Month: October 2007

Lust, Caution

by tristero

I could write a million words about Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution which has haunted nearly all my thoughts since I saw it two nights ago, and will do so for a long time to come. But a far better idea is to state simply and directly that this is one of the finest films I have seen in years, and on so many different levels. “Lust, Caution” is a great masterpiece, beautifully directed with superb performances that are as wrenching and as perfectly realized as any you are ever likely to see, especially by the two leads – Tony Leung and Tang Wei.

The reviews that I’ve read, both good and bad, are very misleading. They won’t give you any sense of what this film is really about (although the spoiler-riddled review by Andrew Sarris comes closest; read it after you’ve seen the movie).* That’s partly because the film is so textured and nuanced, it’s “about” many different things at the same time. “Lust, Caution” is devastatingly emotional, a wrenching experience. And it is as cold as a chilly night in an unheated car outside a torture prison. It is passionately erotic and yet so deeply chaste and repressed that a beautiful woman’s lipstick left on a delicate cup registers as gory and disgusting. The film seems long, perhaps rambling and improvisatory, but its structure is as perfectly honed as the performance of Chinese Opera virtuoso.

Some reviewers pride themselves on catching a fleeting Hitchcock reference in the film, for example, to “Notorious.” As Brahms said when people told him that the last theme of his first symphony sounded like Beethoven’s Ninth: any fool can see that. In fact, the numerous, sometimes contrapuntal, nods to Hitchcock are a huge MacGuffin. Despite being a deeply personal and tragic story, it’s quite plausible to think of “Lust, Caution” as a carefully wrought meditation on the impact of cinema as pure art. Hint: Mr. Yee doesn’t go to the movies because he’s afraid of the dark.

But no review seems to have caught the fact that this is a film as much about contemporary American politics and imperial power as it is about China and Japan in the late 30’s/early 40’s. For a film that is overwhelmingly sensual, sensuous, sometimes idealistic, and crammed with all kinds of complex emotions, the political and cultural vision is incredibly grim, almost nihilist.

Well, I failed not to write about “Lust, Caution,” but there is so much more I haven’t even mentioned. See it. You won’t see a greater new film for a long time to come. And you really should see it, the first time at least, in a theater. You may not like it that first time because, like many masterpieces, it is a disturbing work, not only on the surface but deeply, viscerally, and intellectually. But a masterpiece it unquestionably is.

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Full Disclosure: Producer and co-writer James Shamus and I have known each other for a very long time. We are friends of his and his family and I have enormous respect for him, both as a filmmaker and as a person (I am far from alone). I have never met Ang Lee. My 11-year old daughter has, however, met one of the stars of the film, Tang Wei.

Please try not to let your concern about my bias influence your decision to see this truly remarkable film. I’ve seen many of James’ projects, including, of course, the wonderful Brokeback Mountain. Even by his high standards, this film is exceptional.

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*Chances are that if you’ve heard anything about “Lust, Caution”, you’ve heard it has intense, explicit sex scenes. This is true: there are several scenes of intense, explicit sex. There are also several scenes of intense, explicit mah jongg. Both games are crucial to the meaning and structure of the film and it is vitally important that we see these characters play both.There is much more mah jongg than sex in “Lust, Caution.” I will leave it to you to decide whether that balance is appropriate.

The Boogeywoman

by digby

If I were to just tune in from Mars to this Republican debate, I’d be convinced that there is a horrible enemy that is stalking the American people and its name is … The Hillary. Jayzuz Christ, every single one of these guys, including Ron Paul, prefaces virtually every question with “well, if Hillary won she would (bite the heads off puppies)…” She’s a horrifying Marxist revolutionary and a useless,inexperienced creampuff, the worst of all possible worlds.

And she obviously scares the living hell out of Republicans, whose macho pretenders would rather band together, whimpering like a bunch frightened little boys in the dark, than take on each other. So they are preening for the easy applause from their Cro-Magnon audience. It’s a little bit pathetic.

Oh, and they seem to be repeatedly having hippie flashbacks too. Somebody must have spiked the Diet Dr Pepper with LSD in the greenroom.

This debate, like all Republican debates, is low-tax and fact free. And defense spending has zero points! You can spend on the military until you burst and not add to the debt! It’s awesome.

