the Grapes of Wrath and some neo-con bitchery

Dark humor, laced with arsenic and old shit, presides over the politics of our time. Obviously. And so it is that the recent Holocaust denier festival, held by Iran’s president, Ahmadinejad , existed very briefly as a moral low point shaming Iran, and was then quickly pimped out by the propagandists of the long war to shame the rest of us. It is an illustrative story, demonstrating that morality melts in the self aggrandizing rhetoric of the belligeranti as quickly as icecubes in hell.

The proper response to the idiot president’s gathering of bedbug scholars and cross eyed KKK men was given by the Iranian population, who voted – within the oppressive limits set by the state – against the accident who governs them. However, it is important to remember this about Ahmadinejad – his idiocy consists, in part, of making for official export what many of America’s Middle Eastern allies prefer to purvey for purely home consumption.

However, that is an unpleasant thing for our current crop of liberationists. Krauthammer recently spelled out the implicit underpinnings of the politics of anti-Semitism by distinguishing the good anti-semites from the bad ones. The good ones are like Nixon – or the current house of Saud. Nixon might have raved against the Jews, and the House of Saud officially condones systematic anti-semitism in the Peninsula – from solemn newspaper series about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to textbooks that helpfully define Jews as Apes. This might seem, oh, distasteful, but it isn’t so distasteful that our Churchill counterpart in the U.K., brave, brave Tony Blair, can’t occasionally kowtow to the Saudis and pull the plug on bribery investigations and the like, while strewing the Middle East with as much WMD as Britain can sell. And Nixon, of course, saved Israel in 1973.

To find out where a selective moral mindset can lead you, LI suggests reading some of the hothouse maunderings of the late, great Ron Rosenbaum. Like Christopher Hitchens, Rosenbaum has become a convert to neo-conservatism in his declining years, and he now has a forum at a Pajamas Media site that combines the two salient styles of neo-conism: the apocalyptic and the dyspeptic. It is all St. John of Patmos, with a severe ulcer. The second holocaust is around the corner, according to Rosenbaum. Is he talking about the 600,000 Iraqis that have dies so far in the past three years of this unjust and cursed war? No, he’s talking about the Iranian missile system that dances like a poisoned sugarplum in the neocon collective head. Time is running out – the promise of the Bush administration was to promote at least one more war. The real man’s war, the march to Teheran. And, sadly, the clock is ticking and the planes aren’t flying. Rosenbaum is already ahead of the troops, however, proposing that Ahmadinejad be tried for genocide. It is a pre-genocide thing he’s done, a virtual genocide. This is among Rosenbaum’s helpful suggestions about the Middle East. He also seems to suggest that, to prevent a Holocaust, the Palestinians must disappear. Or so it seems – he is against a Tony Judt type state, merging Palestinians and Israelis, and he is against a double state. Perhaps to avoid the Holocaust we have to reinstitute slavery – certainly the disenfranchisement of the Palestinian population that would please Rosenbaum is all about denying those radical Palestinians any political voice at all. To save the village of our Western moral values, we had to burn it down, seems to be the motto.

But when LI wants to drink a refreshing draught of moonlit struck water – to frolic among the truly politically confused – we go to Harry’s Place. The site has continued the most fascinating experiment, dressing up a Thatcherite politics in the ragged language of the most bogus New Left doctrines. At Harry’s Place, Iraq was never occupied, it was liberated. By comrades! comrades one and all.

For them, too, of course, the little matter of the Saudi corruption of British politics, not to speak of the much more violent nature of anti-semitism (and much more totalitarian nature of the political culture) is absolutely on the margins, as they have riveted Iran with their comradely critiques. You get the feeling that these guys have been a bit beat up over the past three years – they aren’t as gung ho on nuking Iran as Rosenbaum (or maybe just a small, lovepat bombing – Rosenbaum is rather vague about how he wants Iran rubbled). But they do love to take the moral high ground, which consists of tying the anti-war movement to the pro-Ahmadinejad, pro Saddam Hussein cadre among us – all twenty of them. This is what happens when morality is an excuse for war, and the war/non-war binary are the only parameters allowed in talking about international relations. Having staked out the big issue – Holocaust denial – and keeping an eagle eye on all the millions of radical pseudolefty Islamofascistophiles who are just itching to do that, they don’t have time to plaster the other eagle eye on, say, our comrades in Basra, who have expressed their own ideas about the Jews by even changing the weekend – they did want to make sure that the Jewish Sabbath was ritually made into a work day, as a sort of symbolic treading over the Jews.

Such are the fruits of the new anti anti-the-wrong-Semites. Let's hope they don't form one of those terrible vintages. Certainly seems like the Grapes of Wrath to me.