Where have all the correspondents gone?

And so there is no news to report about Auschwitz. There is merely the compulsion to write something about it, a compulsion that grows out of a restless feeling that to have visited Auschwitz and then turned away without having said or written anything would somehow be a most grievous act of discourtesy to those who died here.

From Abroad, Writing the Unspeakable

Colbert was not just a failure as a comedian but rude. Rude is not the same as brash. It is not the same as brassy. It is not the same as gutsy or thinking outside the box. Rudeness means taking advantage of the other person's sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other person from striking back or, worse, rising in a huff and leaving. The other night, that person was George W. Bush.

Colbert made jokes about Bush's approval rating, which hovers in the middle 30s. He made jokes about Bush's intelligence, mockingly comparing it to his own. "We're not some brainiacs on nerd patrol," he said. Boy, that's funny.

Why are you wasting my time with Colbert, I hear you ask. Because he is representative of what too often passes for political courage, not to mention wit, in this country.

He failed dismally in the funny person's most solemn obligation: to use absurdity or contrast or hyperbole to elucidate -- to make people see things a little bit differently. He had a chance to tell the president and much of important (and self-important) Washington things it would have been good for them to hear. But he was, like much of the blogosphere itself, telling like-minded people what they already know and alienating all the others. In this sense, he was a man for our times.

He also wasn't funny.

I can't say I laughed much, either.

I often find the Report mildly entertaining, but comparisons of this speech to Jon Stewart's Crossfire rant are undeserved for a variety of reasons.

If it's satire you really want, my friend, you know where to get it.

"You can't fight here! This is the war room!"

So Not Funny

Few Western academics would aspire to teach political theory in an authoritarian setting. Surely the free, uninhibited flow of discussion is crucial to our enterprise. When I tell my Western friends that I gave up a tenured, high-paying job in relatively free Hong Kong for a contractual post at Tsinghua University in Beijing, they think I’ve gone off my rocker. I explain that it’s a unique opportunity for me: it’s the first time Tsinghua has hired a foreigner in the humanities since the revolution; Tsinghua trains much of China’s political elite, and I might be able to make a difference by teaching that elite; the students are talented, curious, hardworking, and it’s a pleasure to engage with them; the political future of China is wide open, and I’ll be well placed to observe the changes when they happen. Still, I do not deny that teaching political theory in China has been challenging. This has to do partly with political constraints. But it’s not all about politics. Even if China became a Western-style liberal democracy overnight, there would still be cultural obstacles to deal with. In this essay, I will discuss some of these political and cultural challenges.

Teaching Political Theory in Beijing, by Daniel Bell

It is a measure of how all-consuming the Bush Administration's quest to transform the Middle East is that this week's visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao will be denied the spotlight it deserves. While Afghanistan smolders, Iraq burns and Iran shuffles into America's cross-hairs, only a handful of constituencies understand or seem to care that Washington's relationship with Beijing is vulnerable to manipulation by the Pentagon.

China's Internal Crisis

So why did Porter Goss suddenly resign as head of the CIA? Is it because he's somehow implicated with the Brent Wilkes hooker scandal? Or does it have something to do with his deputy, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who's already been implicated in Hookergate? Let's round up the scuttlebutt

Goss is Out -- Why? | The Washington Monthly

If housing futures work the way they’re supposed to, they will shift risk from those who are less able to bear it (individual homeowners with hefty mortgages) to those who are more willing to (speculators looking for a big upside on their investments). In the process, they will effectively provide a form of house-price insurance. They could have wider benefits, too. If there is a housing bubble, and it does burst, housing futures would soften the blow to the national economy. If enough traders participated in the market, it would become, in the long run, a valuable predictor of housing prices in different cities. That would allow buyers to make more rational decisions about how much they were willing to pay for homes, which would make house prices swing less wildly than they currently do.

THROUGH THE ROOF, by James Surowiecki | The New Yorker

Last Sunday's Boston Globe carried an alarming 4,000-word front-page article about President Bush and the Constitution. It seems that Bush has asserted the right to ignore "vast swaths of the law" simply because he thinks that these laws are unconstitutional.

The article is specifically about "signing statements," in which the president offers his interpretation of an act of Congress as he signs it into law. This was an innovation of the Reagan administration, intended to give courts something other than a law's legislative history -- that is, Congress's side of the story -- in any future dispute. Bush often signs a law and at the same time says that parts of it are unconstitutional. Sneaky!

Constitutional Cafeteria

JUST over a quarter-century ago, five Iranian college students hit upon the idea of seizing the American Embassy in Tehran and staging a sit-in. Among them were Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is now Iran's president, and Habibollah Bitaraf, the current energy minister. The takeover of the embassy did not play out exactly as its student planners envisioned — indeed, Mr. Ahmadinejad himself initially opposed the move — but as a symbolic step, it not only isolated Iran from the rest of the world, it also rallied millions of Iranians to the idea of a strictly Islamist future. The ensuing hostage crisis made a big splash internationally, but perhaps its most important and lasting consequence was local: it gave the mullahs the leverage to take full power.

It is an old political strategy: identify a foreign enemy, provoke a crisis and wrap yourself in the flag. Today's confrontation with Iran over nuclear research is an example of how, as the saying goes, history rhymes.

...

What does all this have to do with today's nuclear standoff? The embassy occupation in 1979 was viewed by most Americans as a challenge to our world authority and a statement by the Iranian revolutionaries that they wanted to take Islamist rebellion beyond Iran's borders; in fact, it was primarily a well-orchestrated confrontation intended to place the mullahs firmly in power.

Today, as the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, presides over an increasingly restive, unhappy population, his pit bull, President Ahmadinejad, has picked a new fight with the United States of America. Even many Iranians who oppose the theocracy now favor joining the nuclear club; it adds to national prestige and arguably enhances Iran's security. In openly pursuing nuclear power and defying world opinion, the old revolutionaries are shoring up their stature at home by appealing to nationalism and to fears of foreign invasion or attack.

And why shouldn't they? It worked before.

Playing to the Home Crowd in Iran, by Mark Bowden

There appears to be a specific correlation between the price of oil and the pace of freedom.

As Energy Prices Rise, It's All Downhill for Democracy, By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Over time, our criticism of the US has accumulated many new themes as an idiom of resentment against our US-centric leadership and as an expression of nationalism under the impact of the Iranian revolution and the rise of religious extremism. Post-9/11, it has merged with the rising wave of anti-Americanism in the Islamic world.

Yet the dynamics of US-Pakistan relations and the discriminatory US approach to India and Pakistan have been at the heart of our feelings towards America. A brief history will explain the issues.

...

Will the US agree to cooperate with Pakistan in the field of civilian nuclear energy? No, not now and even less so in future. Does this make the relationship any less valuable for us? Not as long as it continues to serve some other important national interests of ours. In a strange irony both Pakistan and US have historically been part of the problem and part of the solution for each other and this paradigm is unlikely to change.

DAWN - Opinion; May 3, 2006