Maybe I’m taking this too personally, but that’s what blogs are for, right?  But the revolting action by the fascist Iranian thugocracy in breaking into Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi’s safe deposit box in Tehran and stealing her Nobel prize symbolizes all that is petty, ugly, sinister and repulsive about the Iranian dictatorship. It’s not just a violation of her person; it’s a violation of all who believe in human rights.

Shirin Ebadi, one of the bravest women in the world, won the Nobel in 2003 for her work as a human rights lawyer defending victims of Iranian regime. When I say I take this theft personally, it’s because two years later I was honored to be in a room with Shirin Ebadi — and it just happened to be the same night and in the same room in which I met the love of my life. It was at a gathering my book editor gave to celebrate the American publication of Shirin Ebadi’s memoir.

I think it was the only time I’d been in the same room as a Nobel Prize winner, and I was awed by proximity to someone of such courage, by the quiet dignity and strength of her words.

And now the cowardly woman-hating, freedom-crushing creeps and bullies who pass for a regime in Iran (may the nuclear laboratories they lie about blow up in their faces) have stolen the symbol of something they could never hope to aspire to — indeed, even understand — in their evil ignorant fanaticism. They’re nothing more than scummy crooks degrading religious piety everywhere with their travesty of it.

Any new theories? Where do you stand on the old theories? Is the Warren Report conclusion (for all the flaws in its investigation) beginning to worm its way into your heart?

Did the assassination change your life? Did it (and successive assassinations) change your vision of America? Your vision of the world? Or is it irrelevant that there’s still doubt warranted (pun intended). Irrelevant in toto? (the Latin word, not Dorothy’s dog).

I’ve been thinking about Oswald. I think he fired shots that day. I can’t be sure he was alone, although I haven’t been convinced by any of the conspiracy theories. More importantly I can’t be sure why he did it. He was somewhere on the spectrum between nutcase and ideologue, maybe a combination of both.

Like a certain other shooter of recent vintage. It’s a dangerous combination.

Anyway, I’m interested in what people think about or if they do. It is November 22nd, you know.

Okay I’m not the right guy to do this. Make this suggestion. First of all I’m a guy and what I’m suggesting probably should be proposed by a woman.

Second, I believe that the Afghanistan situation is probably hopeless as it is. What I’m suggesting is not likely to be a “solution,” but I can’t see any other paths to a “solution.” If we stay in, tens of thousands will die for people who don’t seem to want to fight the Taliban.

In some ways I’m glad Obama’s “dithering”: there’s a wall in D.C. with the names of 60,000 people, many of whose children and families probably wished LBJ had dithered a lot more before committing us to a hopeless mission and death for those on that wall. I agree that “dithering” is not good for the troops there, but maybe he’ll dither his way to a better decision than LBJ, and many more current and future troops will be grateful.

I think Obama’s looking for a fast way out because he knows there’s no way to win. He was trapped into mouthing John Kerry’s disingenuous campaign ploy: Iraq, Bush’s war, was the wrong war; Afghanistan was always the right one.

And then there was the growing group of Afghan war enablers, the best and brightest bloggers on the liberal left who were entranced by “the cult of counterinsurgency.” Even though almost all predicted the surge in Iraq wouldn’t work they seem to have been so stunned by its “success” and became cheerleaders for sophisticated counterinsurgency (or COIN) tactics when General Petraeus seemed to use them to turn things around in Iraq. (Even though, as we now now, bribes and targeted assassinations played an equal or greater role than the brilliant COIN tactics and the “success” itself is looking more fragile).

But a kind of Boys Club of cheerleaders for COIN grew up around its evangelists and became enablers for the original McChrystal March master plan, now with its 40K troop addon, which Obama initially bought into and is now apparently trying to extricate himself from. With good reason.

But while I see nothing but tragedy and rising body counts in Afghanistan (as I’ve blogged here before), I still find the plight, and the pleas of the Afghan women, compelling. The girls’ schools being blown up by the Taliban out of their insane fear and hatred of women. Killing, stoning, and driving women back to the stone age of sharia law. It’s horrible.

Sorry, I just don’t think people who have earned billions in investment banking should be able to buy their way into the Democratic Party, whatever they now believe or support.

