mr. Underhill.

But, surprise. The Evil One announced the other day that he will now be releasing the original, un-digitally marred trilogy on DVD. I suspect this may be a ruse to draw the last extant copies of the old films out into the open, where they may be rounded up by his troops and disposed of. Now is the time for caution. At least I'm not one of the suckers who bought the recently released DVD versions of the digitally revamped films, as the upcoming DVDs will include those versions along with the orgininals.

NOONAN!

Following on Rob's excellent post yesterday about The Cult of the Will to Torture and Kill, Holy Dolphin Girl chimes in with this doozy on the Moussaoui verdict:

Excuse me, I'm sorry, and I beg your pardon, but the jury's decision on Moussaoui gives me a very bad feeling. What we witnessed here was not the higher compassion but a dizzy failure of nerve.

How removed from our base passions we've become. Or hope to seem.

It is as if we've become sophisticated beyond our intelligence, savvy beyond wisdom. Some might say we are showing a great and careful generosity, as befits a great nation. But maybe we're just, or also, rolling in our high-mindedness like a puppy in the grass. Maybe we are losing some crude old grit. Maybe it's not good we lose it.

No one wants to say, "They should have killed him." This is understandable, for no one wants to be called vengeful, angry or, far worse, unenlightened. But we should have put him to death, and for one big reason.

...He could have stopped it. He did nothing. And so 2,700 people died.

Yeah, no one wants to say "They should have killed him" except for almost the entire conservative media. Nothing says "political bravery" like calling for the death of Muslim terrorists on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Far from being cowed by the forces of liberal oversensitivity, as Noonan insists, I think the Moussaoui jurors displayed real nerve, real will, in applying our nation's laws appropriately, and rising above the atmosphere of vengeance and fear that has been stoked by our government and media in general, and by the prosecution in this case in particular.

Dahlia Lithwick's coverage of the trial has typically been very good.

FREAK OUT!

In the midst of criticizing Tom Hayden, Andrew Sullivan writes:

It still amazes me how the far left is still much, much more concerned with bringing George Bush down than in building Iraq up. The contempt some of them once had for the Iraqi people's fate - they were quite happy to see Iraqis consigned for decades to Saddam's tender mercies - is now matched by their zeal to abandon the country to Jihadists and theocratic Shiite thugs.

I've concluded that Sullivan occasionally takes a sort of hallucinogenic "political independent" drug that causes him to see things that aren't there. Read Hayden's post and you might notice that it contains not a single mention of George W. Bush, odd for a piece which is supposedly concerned with bringing Bush down. Sullivan can't for a moment consider that Hayden, or anyone, might genuinely believe that U.S. troops are currently the most significant cause of violence in Iraq, but if he stares at Hayden's post long enough he can just see the Bush-hatred emerging, like a zebra's head from a tree stump. Dude! I'm freaking out! Deep breaths, deep breaths, it's cool, it's cool. Have a cigarette, Andrew.

The tiresome canard that the left (or any significant portion of it, far or near) wants Bush to fail more than it wants Iraq to succeed is just that. It's trash. It's a way for conservatives (and "independents") to shout "Yoink!" and escape through a rhetorical trap door. I've been around some lefties whose hatred of Bush approaches the cultishly fanatical, but never once have I heard any of them express the wish that Iraq collapse (even more) so that Bush would be politically damaged. The claim that leftists "were quite happy to see Iraqis consigned for decades to Saddam's tender mercies" is likewise an historically innaccurate libel. It was a conservative president who sided with Saddam against Iran, even after it was revealed that Saddam had used chemical weapons against Iranian troops and Iraqi Kurds. It was another conservative president who abandoned the Iraqi Shi'a to slaughter after encouraging them to rise up. It hardly needs pointing out that, if we're keeping score, and we should be, the American left's record of support for human rights, including in Iraq, beats the right's with a big, big stick, and that the vast majority of human rights organizations worldwide operate from the political left, a fact which conservatives rarely hesitate to point out when trying to dismiss politically inconvenient reports issued by those organizations.

(For the record, I disagree with a lot of Hayden's critique. I think Packer is of the two best American journalists covering the Iraq story, along with Anthony Shadid. I have no knowledge of Packer ever "fix[ing] the facts to suit the policy he favors," as Hayden claims. Indeed, Packer's body of work on the war, in addition to being simply great journalism, has been, in my view, a very serious and candid attempt at coming to grips with his initial support for the war, and with the war's implications for the future of liberalism and American foreign policy.)