(Just don’t utter the “Bush” word…)

The truth is that any Democrat will beat this collection of odd ducks.

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Friends And Allies

by digby

Greg Sargent makes an excellent point about today’s stunning NY Times editorial:

It’s hardly every day that an opinion-maker as powerful as that of The Times editorial board raises its voice in support of crucial points such as these, which are largely confined to the blogosphere. And it’s obviously something we should hope for more of. Yet we all spend so much time sticking pins into the Fred Hiatt and David Broder voodoo dolls that we often overlook it when it actually happens.

He’s right. Bravo to the NY Times editorial board.

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Plame

by tristero

There is a widely-held myth that liberals have no place in their worldview for serious consideration of national security issues. Two seconds of thought should be enough for anyone to realize that is an insane myth. Of course we care deeply about keeping our families and communities secure. Who wouldn’t? (Read on to find out the answer to that question.)

The question has always been how much the idiotic projects perpetrated with dismaying regularity by the spying classes, ice-cream-to-the-forehead-antics which have given the CIA and FBI such odious reputations over the years, have any value whatsoever in making us secure. And more ominously, whether at least some of their activities – like assasinations and the ignorant meddling in South Asia and the Middle East – have placed us into deeper peril.

So liberals like myself, who are pretty far removed from Intelligence activities, tend to have a very skeptical attitude towards the agencies. This is as it should be. A skeptical attitude by laypeople towards spies and spying is a bad thing only in a culture that is jonesing to descend into paranoia, the denouncing of neighbors, and isolation. Of course it’s necessary, even crucial, to spy. But let’s be very, very careful about it. Let’s do it extremely well, and let’s do it with a constant awareness of its dangers.

All of this is by way of introduction to the notorious Plame affair, notorious only because Novak and members of the Bush administration colluded in betraying their…No. Let’s not talk about something as “abstract” as an entire country, where you see an ocean of faces, rather than individuals. Let’s talk about that betrayal in the personal terms in which it should be discussed.

These unspeakable bastards – Novak, especially – betrayed your parents, your friends, and all your neighbors. Through their criminally irresponsible behavior, they quite literally made my daughter’s life far more precarious than it had to be. And these scumbags are walking the streets, unpunished, unrepentant. And they dare to lecture me on my values, my patriotism, and my seriousness in protecting what I love.

What they did was to out a spy because her husband published something that seemed to call into actual question what everyone who knows how to interpret modern political speech already knew was one of Bush’s most egregious lies: the Sixteen Words. (and yeah, I know the outing was all supposedly offhand at first; even accepting that, within milliseconds it was hardly so). They did it only partly to punish her husband and her, but that certainly was part of it. The real reason, of course, was to prevent other spies from telling what they know about the filthy, creepy, and utterly useless secret barbarities of the Bush administration, sadistic activity that has nothing to do with security and everything to do with their personal sexual perversions.

And now you know who doesn’t care about keeping you and those you love safe. It isn’t liberals.

I don’t know Plame, but everything, literally everything I’ve encountered about her points to an individual who did a difficult job probably as well as it could be done and in a very real sense was helping to protect us. Until she was betrayed by a slimeball whose loyalties were not to his country but to something else, something truly evil. Opportunism? Fanatical ideology? His twisted sense of a “higher Truth” than man’s law? Who knows or cares why he did it (except for the legal establishment of motive)? What matters is his betrayal.

Now I learn that Plame, in the course of actually protecting my wife and daughter and my friends, as well as your family and friends, endured genuine physical horror:

Because of a pending appeal in her freedom of speech case against the CIA, she cannot say anything about joining the CIA in September of 1985 fresh out of college. She cannot say anything about her initial impression of her Career Trainee classmates – such as Jim Marcinkowski, Brent Cavan, Mike “the Griz” Grimaldi, Precious Flower, and mois. She is proscribed from telling you about wandering the forests of Camp Peary learning land navigation and she certainly will not, at least for now, be able to tell you about being taken hostage and subjected to torture for two days.

I maintain my wariness of spies, spying, and spy agencies. But good God, if this is true – and I see no reason to disbelieve it – it is not only a crime of the worst sort that the people who conspired to destroy her career remain unpunished. It is simply suicidal, on our part, that they continue to be rewarded while they make our country even more dangerous.

Man, these people make me sick to my stomach.