The idea that you devote yourself selfishly to materialism and then suddenly become a friend of working people doesn’t work for me. I know all too many people in the new administration are cronies of the investment banking scammers who destroyed the economy. In fact I think it should be an automatic disqualification for public office. (I’m not talking legal disqualification but choice and pre-disposition.)

One thing you can say about Obama is that he’s not a materialist. He didn’t go for the easy money on Wall Street or their satellite law firms. He’s an idealist. Much as conservatives mock it and much as it can be abused, being a “community organizer” is a noble pursuit. Didn’t your parents teach you that it was noble to seek to help the poor? Mine did; that’s why I’m a liberal. I don’t get why that’s somehow shameful, while the worship of the amoral values of the materialistic “free market” is somehow more admirable. Is that what your parents taught you? (I’m even told that “helping the poor” is encouraged by religion, you “values voters.”) I know you can find all sorts of ways to complicate it, but it seems pretty basic to me.

Anyway, that’s why I want Corzine to lose — even if it’s a short-term defeat for the Democratic Party. I don’t want people like him buying the Democratic Party. If he loses it becomes less attractive to his ilk. Simple as that.

As I’m sure you know, it was Balzac who made the observation that “behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” I’m not saying Corzine broke any laws. I’m saying that the market itself has proven itself the great crime and he’s at the very least an accessory after the fact.

In declining to comment about the explosive New York Times story that the CIA had been paying off the brother of the Afghan president to time off from his opium trade to run errand for us, which he apparently interpreted to mean steal the election for his brother, thus further delegitimizing the U.S. presence there, this is what our “intelligence” agency spokesman had to say:

“A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment for this article. ‘No intelligence organization worth the name would ever entertain these kind of allegations,’ said Paul Gimigliano, the spokesman.

Brilliant! They screw up all over the world, get suckered, misinform the American people and president (remember the “slam dunk” on Iraq) and then tell us they won’t “entertain” such allegations. What does that mean? You won’t buy them a drink or a lapdance?

You just did “entertain” them in the primary meaning of the word. You considered them–and then refused to respond to them in any coherent way, although it sounded more like a denial than a confirmation. But a “non denial denial”. As in if they were true we couldn’t tell you.

But the key phrase here is “any intelligence agency worth its name:. Je seems to be asserting–contrary to all available evidence over the past half century that the CIA is “an intelligence agency worth its name”. That is it has or exhibits intelligence. I’m not willing to “entertain” that. What they’re good at is not “intelligence” but coining new euphemisms for the lack of it.

Nobody left or right tells it like it is on Afghanistan the way retired U.S army Col. Ralph Peters does in this column.

Do you have a better way of looking at it?

I’ve argued before against “solutionism”–the optimistic American belief that there is always going to be a correct, successful solution to any given international problem as long as people of good will, etc.

Alas our endearing but naive American optimism repeatedly comes up against a world in which people of good will, etc. (by our definition) are in short supply. The argument for and the argument against making a big push in Afghanistan are both persuasive to some extent, but neither is a solution. Heads we lose one way, tails we lose another. .

If you doubt this please read this deeply pessimistic account of an ex Marine who resigned his Afghan civilian post out of hopelessness.

I used to think false hope was better than no hope. No so much anymore.

Then how do you explain this and how did it escape notice for so long on the Republican National Committee official site? Another legacy of “the Southern Strategy” that has served the GOP so well. Are you really proud of the electoral victories achieved with voters like this? Are you going to tell me once again that Lincoln freed the slaves and that excuses everything the Republican party has done to profit from racism since the ’60s? When is the silence of the intelligent wing of conservatives going to end? Do you really want to be associated with these people?

Somehow it’s become a meme among the historically ignorant on the right–who have totally driven themselves into hysterical frenzies of ignorant hatred for Obama (Hitler was a socialist; Obama is a socialist therefore Obama equals Hitler). The proof that Hitler was a socialist: his party was called “The National Socialist Democratic Workers Party”. Duh! By that logic you must believe that North Korea is a democracy because its official name is The Democratic Republic of North Korea.

Do you believe everything Hitler said about himself and the Nazi Party? The fact that someone has to point this out is an indication of how stunningly deranged and disproportionate the opposition to Obama has become. You disagree with him about health care? Fine. Many Americans agree, but respect intelligent criticism. You disagree with him about healthc are and think he’s Hitler? You need professional help.

