Month: July 2006

Polling extremists: According to a recent Reader’s Digest/Zogby poll, not all Iranians are extremist nutjobs who don’t believe that Israel exists or that the U.S. is out to bomb them off the face of the earth.

Indeed, 41 percent of Iranians polled said reforming their national economy to operate more efficiently is more important than nuclear capability. Only, 27 percent said the country’s top priority should be to develop nuclear weapons, while a full 23 percent professed to believe that the top goal for their government should be to expand its citizens’ freedoms.

Using Pensito Math, I have taken the liberty of extrapolating these meaningless percentages into real numbers by calculating what they would mean in a country with a population of 8 million. Thus, applying Pensito Math, 27. 9 million would be in favor of reforming the economy and 15 million would support expanded freedoms, while 18.4 million extremists would favor becoming a nuclear threat to the world.

More than half of Iranians polled (56 percent/38 million) said they believe their country should lead the region “diplomatically and militarily,” but only 12 percent (8.2 million) took the more moderate path and said Iran should not be the dominant regional power. Almost a third of respondents (31 percent/21 million) are reasonable, and want Iran to become more secular and liberal. On the other hand, 36 percent (24.5 million) want the country to be a nation of radical religious extremists.

Sadly, only 9 percent of Iranians polled (6.1 million) said that Israel was a legitimate state and should be allowed to exist, while 67 percent (45.6 million) said, “Israel, what Israel?”

Almost two-thirds of Iranians cling to the delusion that they don’t believe that Iran and the U.S. will go to war in the next decade.

A majority held the extreme view that they would be willing to suffer economically if that were the price the country had to pay to develop its nuclear program. A quarter (17 million) took the extremist view and said they would blame the U.S. if the United Nations imposed nuclear-related sanctions, although nearly 40 percent (27.2 million) said they were not sure whom to blame. Only one in six (10.2 million) would rightfully blame the Iranian government for being a bunch of unreasonable hard-headed extremists. If Iran were to develop nuclear weapons — not that they are, of course — a foolish 25 percent (17 million) said it would make the Middle East a safer place, but a more sensible 35 percent (23.8 million) disagreed.

When it came to their view of the United States, older Iranians were more likely to admire the American people and society than younger Iranians, no doubt remembering the kindness the U.S. showed to the late Shah of Iran when he was dying of cancer and the sensitive media coverage of the death and burial of the Ayatollah Khomeni.

Disproving the notion that access to information liberalizes a culture, among Iranians with Internet access, 41 percent (27.9 million) said they wanted a more religious culture, compared to a nonradical minority of 33 percent (22.4 million) who said they wanted a more secular society. Ironically, Iranians with access to the Internet or satellite TV were more likely to identify the U.S. as the country they admire the most and less likely to pick the U.S. government as the one they admire the least — 34 percent (23.1 million) Iranians without Internet access chose the United States as least admired, compared with 18 percent (12.2 million) Iranians with Internet access.

Invest in inflation. It’s the only thing going up.

— Will Rogers

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has well-deserved reputation for verbal gaffes, usually originating from the fact that he is a clueless, pampered movie star in real life.

Here’s a new one, in which the governor was asked how he felt about the Minutemen movement:

“I support any time that a civilian wants to go and do the job that law enforcement cannot do,” Schwarzenegger said in response to a question.

“I’m for that. I’m not for any harassment. I’m not for anyone carrying weapons. I’m not for any of that.

“But I have, for instance, in my house — for years and years and years — I’ve hired private security to take care of my house, because I felt that the police could not really cover every single house and protect the children and families.”

Maybe it’s acceptable in Austria for citizens to take the law into their own hands but here in America we’ve seen this phenomenon escalate into mob violence, riots and lynching. And while wealthy movie stars can hire rent-a-cops to protect their gigantoid McMansions, the rest of us are left to depend on law enforcement paid from the public rolls.

Almost three years ago exactly — on July 14, 2003 — Bob “Douchebag of Liberty” Novak revealed the identity of a secret CIA agent named Valerie Plame, effectively shutting down her undercover operation tracking the black market for WMD in Europe. Novak claimed that Bush Administration officials had revealed Plame’s identity to him.

We have believed from the getgo that within hours of learning that Novak was going to publish Plame’s name, President Bush knew exactly who in his administration had done the leaking and that statements he made thereafter were carefully parsed to protect himself and the leaker from future liability.

Now that Novak has confirmed that Karl Rove was the leaker, it is a good time to look back at two key statements made by President Bush in the wake of the revelation. Notice how the president’s strategically nuanced wording makes President Clinton’s widely derided statement, “It depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is,” look like incisive explication.

[…]

Asperger’s syndrome is a form of autism that may have affected both Andy Warhol and Richard Nixon. Now the Independent in London is saying that a leading advocate of supply side economics in Britain in the 1980s may have also been Aspergic:

Sir Keith Joseph, the father of Thatcherism whose free market principles are still followed to some extent by Tony Blair, had a form of autism that is reflected in his political philosophy, a psychiatrist believes.

The former Conservative education secretary, who was Mrs Thatcher’s mentor in the 1970s and 1980s, had Asperger’s syndrome, a condition that renders sufferers unable to interpret social situations or to empathise with other people, according to Michael Fitzgerald, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin…

Joseph – who died in 1994 – was a brilliant lawyer who served in Harold Macmillan’s government in the 1960s but was prone to eccentric behaviour and errors of judgement that can be attributed to his mental condition, Professor Fitzgerald said. In the early 1970s, he was urged by friends to challenge Edward Heath for the Tory leadership but he lost any chance of winning after making a speech in Birmingham in 1974 in which he implied that the lower classes should be deterred from having children.