THE NATIONAL ANTHEM CRISIS

As Jacob Weisberg notes, The Star-Spangled Banner is a pretty poor national anthem. Matt Yglesias notes that it was written during, and memorializes, a fairly dishonorable war. I'll add that it's a song written about a flag, for pete's sake. A national anthem should be a big shout out to the neighborhood, a sort of national boast, and I'm sorry but the SSB just doesn't represent like it should represent: "We're free, we're bave, but how about that flag, eh? Eh? Ya like that flag?" I've got nothing against the flag, I like it a lot in fact, but I just think that our anthem, rather than commemorating the flag's staying power during a right boner of a war, should list things of which we're proud, the qualities we admire and to which we continue to aspire. A good American anthem would include references to the Bill of Rights, barbecue, and Blue Note records.

I've always been partial to the Philippine national anthem. The Ukrainian one is close to my heart for obvious reasons, and of course the French have themselves a beauty, excellent for singing in clubs in occupied North Africa.

GALBRAITH

On the passing of John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006), I'll just mention that he was the only guest I ever saw on Firing Line who made William F. Buckley visibly insecure (all the stranger because the two were friends.) Usually it was Buckley who would assume a superior, condescending posture toward his guests, causing them to scrape and scramble for some way toward the rhetorical high ground. Not so with Galbraith, who slouched his ginormous frame into the chair opposite Buckley and held forth while barely glancing in Buckley's direction for the entire episode, while Buckley simpered and stuttered.

I miss Firing Line.

BECAUSE SOMEONE'S GOT TO FIGHT THIS WAR OF IDEAS

Fred Kaplan on Juan Cole's Global Americana project:

Juan Cole...wants to hire skilled linguists to translate into Arabic the classic works of American political thought—especially those works that deal with freedom of religion, division of powers, sovereignty of the people, and equal rights. He has in mind the essays and speeches of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King Jr., and Susan B. Anthony; a solid history of American Jews and other minority groups; maybe a few good books, written by American historians, about Iraq. Cole also wants to subsidize Middle Eastern publishers to print these books in large numbers and at low prices, and he wants to pay fees to book dealers throughout the region—just as publishers pay Borders and Barnes & Noble here—to display the books prominently.

This isn't just an idea. Cole has established the Global Americana Institute and the Library of Americana Translation Project. Since he outlined the idea in his blog late last year, readers have sent him $13,000. He claims that some foundations are "jumping-up-and-down enthusiastic" to pour in the big bucks, once he obtained the legal status of a nonprofit organization. The federal government just gave him this status two weeks ago. He's filling out the grant applications now. He also recently returned from the Beirut international book fair, where he says several Middle Eastern publishers and dealers expressed great interest in the project (and, no doubt, in the prospect of the money).

Long ago, the federal government did on its own just what Cole proposes to do. The United States Information Agency—then an independent agency—maintained libraries in Amman, Istanbul, and elsewhere, filled with translations of American political and literary classics. The Franklin Book Program, a nonprofit company with funding from the State Department and private foundations, published hundreds of titles and stocked them in libraries and bookstores all over the world. The Franklin Book Program shut down in 1977, its international board having determined—prematurely, it turned out—that its mission was accomplished. In the 1990s, under pressure from the Republican-run Senate (especially Jesse Helms, then chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee), the USIA was absorbed into the State Department; its budget was whacked and its agenda politicized; its libraries were shut down, their books remaindered.

You know, spearheading an effort to translate the great works of American political thought into Arabic doesn't seem like something such a supposed America-hater would be interested in, but I'm sure the wingnutosphere will explain it away somehow...

THE POOR MAN

Brings the funny.

READ

Best-selling author Glenn Greenwald.

I genuinely believe there is a hunger to talk about what is happening to our country and why it is happening. The media is capable, at best, of talking about scandals and issues in day-to-day isolation. The fact that this administration has expressly embraced theories of presidential power which are entirely unprecedented and plainly alien to our most basic political values and traditions is something of unparalleled significance and yet also something that we have barely discussed as a country. I think Americans know there is something deeply amiss and are receptive to attempts to talk about what that is.

Moreover, the conditions are ideal to have a real discussion about the abuses and excesses of this administration. One thing which administration supporters such as York have failed to sufficiently appreciate is just how many people who previously supported this administration have now turned on it and have irrevocably abandoned it. The president's approval rating didn't plummet from 60% to 33% because "liberals" changed their minds. That has happened because people who were open to standing behind the president -- and who, for several years, did support him and his policies -- have changed their minds about his competence, his likability, his trustworthiness, and the overall wisdom of his world-view. That is an extraordinary shift. The group of people who believe that the Bush presidency is a failure extends far beyond "the Left" and includes virtually every group on every point on the political spectrum.

