Glasvegas: 'Euphoric Heartbreak', CD review

Glasvegas's Euphoric Heartbreak has passion and purpose.

By Neil McCormick
The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/
5:04PM BST 01 Apr 2011

Rating: * * * *
Columbia, £12.99

Working-class rock heroes: Scottish four piece Glasvegas

Rock may be in creative and commercial decline but there are still some things it does better than any other kind of music: big, anthemic, emotional commitment and release. Scottish four piece Glasvegas do these simple things better than most.

Built around the vulnerable, angst-filled crooning of frontman and songwriter James Allan, Glasvegas play straightforward, melodic songs constructed around familiar chord changes amped up so that effects-laden guitar distortion crashes out of the speakers with all the sonic grandeur of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, a sparkling bed of harmonic spikes and melodic accidents.

On their second album, Glasvegas evoke the ambient intensity of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music while anchoring it in songs that demand actual commitment from the listener. I worry about where they can go next with such a restrictive musical template, but here they have managed subtle refinement without sacrificing the essence of their primitive appeal.

There is a sense of flow to this set, building from intimate beginning to a genuinely euphoric climax before tailing off with wistful beauty. You have really to listen to penetrate Allan’s thick Scots accent, but as the sound opens up you discover nuances amid the noise.

Allan’s swooping melodies hint at a Roy Orbison style flair for reshaping classic rock into heartbreaking epics, and lyrics enacting the political as highly personal dramas.

It’s like a marriage of the Clash, the Smiths, the Pixies and the Jesus And Mary Chain, delivered with a passion and purpose that makes much-hyped rock saviours the Vaccines sound as vacuous as they really are.

At a time when questions are being asked about how posh rock music has become, Glasvegas are staunchly working-class heroes. Allan grew up in a single-parent family on an estate in Glasgow, experiencing years of unemployment and poverty before forming this band with his cousins. He is a tortured, sensitive soul, who clearly struggles with a lot of the prejudices of his environment.

The heart of their superb 2008 debut was 'Daddy’s Gone', a song of abandonment. Here too he sings with aching bewilderment about such themes as desire and loss, but he also embraces the kind of difficult topics that might force some sections of his audience to confront their assumptions.

'I Feel Wrong and Stronger Than Dirt' are subtitled 'Homosexuality part 1 and 2'. As the titles suggest, there is nothing arch or clever about Allan’s writing, but in its bold stating of sincere feeling lies its true power. Glasvegas are a band their audience can believe in, and that is exactly what rock needs right now.

Related:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/neilmccormick/3814349/Glasvegas-how-they-thundered-to-greatness.html



Fear and loathing in Glasvegas

By BRIAN BOYD
The Irish Times
http://www.irishtimes.com/
Monday, March 28, 2011

Life in a goldfish bowl: Paul Donoghue, Rab Allan, Jonna Löfgren and James Allan of Glasvegas

After the immediate success of his debut album, footballer-turned-rock-star James Allan found himself in a Chicago hotel singing ‘Close To You’ to his pet goldfish. This time around there’s less pressure . . .

AS HE WAS carried out of the backstage area of a rock festival on a stretcher due to a drug overdose, Glasvegas singer James Allan told people staring at him, “It’s not how it looks.” Unfortunately it was exactly how it looked.

Glasvegas were one of the big draws at the 2009 Coachella festival (the US equivalent of Glastonbury) and at the time, the official reason given for Allan not being able to perform was the old reliable “exhaustion and dehydration”.

In rock terms you can break the code of the euphemisms easily enough. “Fruit and flowers” (as on a backstage rider) is cocaine and groupies while “exhaustion and dehydration” can be anything from a psychotic breakdown to a Class A overload.

Allan’s crash and burn came six months after the release of the band’s self-titled album – a magnificent work that artfully combined the guitar noise of Jesus and Mary Chain with the orchestral production of Phil Spector. Easily the best album of 2009, Allan, now 31, says it was too much success too quickly.

“My head just wasn’t in the right place. I was exaggerating all the bad things about success,” he says. “I had been a professional footballer all my life [he played for Cowdenbeath and other Scottish league teams] and while most people who want to be in a rock band practise for a few years and learn how to write songs, all the songs on the first album were my very first attempts.

“One moment I was on the dole, the next I was on the front cover of music magazines. In fact, I remember signing on one day and producing a newspaper with mention of my name in it to the woman behind the counter. She hadn’t believed me when I told her I was in a rock band.”

What distinguished the first Glasvegas album was how, despite lyrically coming across as particularly bleak, it was so sonically extravagant. Allan wrote about racial murder ( 'Flowers and Football Tops '), absentee fathers ( 'Daddy’s Gone' ) and heroic social workers ( 'Geraldine' ).

“All music is influenced by your environment,” he says. “I wrote those songs while on the dole in Glasgow and I honestly never knew they would end up on the record – or even that there would be a record. The press said they were ‘theme’ songs but it was what I saw happening around me. I was never into the usual sort of ‘escapist’ lyrics – I prefer real events. 'Flowers and Football Tops' is about a true story – a teenager in Glasgow was stabbed to death then drenched in petrol and set alight near where I lived. I just couldn’t shake that story off.”

He found himself feted by the indie gods and traipsing from one award ceremony to the next – and it didn’t sit well with him. A desperately shy and ferociously intelligent character, Allan found “the road” hard going and on a Kings Of Leon tour in the US he became strangely attached to two goldfish.

“My sister gave them to me as a birthday present and I think I was going a bit mad at the time with the constant touring. I remember taking the goldfish to the zoo in Chicago with me and there’s some video footage of me somewhere on the 33rd floor of a hotel singing The Carpenters’ 'Close To You' to them. Yeah, that was strange alright.”

