An excellent little piece in the book I'm reading right now THE WHITE TIGER.

"These are the three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever. This last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things that they have no say in ... Would they do it this time? Would they beat the Great Socialist and win the elections? Had they raised enough money of their own, and bribed enough policemen, and bought enough fingerprints of their own, to win? Like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra, the voters discuss the elections in Laxmangarh."
---Aravind Adiage (The White Tiger)


In other news I'm really craving Deli food these days. Like really good sandwiches on really good rich bread, maybe with some tomato soap or something. That place Jason's Deli in Longview was excellent.

Former Fed Chief Attacks Bush on Fiscal Role

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 — Alan Greenspan, who was chairman of the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades, in a long-awaited memoir, is harshly critical of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Republican-controlled Congress, as abandoning their party’s principles on spending and deficits.

In the 500-page book, “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,” Mr. Greenspan describes the Bush administration as so captive to its own political operation that it paid little attention to fiscal discipline, and he described Mr. Bush’s first two Treasury secretaries, Paul H. O’Neill and John W. Snow, as essentially powerless.

Mr. Bush, he writes, was never willing to contain spending or veto bills that drove the country into deeper and deeper deficits, as Congress abandoned rules that required that the cost of tax cuts be offset by savings elsewhere. “The Republicans in Congress lost their way,” writes Mr. Greenspan, a self-described “libertarian Republican.”

“They swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose” in the 2006 election, when they lost control of the House and Senate.

As officials leave the Bush administration, there is no shortage of criticism of this White House: Disenchanted hawks are writing that Mr. Bush has abandoned the certainties of the first term and taken too soft a line on North Korea and Iran; from the other side of the spectrum, former officials are telling tales about how the administration bent rules on torture or domestic spying.

But Mr. Greenspan, now 81, is in a different class, by dint of his fame, his economic authority and his service across party lines. His critiques are likely to have more resonance among Mr. Bush’s base.

His book was provided to The New York Times by his publisher, Penguin Press, under an agreement that nothing would be reported until its publication date, on Monday. But The Wall Street Journal, saying it had purchased a copy from a retailer, published excerpts on its Web site on Friday night, freeing other news organizations to do the same.

Much of the book concerns Mr. Greenspan’s reflections on markets, globalization and the media’s fascination with the thickness of his briefcase on the way to meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets interest rates.

He praises President Bush for letting the Fed stay independent of political pressure, saying he was scrupulous in not trying to interfere with monetary policy — which he contrasts sharply with the pressure exerted by his father, George H. W. Bush, in the early 1990s. For years, the first President Bush has blamed Mr. Greenspan for contributing to his defeat in 1992 by failing to prevent a recession by cutting interest rates.

Of the presidents he worked with, Mr. Greenspan reserves his highest praise for Bill Clinton, whom he described in his book as a sponge for economic data who maintained “a consistent, disciplined focus on long-term economic growth.”

It was a presidency marred by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he writes, but he fondly describes his alliance with two of Mr. Clinton’s Treasury secretaries, Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers, in battling financial crises in Latin America and then Asia.

By contrast, Mr. Greenspan paints a picture of Mr. Bush as a man driven more by ideology and the desire to fulfill campaign promises made in 2000, incurious about the effects of his economic policy, and an administration incapable of executing policy.

The White House is clearly not eager to get into a public argument with Mr. Greenspan, whom President Bush reappointed to a fifth term in May 2004. But they pushed back at Mr. Greenspan’s central themes.

“The Republican leadership in the House and Senate kept to our top number,” Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, said. Veto threats worked, he said, to keep spending within caps set by the White House. “We’re not going to apologize for standing up the Department of Homeland Security and fighting terror.”

Mr. Greenspan described his own emotional journey in dealing with Mr. Bush, from an initial elation about the return of his old friends from the Ford White House — including Mr. Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, secretary of defense — to astonishment and then disappointment at how much they had changed.

“I indulged in a bit of fantasy, envisioning this as the government that might have existed had Gerald Ford garnered the extra 1 percent of the vote he’d needed to edge past Jimmy Carter,” Mr. Greenspan writes in his memoir. “I thought we had a golden opportunity to advance the ideals of effective, fiscally conservative government and free markets.”

Instead, Mr. Greenspan continued, “I was soon to see my old friends veer off in unexpected directions.” He expected Mr. Bush to veto spending bills, he writes, but was told that the president believed he could control J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, the Republican speaker of the House, better by signing them.

“My friend,” he writes of Mr. O’Neill, “soon found himself to be the odd man out; much to my disappointment, economic policymaking in the Bush administration remained firmly in the hands of the White House staff.”

He was clearly referring to the political team led by Karl Rove at the White House. Mr. Rove was a neighbor of Mr. Greenspan in a leafy enclave near the Potomac River, but the two men almost never had a conversation.