Gives me hope.

FRUM AND DUKE SITTIN' IN A TREE...

Even among the hysterical choir of hardline Israel supporters who have responded to Walt and Mearsheimer's Israel Lobby paper with a steady chorus of slander, the glass-shattering spinto soprano of David Frum stands out. In his NRO diary he writes:

APR. 27, 2006: THINGS HAVE COME TO A PRETTY PASS ...
... when a man cannot argue that the United States is controlled by a sinister Jewish conspiracy without being accused of anti-semitism. That, at any rate, is the argument used by defenders of the now notorious Walt/Mearsheimer paper.

This is obviously a wildly dishonest representation of what Walt and Mearsheimer wrote, but Frum, equally obviously, is not interested in debating the paper's merits, or its lack of them, as much as he is in doing his part to make sure that future authors think twice before attempting any similar project.

Frum goes on to "support" his charge of anti-semitism against Walt and Mearsheimer by pointing out that...wait for it...their paper has been praised by anti-semites. This is a transparent and elementary fallacy, something one as educated and intelligent Frum surely must realize. It hardly needs pointing out that, according to Frum's reasoning, the fact that David Duke and other racists agree with Frum's position on affirmative action means that Frum is a racist. It says a lot about Frum's estimation of his readership that he thinks he can get away with this kind of crap.

DON'T STOP BELIEVING

Poor Daniel Pipes:

The great mystery of the 2003 war in Iraq - "What about the WMD?" has finally been resolved. The short answer is: Saddam Hussein's persistent record of lying meant no one believed him when he at the last moment actually removed the weapons of mass destruction.

"Actually removed the weapons of mass destruction" implying that those weapons actually existed at or near the time of the U.S. invasion, something that the Iraqi Perspectives Project, about which Pipes is writing, does not claim. Ever the dutiful servant, Pipes' intent here, once again, is to represent "traces of previous WMD programs" as somehow equivalent to actual WMD.

Later:

Apr. 25, 2006 update: I have received many questions about the disposal of the WMD - Syria? Belarus? - and wish to clarify that I purposefully did not deal with this question in the above article (just as the Iraqi Perspectives Project did not). The topic here is exclusively the functioning of the Saddam Hussein regime in relation to the WMD mystery. Any thesis of what was done with the WMD is compatible with the above background explanation.

Any thesis? How about the thesis that Saddam sent the WMD to the moon inside the the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile?

I guess we'll never know.

ZARQAWI

As usual, Frontline has a great companion website to their program on the Iraqi insurgency. This interview with reporter Michael Ware is very interesting, particularly on the significance of Zarqawi and what he means to a new generation of terrorist jihadis:

WARE: Zarqawi, in many ways, has not only confronted the West, but he's also challenged the jihad community itself, and he's forced it to look again at itself and its strategic objectives, and even its tactics. So he's enflamed great debate.

Nonetheless, the suspicion that I harbor is that in the final wash down the track, be it in years or in generations, what we will see is that the form of Islamic militancy will have more of the mark of Zarqawi than it will of the more moderate. It's this young generation that's being enthused by Zarqawi; it's he that has brought them alive.

Q: And bin Laden is not a part of that generation?

No. Certainly the way I see it, and the way it's been expressed to me by individuals who have become a part of Zarqawi's organization, Sept. 11 was the end of a form of Al Qaeda. Sept. 11 was the final product of the Afghan generation. ... And I'm sure the Al Qaeda strategists knew that after Sept. 11 an attack would come, and the organization would be dispersed, and [they would] have to revert to an underground movement and would be under great stress. And if you look at what bin Laden has said, and if you just analyze the nature of the actions, it was an inspirational event: "You see what we can do? Now you go out and do it. We've trained you. We've funded you. We've shown you the way." And that's always been a fundamental Al Qaeda principle.

So very much it was franchised terrorism, and it was, "Think globally, act locally," with a very local phase to every manifestation. And it didn't have to be Al Qaeda in every appearance. It was Abu Sharif [leader of Asbat al-Ansar, a Lebanon-based group] here and the Moral Liberation Front there, and something else here and something else here. But in all its permutations, it was a furtherance of a fundamental Al Qaeda-inspired ideology or concept. It's the idea that is most powerful.

So what we saw after Afghanistan is this movement seeking its new birth, its next platform, and through Zarqawi we see this personified. He had a camp in Herat, [Afghanistan], for his organization, which was not Al Qaeda but was definitely affiliated and working within it. It's then reported that he went to Kandahar, joined the defense of that, and eventually fled through Iran. Then there [are] various reports about where he went and how long he spent and whatever. But essentially, what he was doing was ... shopping around as a terrorist consultant for hire. He was looking for the next place or group or cause on which to graft himself. And ultimately, the U.S. administration gave him Iraq as the next platform upon which to build the new generation. It was the ultimate tool with which to recruit.