Trolling For Votes In The Tampon Aisle

by digby

I just watched a round table on Meet The Press discussing whether Hillary Clinton is, and should be, trying to appeal to the woman vote. It seems this is quite bizarre and freakish and worrisome to many people. Last week, Tucker Carlson and Cliff May tackled the same subject by suggesting that “Vaginal-Americans” who vote for Hillary because she is a woman should be denied the right to vote. (No word on whether the men who say they would never vote for a woman should lose theirs.)

I find all this angst about Clinton’s alleged strategy to appeal to women a little bit confusing. Am I misremembering something, or have we not just spent the last 20 years rending our garments over how to appeal to the white male voter? Was I hallucinating all those times that gun-toting politicians put on a hunting jacket and threw a football and drove a cigarette boat at 100 miles an hour to underline their macho bonafides for the boys? These were not attempts to appeal to men?

A recent book that seems to be sweeping the Village book salons is this one called: “THE NEGLECTED VOTER White Men and the Democratic Dilemma“. The insiders are ecstatic, as if they’ve never heard this amazing insight before. Here’s Joe Klein:

So, the question: Is Merle Haggard indicative of a larger movement among his white male country brethren? This is a key to the next election, the subject of a new book by David Paul Kuhn, The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma. Kuhn accurately links the Republican dominance of the past 40 years to the loss of the Haggard vote. The percentage of white males identifying themselves as Democrats has declined from 47% in 1952 to about 25% in 2004. Much of that decline was an unavoidable consequence of two honorable positions the party took in the 1960s: in favor of civil rights and against the war in Vietnam. But civil rights slid into special preferences (for everyone, it seemed, but white men), and Vietnam slouched, all too often, into reflexive pacifism and a distrust of the military. Is it possible now, with the Republicans diving into foolish militarism and the indulgence of Thou-shalt-not killjoys, that Reagan Democrats might be tempted to come home?

They will have to be wooed, of course…

Of course.

For as long as I can remember, the Democrats have been desperate to “recapture” the white male vote and nobody thought it was illegitimate to appeal to a constituency on the basis of their race and gender. But when Clinton is said to be appealing to women, it’s as if she’s breaking some sort of taboo — that she’s being narrow and opportunistic and cheap.

I frankly think it’s smart for her to appeal to women, and not just because she’s a woman. It’s smart because, for Democrats, that’s where the votes are. They should all be appealing to women. Women make up more than half of the electorate and have an equal claim to the attention of politicians as “white males” do, who, as the vaunted book mentioned above details, have been voting true blue Republican for a generation. Women are far more likely to vote for Democrats than men are, particularly unmarried women who make up a majority these days. It’s completely rational for any candidate, much less a female candidate, to appeal to women. It’s certainly more rational than the endless parade of Democratic men spitting pork rinds and driving pick-ups to appeal to men has been over the last couple of decades.

As Tom Schaller points out in this Salon article, there is a good reason that none of the Democrats, not just Hillary Clinton, are doing the usual manly pandering:

The real story, however, is that the white male share of the electorate continues to decline. In 1976, Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford while garnering what by today’s standards would be an eye-popping 47 percent of the white male vote. But in 1976, according to Abramowitz’s math, white non-Hispanic males were 39 percent of the American electorate. (Abramowitz’s figures, based on numbers from American National Election Studies, are slightly lower than those produced by exit polling, which may oversample white males.) The white male share of the electorate, which had fallen seven percentage points between 1952 and 1976, then stayed roughly constant for 20 years, but after 1996 began dropping again. It fell to 36 percent in 2000 and 33.1 percent in 2004, and it is still falling.

The remainder of the electorate, meanwhile, is composed of white women, among whom Democrats are competitive, and other minority groups that lean Democratic. Kerry won Hispanics, Asian-Americans and Native Americans by margins of at least 20 points in 2004, and all are growing as a share of the total electorate.

And more importantly, aside from enlightened white males, who are not voting on the basis of bruised male vanity, and union men, who know which side their bread is buttered on, the white male Bubba vote is lost to Democrats anyway. They are what’s known in the trade as “Republicans”:

So should Democrats really be all that worried about Bubba? After snubbing him during primary season, should they revert to form during the general election, and begin their familiar, unrequited quest for his affections? Republican pollster Whit Ayres has a clear preference. “I would dearly love for the Democrats to spend millions of dollars trying to persuade NASCAR fans to vote for the Democrats,” Ayres chirped last summer. “They tend to be disproportionately southern, disproportionately white and disproportionately male, which pretty well defines the core of the Republican Party.” In other words, it’s a waste of time and resources for the Democrats to pursue them — a classic sucker’s bet.