Are you aware of the nature of Hitler’s chief opposition, the German Social Democratic Party? Frankly I doubt it. As someone who has researched and written about the death-struggle between the German Social Democratic Party (yes, they were socialists! and pro-democracy!) and the Nazis (in Explaining Hitler), as someone who has spoken with aging German social democrats, whose fellow party members were murdered by Nazi thugs on the streets and in the concentration camps, I have to say to the Hitler mustache crew: Have you no shame, have you no decency? Have you no ability to read history? Are you not aware of how sickening your trivialization of Nazi evil is. You are traducing the memory of some of the bravest defenders of democracy in Germany by mimicking the Nazis’ meretricious expropriation of the socialist name. Are you unable to distinguish between Nazi Germany and the democratic socialism of Sweden, say? Are you that detached from reality?

The German Social Democratic party fought the Nazis in the streets, in the press (see my chapter on the socialist anti-Hitler newspaper, The Munich Post) whose reporters risked their lives to warn the world about the evil brewing in Germany. Evil fomented by Nazi lies and violence. The German Social Democratic Party was, by the way, hated not just by the Nazis but by the Communists as well. Both totalitarian groups couldn’t abide a genuinely pro-democratic party. (Are you aware there’s a difference between democratic socialism and totalitarian communism? Whatever critique you have of the former, they were never mass murderers like the latter. Have you read anything but the Jonah Goldberg book? ).

Hitler and his party were mass murdering racist, anti-semites who wanted to wage wars of subjugation and campaigns of extermination and caused a war that killed 60 million all told. The fact that some people need to be reminded of this–and the differences between Hitler and Obama — is an indictment of the sad failure of the American educational system and the sad takeover of conservatism by hate-filled lynch mob ignoramuses.

(By the way, I’ll ask again: when are decent conservatives going to speak out against the Hitler mustache crew? Do you really want to let them to define conservatism? At this point your silence equals assent to dangerous idiocy.)

The great philosopher Emil Fackenheim once said that the lesson of the Holocaust, or one of them, should be to give “no posthumous victories for Hitler.” And yet, in gleefully proliferating Hitler’s image in their demented defacings of Obama’s image, they are doing just that. Somewhere in hell Hitler is smiling upon them. And laughing at them.

I’m just curious,on anthroplogical grounds.

Let’s try an experiment that will help me better understand the anonymous cowards who use a screen name to escape responsiblitlity for the infantile insults better suited to the short bus. Are you the true face of conservatism?

The reason I ask is that I know quite a few intelligent, literate, thoughtful conservatives and none of them sound like the many semi-literate haters who embarass themselves here. (and yes I have condemned “Bushitler” type haters on the left).

Why is that? Or was I deceived by knowing intelligent convetvatives and not aware that the anonymous haters here are more typical?

So here’s the experiment. Conservatism I always thought was about preserving the lasting values and achievments of our civilization. So I hope you won’t mind if I ask: Do you read any books aside from right wing screeds? You don’t sound like you do, but I could be wrong. So please name the last classic work of literature you’ve read in the past year (or decade) and tell me in a few words why you thought it was valuable (aside from some cartoonish political lesson). Just so I’ll know you’re not faking it. How about something published before the twentieth century that you didn’t read as a school assignment but because you are a conscientious conserver of our intellectual heritage.

And, hey, for those of you who cower in anonymity because you think the black helicopters will get you, here’s your chance to use your real name in a non controversial context you won’t have to be afraid about. (Or ahsamed if your neighbors knew your frothing side). Try it, putting your name behind your words. I know it’s scary to you, but it’ll be worth it because of what you’ll gain in self-respect.

By the way the fact that the nominations for the Nobel closed in February doesn’t mean that the voting took place then. Perhaps it will help you grasp this concept if you try to wrap your mind around the idea that American political nominating conventions are not the same as the elections. I don’t think Obama was the only deserving candidate, and I’m sure politics played a role in his selection, but pushing the issue of nuclear weapons to the forefront of the international agenda is a valid reason for giving him the prize, since it has the the power to change the fate of the earth.

Okay let’s hear some intelligent discussion about books you’ve read. Surprise me.

*typos fixed version.