If you go back and you see the letter that Zarqawi wrote to Osama bin Laden, which was intercepted, ... it constitutes Zarqawi's business plan. "This is what I intend to do with this platform, seeking the support of Osama bin Laden." You go back and read that document now, and Zarqawi has followed through with everything that he promised. Every tenet that he outlined, he has, if not fulfilled, he has pursued vigorously. And it was here that Al Qaeda was given a rebirth. This is what we're now seeing: This Bush administration is the midwife to the next generation of Al Qaeda, and that's a generation that is principally being shaped or flavored by Zarqawi. ...

SULLIVAN AND SAHLANI

Andrew Sullivan has this post up:

Sistani and the Holocaust
The great hope for Shiite moderation in Iraq, Ayatollah Sistani, has a representative in the U.S.: one Fadhel Al-Sahlani. He's both a Holocaust-skeptic and someone who believes that Israel should not exist. Just noticing the actual content of Muslim moderation in Iraq.

A couple things bothered me about this. While Sahlani is in fact Ayatollah Sistani's accredited representative in the United States, it seems a bit presumptious to attribute Sahlani's every utterance to Sistani. In this respect, the title of the post seems pretty misleading. Things get really silly, though, and simple-minded, when Andrew attempts to inflate a few comments in an interview into the "content of Muslim moderation in Iraq." That is, unless Andrew would also insists that a few regrettable comments by James Dobson's lawyer should be held to be representative of the "content of American Christianity"? Doubtful.

Sistani's got a pretty nifty website. If Andrew, or anyone, would like to know the Grand Ayatollah's opinion on anything, they can e-mail him here.

DISUNITED FRONT

Abu Aardvark has some first thoughts on the new message from bin Laden:

It is striking that for the second time in months, al-Qaeda's leaders have issued a strong statement on Palestinian affairs...and Hamas has told al-Qaeda in no uncertain terms to get lost. It happened back when Zawahiri attacked Hamas for taking part in the elections, and now it's happened in response to the bin Laden speech. A fairly typical example of the refusal of many entrenched Islamist movements to accept al-Qaeda's claims to lead the Islamist umma (the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was equally unimpressed with Zawahiri's criticism of their electoral participation, and issued strongly worded public statements to that effect) - and worth keeping in mind as the first wave of analysis of the new bin Laden tape pours out.

THE POOR MAN'S AIR FORCE

Mike Davis on the history of the car bomb.

On a warm September day in 1920, a few months after the arrest of his comrades Sacco and Vanzetti, a vengeful Italian anarchist named Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon near the corner of Wall and Broad Streets, directly across from J. P. Morgan Company. He nonchalantly climbed down and disappeared, unnoticed, into the lunchtime crowd. A few blocks away, a startled postal worker found strange leaflets warning: "Free the Political Prisoners or it will be Sure Death for All of You!" They were signed: "American Anarchist Fighters." The bells of nearby Trinity Church began to toll at noon. When they stopped, the wagon -- packed with dynamite and iron slugs -- exploded in a fireball of shrapnel.

[...]

Buda's wagon was, in essence, the prototype car bomb: the first use of an inconspicuous vehicle, anonymous in almost any urban setting, to transport large quantities of high explosive into precise range of a high-value target. It was not replicated, as far as I have been able to determine, until January 12, 1947 when the Stern Gang drove a truckload of explosives into a British police station in Haifa, Palestine, killing 4 and injuring 140. The Stern Gang (a pro-fascist splinter group led by Avraham Stern that broke away from the right-wing Zionist paramilitary Irgun) would soon use truck and car bombs to kill Palestinians as well: a creative atrocity immediately reciprocated by British deserters fighting on the side of Palestinian nationalists.

[...]

The car bomb...suddenly became a semi-strategic weapon that, under certain circumstances, was comparable to airpower in its ability to knock out critical urban nodes and headquarters as well as terrorize the populations of entire cities. Indeed, the suicide truck bombs that devastated the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 prevailed -- at least in a geopolitical sense -- over the combined firepower of the fighter-bombers and battleships of the U.S. Sixth Fleet and forced the Reagan administration to retreat from Lebanon.

