Notes from a Quiet Office

THIS JUST IN: SAFIRE A DOUCHEBAG

You heard it here first, kids: William Safire is a big fucking douche. Today he is on about none other than... drumroll, please... the forces of freedom!

Yes, Mr. Safire, lighting up his opium pipe in the ivory tower of the New York Times building, decided he was going to enlighten us on the subject of the "Four Elections". In dogmatic claptrap terms, that means the elections for head of state that have been held in America, Australia and Afghanistan (pop quiz, Hongsketeers; can anyone figure out what these countries have in common other than the fact that they all start in "A"?) and the upcoming one in the big I: Iraq. According to Safire, (who will from here on out be known only as "El Doucherino") the three wins thus far by Karzai, Howard and Bush (yes, that's right, I switched the order—let Bush run Afghanistan for a bit—he was a kid once, you leave a mess, you pick it... oh wait, he never got that part, did he?) are examples of an outpouring of world sentiment in favor of the undefinable term "freedom."

Hold on a second while I wrestle my rage to the ground.... OK. The most he can say about Howard's role in the march of freedom is that he is an "American ally." I guess that the rest of the world's constitutional democracies are anti-freedom, not like the steak-chewing, SUV-driving, prisoner-torturing U.S. of A. I'll give him Karzai, and we won't even get into the Bush thing, but what exactly does he even mean? What is the point of this article?

Well, the point, as usual, is to demonstrate how smart El Doucherino thinks he is and how many top-level connections he has. In the application of his raison d'etre, we find Safire opining on Iraq because of the straight poop he is receiving (read: eating) from the Kurds about the status of Iraq:

From the Desk of El Doucherino:

My bona fides with the Kurdish people go back a generation, to friendship with their nationalist patriot, Mustafa Barzani. Kurds were the open source of a 2001 column reporting the presence of an affiliate of Al Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam, in northern Iraq, where terrorists tried to kill Dr. Salih. Hungry Kurds first told me of Saddam's oil-for-food scam, and still remember Christer Elfverson, the Swede who spent four years as the U.N. deputy to Benon Sevan - a bureaucrat who saw no evil in the denial of $4 billion worth of food and medicine owed the Kurds.

Today their pesh merga is the readiest and fiercest Iraqi fighting force. In Iraqi uniform, these mountain warriors are helping to pacify Mosul; they want to avoid Kurd-Arab clashes, but a million Kurds live in Baghdad and their trained compatriots will defend them from terrorists. It's simplistic to prognosticate the coming election as 60 percent Shiite, 15 percent Sunni, 20 percent Kurd, 5 percent other. Only half the Shiites and Sunnis are fervent Islamists, while most of the Kurds are secular Sunnis. The result is an Oliver Hardy demographic: "a fine mess," susceptible to democratic surprises by charismatic local candidates.

So, in summary- we can trust everything the Kurds tell us, and the Kurds tell us it's all hunky-dory. As an aside, the running foreign policy battle between Friedman and Safire on the Times Editorial page can get quite silly on both sides, but lets remember that Safire hardly ever leaves the damn country, whereas Friedman (and Kristof) feel it is important to see the area one is reporting on.

Also, anyone who has a problem with the holding of the elections if they are to bear any resemblance to Rummy's "80% is good enough for me" faux-lection is a "pessimist" and a "foot dragger" aligned with the anti-American contingent so bitterly humiliated in the last few months, out only to win a vindictive scuttling of the greater good in Iraq, who's people El Doucherino feels such strong empathy for:

From the Desk of El Doucherino:

Now pessimists are trying desperately to call off the fourth election - the one scheduled for late January in Iraq to elect a 275-member national assembly that will write a constitution - lest they lose that vote, too.

As if that's enough, he even gets in his twice-weekly jab at the United Nations, attacking the U.N. deputy to Iraq 1999-2003, Christer Elfverson, as a "Swede who spent four years as the U.N. deputy to Benon Sevan - a bureaucrat who saw no evil in the denial of $4 billion worth of food and medicine owed the Kurds." For those of you who don't read El Doucherino often, his obsession as of late has been with the U.N. Food for Oil program, in which billions of dollars earmarked for food for starving Iraqis was siphoned off by Saddam while French and Russian corporations raked it in by buying at sub market rates. While the program was an enormous rip-off and a shameful misuse of the U.N., Safire acts like we didn't know any of this before we invaded, and that the invasion uncovered these hard truths.

In fact, the reason the food-for-oil program kept running has little to do with a complicit U.N. or a scamming France, and quite a bit to do with P.R. The greenie sissy liberals (my term—I'm not of their kind) were banging and haranguing on the issue of starving Iraqis in an effort to have the embargo lifted. Not willing to lift the embargo, we set up the Food-for-Oil program with the U.N. The reason we didn't call for its cancellation was public realtions realted: We couldn't afford to be seen as Iraqi baby killers.

Now that the right has nothing else to point to, now that the treads have worn off of the "Saddam was a ruthless killer and he had to be removed" bus and that bus has been sideswiped by its "Thousands of Iraqis are ruthless killers and they have to be stopped" counterpart, the traction is seen as being against international multilateralism, namely, the U.N.

In this spirit, they have chosen the World's Largest Douche, Baron Von Douchenstein, to investigate. For those of you not familiar with the Baron, his real name is Norm Coleman, and he is a very principled Senator from Minnesota whose deep-seated beliefs led him to switch parties and religions. The Baron is a busy man, and had to be ripped away from very official business— -in order to take part in this, one of five parallel federal investigations into "UNscam," as it is known. With El Doucherino and Von Douchenstein on the job, the world is a safer place for all.

AAAHH!

Sorry for that break in our regularly-scheduled program and allow me a minute to wrap this up. I have been a supporter of Safire's, though I agree with him on almost nothing. I used to feel that he was a true political insider, acting out in the way that egomaniacal conservative political insiders do. Now I feel differently—his columns as of late are a broken record, the dinner party ramblings of an individual that cares more about being listened to than being right. With his column winding down and his life reaching its final stages, El Doucherino is revealed as being, in the end, awed by his own panache. Enough of that rant. Selah.

Posted by Mordred at December 1, 2004 12:49 PM
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