In responding to Mr. Greenspan, Mr. Fratto of the White House disputed the accusation that Mr. O’Neill’s economic arguments were ignored. “Just because you don’t carry the day doesn’t mean your views weren’t considered,” Mr. Fratto said.

Though Mr. Greenspan does not admit he made a mistake, he shows remorse about how Republicans jumped on his endorsement of the 2001 tax cuts to push through unconditional cuts without any safeguards against surprises. He recounts how Mr. Rubin and Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, begged him to hold off on an endorsement because of how it would be perceived.

“It turned out that Conrad and Rubin were right,” he acknowledges glumly. He says Republican leaders in Congress made a grievous error in spending whatever it took to ensure a permanent Republican majority.

Mr. Greenspan has critics as well, and they are likely to weigh in as soon as the book is published. Though he publicly disagreed with Mr. Bush’s supply-side approach to tax cuts, urging Congress to offset the cost with savings elsewhere, he refrained from public criticism that could have shifted the debate. His willingness to criticize now, 18 months after leaving office, may open him to the accusation of failing to speak out when it could have affected policy.

Today, Mr. Greenspan is indignant and chagrined about his role in the Bush tax cuts. “I’d have given the same testimony if Al Gore had been president,” he writes, complaining that his words had been distorted by supporters and opponents of the cuts.

Mr. Greenspan, of course, had been the ultimate Washington insider for years, and knew full well that politicians cited his words selectively to suit their agendas. He was also legendary for ducking delicate issues by, as he once said, “mumbling with great incoherence.”

Mr. Greenspan’s memoir describes at some length the monetary policies that many economists say fostered the extraordinary economic boom of the 1990s. In what is widely regarded as a brilliant insight, Mr. Greenspan became convinced the United States could grow faster than generally thought because productivity was climbing much faster than the official statistics implied.

Mr. Greenspan writes briefly about what may become a more troubling legacy, the housing bubble, and now the bust, that was fueled by low interest rates and risky mortgages in the last six years.

Some economists argue that Mr. Greenspan deserves considerable blame, because the Fed slashed interest rates to rock-bottom lows and kept them there for three years after the stock market collapse and the recession in 2001.

The Fed was “a prime culprit in creating the crisis,” wrote Steve Forbes, publisher of Forbes magazine, in a just-published commentary. But other economists, including critics of Mr. Greenspan, say the housing bubble resulted from much broader forces, including a dramatic drop of interest rates around the world and an explosion of mortgages that required no money down, no income verification and deceptively low initial teaser rates.

Mr. Greenspan generically defends the Fed’s action, writing: “I believed then, as now, that the benefits of broadened home ownership are worth the risk. Protection of property rights, so critical to a market economy, requires a critical mass of owners to sustain political support.”

The book appears in stores on Monday, the day before the Fed is expected to lower interest rates in an effort to prevent the collapsing housing market from taking the rest of the economy down with it.

December 26, 2006

Fitzgerald: A tribute to William Dalrymple

Very early on Christmas morning I happened to tune in the BBC World Service. I thought there might be something, perhaps King's College Choir, or the aptly-named Raniero Cantalamessa in Rome, or perhaps someone musing on the fate of Christians in Iraq, other than that moral idiot and historical nitwit, the current Archbishop of Canterbury.

But that would have been a different BBC. This BBC, the BBC of John Simpson and Judy Swallow and Robin Lustig and Barbara Plett of the ready tear for Arafat, is a very different BBC from that of Huw Weldon. And it lived up to my grim expectations. It did not disappoint.

For on the air was someone telling mournfully about "the Wall." And of course I knew which wall he was talking about. He did not mean the Wall of John Hersey, not the Great Wall of China, not the wall being built by Saudi Arabia for many hundreds of miles right through the desert, though no one threatens Saudi Arabia or its inhabitants with their total destruction, nor any other wall being built or being contemplated. No, this "wall" was the wall being built by the Israelis, as a modest measure forced upon them out of desperation as a way to prevent homicide bombers from easily entering their cities, to there set themselves off on busses, in restaurants, and at Passover celebrations. And this "wall," the smooth speaker said, was built right through the usual "uprooted and destroyed" olive groves -- a staple of "Palestinian" propaganda, those "uprooted olive groves," and so important to their propaganda machine that they have been caught uprooting their own olive trees, for the world press to come and cover and bewail.

There was not a hint in this lachrymose tale by this teller of tales of any indication as to why the Israelis might have felt it necessary to build such a wall. There was not a hint of the endless terrorism to which Israel's Jews have been subject, a terrorism of which only now is the rest of the Infidel world is getting a small taste, and which the people of England will be getting a larger and larger taste. There was not a hint as to whether or not this wall was justified in its building. Nor was there any mention made of the fact that it is being built through territory to which Israel has a very large historic, legal, and moral claim. The drawback of this wall is that it appears to lessen this claim. It appears to recognize, although there is no need to do so, the armistice lines of 1948 rather than those of June 1967 as the ones that must prevail.