Hezbollah's ruthless and brilliant use of car bombs in Lebanon in the 1980s to counter the advanced military technology of the United States, France, and Israel soon emboldened a dozen other groups to bring their insurgencies and jihads home to the metropolis. Some of the new-generation car bombers were graduates of terrorism schools set up by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence (the ISI), with Saudi financing, in the mid-1980s to train mujahedin to terrorize the Russians then occupying Kabul. Between 1992 and 1998, 16 major vehicle bomb attacks in 13 different cities killed 1,050 people and wounded nearly 12,000. More importantly from a geopolitical standpoint, the IRA and Gama'a al-Islamiyya inflicted billions of dollars of damage on the two leading control-centers of the world economy -- the City of London (1992, 1993, and 1996) and lower Manhattan (1993) -- and forced a reorganization of the global reinsurance industry.

Read the whole thing.

MAKING THE BEST OF THE BAD

Today's Golden Strawman award goes to Cliff May:

The question is not whether Donald Rumsfeld should resign. The question is not even who should replace him. The question is: What goals would a new Secretary of Defense set, and what strategies would he implement to achieve them?

If Rumsfeld's critics believe America's military has met its match on the battlefields of Iraq, they should say so forthrightly. But they should talk, too, about the ramifications of an American defeat in the heart of the Arab Middle East.

For example, once al-Qaeda can creditably claim to have driven U.S. forces out of Iraq, is there any reason to believe the line will be held in Afghanistan? And what responses should we expect elsewhere in the region after such an American humiliation?

Of course, no one has suggested that "America's military has met its match on the battlefields of Iraq." As I'm quite sure Cliff understands, guerrilla insurgencies avoid open confrontation on traditional battlefields, preferring instead to turn the streets, markets, and neighborhoods into battlefields. They don't win with a massive, decisive battlefield victory, they win by proving to the people that the government cannot protect them, they win by dictating the pace of the fighting, they win by not losing. You can make up your own mind on whether or not they're winning in Iraq.

And no matter how many times it's made, the reputation argument ("Withdrawal will make us look weak!") never gets any less silly, or any less darkly reminiscent of Vietnam. It should be obvious that, whenever the U.S. withdrawal occurs, al Qaeda will claim credit for it, as will the Sunni Iraqi insurgency (which is not to be confused with al Qaeda), as will Muqtada Sadr. Recognizing that the U.S. occupation itself has become a significant destabilizing factor, I think an important question right now, perhaps the most important, is which faction will the U.S withdrawal strengthen more. Our best option at this point seems to me to be some kind of behind-the-scenes deal with Sistani, wherein Sistani can represent as having brokered an agreement for a phased but very definite timeline for a U.S. exit. Sistani is no liberal by any stretch of the imagination, but, in addition to being arguably the most powerful man in Iraq, he has repeatedly advocated for electoral democracy, at least as he defines it.

Shi'a cleric-controlled democracy is obviously not what the U.S. went into Iraq to create, but that's what they're going to have, at least in the short term, and we'd better get used to this idea. The question is whether it will be a religiously-oriented democracy under the guiding hand of conservative Sistani, with at least the possibility of eventual liberal reform, or a straight-up hardline religious authoritarian sham-democracy under the iron fist of Sadr and his militiamen.

HAVING CO-WRITTEN "AN END TO EVIL", NOW THAT'S EMBARRASSING

In reference to this item by Matt Yglesias, David Frum asks:

Shouldn't it be mildly embarrassing to somebody in the world of left-liberal politics that a 25-year-old blogger is able to produce a stronger case against striking Iran than two former Clinton NSC Senior directors in the New York Times, the director of the European Studies Center at Oxford University in the pages of The Guardian?

Actually, we in the world of left-liberal politics are quite proud that we have in our ranks 25-year-old bloggers who, in addition to generating astute political analysis, are actually able to claim it as their own work.

SO LONG, SPANKY

It's been fun, but let's face it, you were always going to be in Ari's shadow, obscured by the wisps of smoke and fetid stench of brimstone which, even now, three years after his departure (laughing maniacally, in a stone chariot drawn by humongous demon rats with halitosis) still lingers in the press room. My friend, compared to your predecessor, you are not even the Diet Coke of evil, nay, more like the TAB of evil, or perhaps the Fresca. When one considers the duplicity, mendacity, and outright skullduggery of those with whom you worked every day, this almost equals a compliment.

As Michael Wolff notes, your "singular talent [was] to stand there and take it." I will miss that vaguely frightened look that you had, similar to the look the President gets when he speaks to an audience which hasn't been hand-picked, and even sometimes when it has. I will miss that Victorian vapored look of indignation you used to get at entirely appropriate and reasonable questions. I will not miss your over-reliance on the phrase "moving forward".

So long, and good luck, though good and faithful servant of knavery. It's time for you to be moving forward.