No kidding.

You hear this discussion all the time. Will the Democrats finally be able to get that big score, the key to all election gold, the white male vote? It’s as common as dirt in the gasbag class. But when a candidate appeals to women, this is the level of “analysis” you get:

MATTHEWS: I think it’s time for me to get in trouble again. Kathleen, I’m thinking about a woman who lives in the suburbs; she may not work outside the home. They’re talking around election time — the husband and the wife — you know, she says, “I sort of like this Hillary, the first woman president. She’s pro-choice.” And the husband says, “You know, dear, you know, this is going to kill our tax bracket. You know that tuition thing we pay every couple of years for the kids, every year, we can’t do that if we get a higher tax bracket. We have to pay more money.” So, could the tax issue — Hillary’s threat to raise taxes — throw a lot of women and men from the suburbs back into the Republican column? Am I being too tricky here?

PARKER: Yeah, you may be too tricky. First of all, I don’t know what your assumption is here that I would know about women in the suburbs who don’t work.

[laughter]

PARKER: I don’t’ have any recent poll material.

MATTHEWS: Those club members that come in, you know, late in the afternoon.

There you have the view from the Village. Or Pluto. I’m not sure which.

This is going to be a tiresome campaign in this respect because a lot of people are going to claim that women are being too sensitive or politically correct and that men are being pigs who hate Clinton purely because she’s a women, neither of which are altogether false, but which do dumb down the conversation quite a bit. But the only reason we have to talk about this in these terms is because gasbags like Tucker Carlson say they “cross their legs” whenever they hear Hillary’s voice and bulge-worshiping blowhards like Chris Matthews find something unseemly in the idea that a female presidential candidate has a specific appeal to women. If they’d view it through the same prism with which they have lamented the Democratic loss of the valuable white male (and celebrated the Republicans’ “outreach” to same) rather than some sort of exotic appeal to a discrete, out of the mainstream, special interest, it wouldn’t be nearly as contentious.

If you are interested in seeing just how formidable the women’s vote is, check out Women’s Voices. Women Votes. It’s actually quite astonishing.

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Templetonian Mathematics

by tristero

This morning, I opened up the Times to find a full two page ad – we’re talking over 130,000 clams for that ad – from the John Templeton Foundation which asked the question that bedevils us all: Does The Universe Have A Purpose?

A professor of chemistry says No. An insane computer scientist named Gelertner says Yes. But in skimming through the answers in the paper and on the website, I was struck by an odd omission.

Despite assurances from our physicist friends that the language of the universe is Mathematics, not a single answer tried to express the purpose of the universe in math. Well, I decided to take up the challenge and after a tremendous amount of thought this morning, and the sacrifice of far too many innocent napkins and backs of envelopes, I finished my calculations and can happily report that, mathematically speaking, there is a Purpose (P) to the Universe. It is:

P = trB

Where:

t is the sum of the “quantities” F, S, and G(h) – which represent the members of the Holy Trinity;
r is equal to 2, the dual nature of reality (spirit plus matter); and
B is set to Bennett’s Constant.

I’m certain that more mathematically sophisticated people than myself can derive more subtle expressions of the Universe’s Purpose. But for a Sunday morning rough estimate, this seems pretty close.

Saturday Night At The Movies

Thin Lizzie

By Dennis Hartley

Alas and anon…just when you thought it was safe to assemble an armada and go back into the water, someone goes and produces another costumer concerning a certain virgin queen. Bollywood director Shekhar Kapur has re-enlisted co-conspirators Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush for one more go at the old girl in “Elizabeth: The Golden Age”.

Picking up a few decades hence from where he left off in his outstanding 1998 film “Elizabeth”, which depicted the ascendancy of the title character, Kapur cheekily condenses a turbulent and historically significant 4-year period (1585-1588) during the reign of Elizabeth I into what appears to be a rather eventful week in the life of HRM.