And the speaker went on. He went on about the travails of the Christians of Bethlehem, with no hint of understanding that the Christian population of Bethlehem, some 80% of the total in 1948, has gone down and down not when under Israel's control, but when it has been under the control of the Arabs. Never has the situation been more grave than now, under the "Palestinian Authority." Local Christians seldom speak out. They are fearful. The Christian Arab strategy, long ago internalized, has been to never complain, and always to parrot the Muslim line, to do the bidding of the Muslims, to be good "Palestinians" always, and therefore always, even when it is absurd and seen by all sensible people to be absurd, to blame -- with no evidence and no logic -- the Israelis, that is, the Jews. To swallow this, one would have to ignore the entire history of Islam, the history of conquest and subjugation of Christians in wide areas of the Middle East and North Africa, and what became of those Christians, and what are the rules, set down clearly in the Shari'a, for the treatment of Christians as dhimmis. The speaker apparently thought he did not have to take note of that. He was under no obligation, he must have thought, to have read or at least to know the contents of The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam or a thousand other possible articles and books that formed the basis for that magisterial study of a major subject in world history. None of that mattered. He longed to go back, to go back one day to see the "Christians of Bethlehem" unoccupied (but they haven't been "occupied" -- even if one were to accept that meretricious and inaccurate word, which I do not -- for more than ten years, but have been under the total control of the "Palestinian Authority").

One longed to ask him what he thought would have happened to the "Christians of Bethlehem" if the Israelis had had the intelligence to insist on retaining Bethlehem as part of Israel, and never surrendered it to the "Palestinian Authority." He could look around at how the Arab Christians have fared in what is Israel, Israel diminished, Israel dimidiated within the 1949 armistice lines (the Arabs refused to recognize them, as they were once offered, as permanent borders; that offer does not remain open forever, to be accepted whenever the Arabs feel like it).

Well, how have they fared?

Can they worship freely? Are they subject to harassment, persecution, even murder as the Christians of Gaza and the West Bank have been, despite their best efforts to further the "Palestinian" cause? Does this speaker know about this? Does he think it relevant to his teary tale?

And who was this speaker, anyway? I waited to the end, enduring the nonsense of it all just to find out. It turned out to be William Dalrymple. Ah, of course. William Dalrymple, described here long ago, quite accurately, as an up-market Barbara Cartland, whose tales of trans-racial passion at the Mughal Court, or at this or that princely court in the time of the Mughals, has it all: star-crossed lovers, and of course the Splendor That Was India, or rather the India of the Muslim rulers who lived off of their Hindu subjects, the subjects who were killed by the Muslims in numbers without any historical parallel. (The historian K. S. Lal and others estimate that 60-70 million Hindus were killed by the Muslim conquerors and masters). Now a love of luxe, and of luxe combined with heaving breasts, is the kind of thing that the Barbara-Cartlands of this world love, including even the plausible sort who put in a bit more history and a little less of the Romance-novelette lord or duke or Arab prince (see "The Sheik"), who picks up the girl in her swoon at the very end (the promise of sex has always been just beyond what Nabokov calls "the skyline of the page") -- that is, William Dalrymple. He's as vulgar and stupid as they come, behind the plummy voice and the pretense of being a historian.

And what is funniest about the Dalrymples and their admirers is that these are the same people who find nothing wrong with the late Edward Said's complaint about Jane Austen in Mansfield Park, the complaint that she does not specify that a main character lives off his revenues from his West Indian plantation, a plantation with slaves.

But here is Dalrymple singing the tale of Mughal India, and its luxe and volupte if not its calme, all of it based on the ruthless enslavement and oppression of the Hindu masses by their cruel Muslim masters. (Of course, there were a few exceptions, such as syncretistic Akbar, his memory revered by Hindus for his temporarily lifting the Jizyah, and his memory despised by the Muslims, for his softness toward Hindus.)

If anyone should be complained about, it is not that subtle miniaturist Jane Austen, who after all was not singing the praises of slaveowning in the West Indies, whereas William Dalrymple has written endlessly about, made his heaving-breast passionate high-toned nonsense out of, nothing but a slave-state.

With his marks -- so inapposite, and yet so typical of the current BBC with its current management and current personnel -- on the hideous Israelis and the woes of the "Palestinian" Christians, William Dalrymple simply showed he was all of a piece. His love-affair with the Muslims of India, his love affair with the Muslim Arabs, his complete indifference to the plight of the Jews in Israel trying, desperately, simply to defend themselves against terrorists and doing the absolute minimum they can -- all this goes together. What does Dalrymple think any other country -- Great Britain for example -- would do if it faced the same kind of endless torment and threats and attempts on the lives of its citizens and of the state, that Israel does as it confronts what it has so far failed to name, and even to recognize, as a Lesser Jihad?

He, William Dalrymple, singer of The Wonder of Mughal India, so far coheres. He coheres, and he nauseates. Posted at December 26, 2006 10:54 AM

http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/2006/12/014572print.html