Jun 192002
 

So Pat Buchanan, who certainly has more serious transgressions to answer for than alleged disloyalty to his past employer, is the latest suspect, according to the execrable Joshua Micah Marshall. Marshall is atwitter because, mirabile dictu, Buchanan won’t confirm or deny! Um, Josh, Stanley Kutler in Slate supplies a slightly more persuasive explanation. And as Jane Galt points out,

if Buchanan were really concerned about alienating his peeps in the GOP, he’d be more worried about, oh, say, his running for national office on a third party ticket and thus siphoning off some of the party’s base during a tight election year than he would about admitting he blew the whistle in a 30 year old political scandal.

Something about Deep Throat — secret meetings! scribbled times on newspapers! wrestling matches in underground parking garages! — inflames the imagination of every journalist. My friend Mark Riebling, who’s really more a historian, joined the fray by nominating, in his generally excellent book Wedge, ex-spooks William Colby and Cord Meyer, but he admits he’s no longer convinced, and really he wasn’t very convincing even when he wrote it eight years ago.

Edward Jay Epstein, on the other hand, argues that there was no Deep Throat. Throat’s revelations were attributed in the original Washington Post stories to multiple sources, which Woodstein bundled up and dramatized for All the President’s Men. Epstein’s theory is no fun at all. Its only merit is that it’s obviously true.

Jun 192002
 

The relevance of Eric Hoffer’s book The True Believer to suicide bombing is obvious, and Jason Rubenstein has an excellent post about it. You could do worse than this if you want to understand the character of the suicide bomber:

There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation or any distinct group by its least worthy members. Though manifestly unfair, this tendency has at least some justification. For the character and destiny of a group are often determined by its inferior elements….The reason that inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence for the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to wreck and waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy. They also crave to dissolve their spoiled, meaningless selves in some soul-stirring spectacular communal undertaking — hence their proclivity for united action. Thus they are among the early recruits of revolutions, mass migrations and of religious, racial and chauvinist movements, and they imprint their mark upon these upheavals and movements which shape a nation’s character and history.