As the film opens, we are introduced to a much more wary and care-worn monarch (an alarmingly thin Blanchett) holding court over England’s destiny. Gone is the radiant, rosy-cheeked and free-spirited “Bess” who lit up the screen in the previous film; she has been replaced by a mercurial, slightly paranoid monarch who is constantly on guard against duplicitous well-wishers and sycophants. Even her closest confidants are kept at arm’s length, especially her Machiavellian “spymaster”, Sir Francis Walsingham (Rush).

The Queen has two big headaches keeping her on edge. The first is her cousin, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland (Samantha Morton, in a fiercely intense performance) who feels she is the rightful heir to the English throne, not the childless “bastard” Elizabeth (who is a Protestant to boot). Mary has some influential Catholic sympathizers at home and abroad, including the other royal pain in Elizabeth’s derriere, King Philip II of Spain (Jordi Molla), who gets his jollies jeering at the English queen and rattling his saber.

Elizabeth finds a temporary distraction from all her political woes when the dashing adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen, in all his rangy glory) strolls into her court, full of tales and loaded with booty from his latest excursion to the New World. Elizabeth is obviously charmed, but has to suppress her schoolgirl crush for sake of appearances. However, when she learns that Raleigh has fathered a child and secretly eloped with her favorite chambermaid, Bess Throckmorton (Abbie Cornish) she is not so amused, and gives him a nice cozy jail cell to explore for a few years. Not to worry, however-history intervenes and the Queen pardons Raleigh in time to put him in charge of naval defenses in the year of the Armada (1588), which fuels the film’s climatic battle scenes.

I have to warn you, this is one of those “historical” epics where you have to make a decision going in whether you are going to nitpick and get cranky and argumentative over factual inaccuracies and behavioral anachronisms, or just sit back for two hours and enjoy the opulent pageantry and bodice-ripping court intrigue with a shit-eating grin on your face. Keep in mind that the screenplay was authored by William Nicholson, who scripted the (very) loose re-interpretation of the Camelot legend, “ First Knight” and Michael Hirst, who wrote several episodes of Showtime’s recent mini-series about Henry VIII, “The Tudors”. In other words, this ain’t “Masterpiece Theater”, folks.

Kapur does seem indecisive at times; it’s as if he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to make an updated version of “Fire Over England” (which depicted Elizabeth and Raleigh embroiled in court intrigue in the year of the Armada) or pay homage to “The Sea Hawk” (the swashbuckling action scenes featuring Owens in full Errol Flynn mode will definitely make history majors twitch). Nicholson and Hirst’s dialogue fuels some spirited exchanges between Blanchett and Owen in the first half of the film that reminded me of the clever repartee from “Shakespeare in Love ”, but it ultimately clashes with some of the heavier moments later on (Samantha Morton nearly steals the movie in her execution scene, but it seems to belong in a completely different and darker-toned film).

If you are a fan of the genre, you will likely be pleased. Blanchett is excellent in the lead role, and Owen is charismatic as always. Rush is good, although his character is a bit one-dimensional (not his fault). One thing for sure-this should be the last of Liz the First for a while. Right? Tell me there isn’t another one in pre-production. Prithee, tell me.

Go, little queenie: Elizabeth I(2005 HBO mini-series), Young Bess, Virgin Queen (1955), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Mary, Queen of Scots (1972).

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Krugman Day

by digby

Since tristero started out today with a Paul Krugman post, I think it only right that I direct you to a fascinating discussion over at FDL (still going on I think) that happened this afternoon with the Man himself. And none other than Bob Borosage, of Campaign for America’s Future, did the intro. Check it out.

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More Civility

by digby

… from one of our Republican “Values” candidates:

Play of the Day: McCain Names Mannequin

SPARTANBURG, S.C. (AP) — Republican presidential candidate John McCain took one look at a nursing school’s training mannequin and asked if the dummy’s name was Hillary.

Campaigning Thursday at the University of South Carolina Upstate nursing school, McCain couldn’t resist a swipe at Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“I was very glad to meet the dummy, named ‘Hillary,'” McCain said to laughter after a tour of the school. “Is that the name?”

It wasn’t. The dummy, or human simulator, doesn’t have a name.

You’ll note that the Associate Press calls it “The play of the day,” which is not surprising since this is exactly the kind of bitchy,sophomoric humor the Village press love. And it’s also why they love them some McCain, who’s back in good graces with the DC press corps.

Joe Klein:

There is only one American politician who sounds like this: “With my usual suicidal, masochistic tendencies, I spoke at the Detroit Economic Club last week and supported increased fuel-efficiency standards.”Yes, yes, it’s John McCain, rising from the crypt, but not as a zombie. The foolishly conventional Republican McCain of last year was the zombie. No, this is the funny, free-range McCain reincarnated, the independent who dares speak to an environmental forum in New Hampshire, touting his green credentials, actually supporting a return to the Kyoto global-warming negotiations, which is anathema to most Republicans. That guy — the interesting one — is back.

He’s a funny, interesting guy alright. He’s also a jackass. Always has been.

H/T to BB

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And Speaking Of Paul Krugman

by tristero

Here’s one of those miniscule examples that nicely illustrates the deep focus and dishonesty of rightwing discourse. Iain Murray, of the “Competitive Enterprise Institute” wrote a letter to the Times (I’ve added the relevant links):

In his Oct. 15 column, Paul Krugman calls me a victim of “Gore derangement syndrome” for pointing out on National Review Online the similarity between Al Gore and Osama bin Laden’s stances on climate change, which any impartial observer will admit are pretty similar (I quoted Osama directly and at length in the post).

I suggest that Mr. Krugman is suffering from “Gore blindness syndrome” in his failure to recognize a tongue-in-cheek comparison. I hope for his blood pressure’s sake that he never watches “The Daily Show.”

That Mr. Krugman should go further and suggest that I believe that Mr. Gore is a friend of the terrorists is, however, inexcusable. That conclusion is completely unsupported by anything I wrote, and I strongly reject the insinuation.

Of course! How outrageous for Krugman to insinuate that Murray was saying Gore was a friend of terrorists? It’s ridiculous, merely because Murray wrote that Gore should share his Nobel Prize with that “well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden: “

who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance – and that of the Nobel committee – in his September rant from the cave.

Why would anyone think that Murray was associating Gore with bin Laden for any other reason but pure, clean, joking around?

We come across this a lot, we liberals. For example, as you probably know, James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA (and a Nobel winner), recently made a lot of racist remarks that caused him to be suspended from administrative duties at the lab in which he worked; also a lecture he was to give in England was summarily cancelled just a few days before he was supposed to fly over and deliver it. What you, thankfully, missed was close to 1000 comments at Pharyngula (here’s a link to over three hundred of them) as we argued with some commenters who were complaining that Watson was being “censored” because he was telling The Truth. But it got personal as one John Smith, among others, made some remarks the rest of us were certain were racist. He, on the other hand, was quite insistent he wasn’t:

Fetch some racist quotes of mine. You can’t. You’re a slimily dishonest fundamentalist, no better than a religious nut.

You see, the problem is that we didn’t pay enough attention to the “hedging” in his posts:

I don’t need data to suggest that MAYBE Africans are less genetically intelligent.

And indeed, that is true. You don’t need data to say maybe something is true. Like maybe there really is a UFO behind the Hale Bopp comet. Am I saying I believe there is one? Of course not! I’m just open to the possibility is all, and that’s no reason for you to think I”m completely deranged. I’m just not a fundamentalist.

In fact later, John Smith slipped up:

When I was talking about “dark-skinned” people, I was referring to those who are conventionally considered “black”. I don’t think this group of people have convincingly shown themselves to be as genetically intelligent as the rest of the human race.

Yes, Mr. Smith can continue to argue that he is simply being “open-minded.” After all, he did write “I don’t think…have convincingly…” rather than emphatically asserting that “this group of people” are not “as genetically intelligent as the rest of the human race.” But let’s get real. He’s not even kidding his deeply racist self.

Now, attentive readers might ask themselves, “Hold on, wait a minute! What does John Smith’s defense of his racism have to do with Iain Murray’s complaint, you know, that Krugman unfairly accused Murray of saying Gore was bin Laden’s BFF? ”

To which I can only respond, “Nothing whatsoever, dear reader.”

But then, you might think a little harder and ask, “Are you trying to say that Iain Murray has all the intellectual honesty of a two-bit racist piece of trash?”

Answer: “Why would you think I was trying to say that? Because I merely talked about Murray and a racist in the same blog post? Amazing what leaps of logic people make!”