He went missing for a week in September 2009. He was supposed to show up at the Mercury Music Prize Awards (Glasvegas had been nominated) but neither bandmates, management nor label could get in touch with him.

“I wasn’t being disrespectful to the Mercury, I would have loved to have been there – I used to love sports day at school,” he says. “It’s just I was supposed to fly down to London to meet up with the rest of the band but at the airport I just decided to go and visit a friend in New York instead. The problem was I had no mobile phone – so no one could get in touch with me.

“The worst part of that, though, was my father going down to his local shop in Glasgow. The headline on one of the newspapers was ‘Glasvegas singer is missing for past five days’ and they had this on the billboard thing outside the shop. He was really upset. But I got in touch with everyone and now I do have my own mobile phone.”

TO RECORD THE follow-up album, Allan decided to write it well away from Glasgow.

“I wanted somewhere completely different and when we were touring around the US I remembered getting off the bus in Santa Monica one time and having the feeling it would be a great place to write an album. I wanted to see what would happen if you took a person out of his natural environment – and how that would effect the music. So I hassled my manager for ages and eventually we got this big beach house and moved in for a few months. I remember it being horrendously expensive so feeling under pressure to come up with the songs quickly.”

Endless strolls at night on Santa Monica beach helped him get over the overdose, and over the goldfish. “I had gone from being a nobody on the dole to a somebody and this was the first time I had to slowly and surely put myself back together,” he says.

“As a rock star you can think of yourself as important but when we went into Los Angeles you’d find yourself sitting beside Dustin Hoffman in a restaurant. And then you think of all the darkness of the rock ’n’ roll persona and how certain people are attracted to and fascinated by that. I remember walking along that beach – and it was a place of such natural beauty – and asking myself why I wanted to be in a band in the first place and trying to get back to the start again somehow. And it’s a funny thing but places of great natural beauty can make you very sad – there had been heartbreak in my life and that’s what came out on the album.”

Entitled Euphoric /// Heartbreak \\\ , Allen explains the slashes are all important as they represent “the ascent, the crest of a wave and then the crash”. Eschewing the bruised social commentary of its predecessor it’s just as musically lush but a lot more introspective lyrically.

“There was a lot of uncertainty because the canvas was so blank,” he says. “But then I starting digging very deep – maybe in an unhealthy way – and then I got myself into this position . . . it’s hard to explain but it’s like as if everything around you goes silent, the sort of feeling I used to get when I was dribbling around players as a footballer, and the songs just came.

“ I really felt a lot less pressure with this one because now we’re sort of an established band – with the first one we just had no idea what was going to happen.”

Regret and contrition bleed out of almost every track. “They’re very personal, they’re very honest, but I felt that was the only way,” says Allan. “You’ve probably gathered by now that I’m a bit impressionable and the songs here are from the last two to three years when I was at my most impressionable. I did a lot and I learnt a lot. And I think the title of the album says it all.”


Euphoric /// Heartbreak \\\ is out now


Glasvegas get euphoric over second album

James Allan and his bandmates return after a long lay-off.

By Alan Morrison
The Herald (Scotland)
http://www.heraldscotland.com/
29 Mar 2011

With Glasvegas it's always about the clash of extremes. It starts with the band's name, as the grit of Scotland's west coast slaps up against the glitz of the American Dream. Then it becomes a statement of intent within the music itself, as distorted guitars and a thumping beat envelop doo-wop melodies and Phil Spector soundscapes.

This was the lifeblood of Glasvegas's self-titled debut album, and it's even more prominent on the follow-up. EUPHORIC///HEARTBREAK\\\ goes one step further than its predecessor, forcing those extremes, those contradictions, into its very title. Again, it's there in the music, as heavy textures of guitar, keyboards and adrenaline-rush drumming contrast sharply with the raw emotions of fragile lyrics.

"For good or bad, I try to avoid mediocrity and things being in the middle," admits singer and songwriter James Allan. "But that can sometimes get us into trouble ..."

This approach has split audiences into those who are set alight by the fire in the belly of songs like 'Daddy's Gone', 'Geraldine' and 'Go Square Go', and those who think Allan, hidden behind his rock-star Ray-Bans, is a bit arrogant and pretentious. It has also seen Glasvegas's debut album go platinum and pick up a much-deserved Mercury Prize nomination while the band dipped a steel-capped toe in the stadium lifestyle via support slots with U2 and Kings Of Leon.

It's a truth, not a cliche, to say that such success carries an emotional toll. Rather than join his band mates at the Mercury Prize ceremony in September 2009, Allan went awol in New York. A few days later, however, they all met up in Boston for the beginning of the Kings Of Leon tour, and although the band claim that reports of a later incident in Chicago were much exaggerated and merely the end product of Allan larking about on his birthday (the music gossip pages made much of him wearing only a bathrobe and singing Carpenters songs to his goldfish), exhaustion was clearly setting in. So much so that drummer Caroline McKay called it a day in March 2010.

Now, after a year away from the media glare, most of it spent writing and recording in a three-storey beach house in Santa Monica, Glasvegas are back with a new album, a new drummer and an escalating series of live dates. They've been easing latest recruit Jonna Lofgren in with low-key gigs (including a Scottish tour in early January that stretched from Orkney to Hawick), testing out new material along the way. But it's the album (released on April 4 with U2 and PJ Harvey producer Flood behind the desk) that's going to be the real focus of attention.

Musically, it's more ambitious, more layered, than the debut disc. Words-wise, it's a world apart from what typically passes for rock lyrics today. 'The World Is Yours', 'Shine Like Stars' and 'Euphoria Take My Hand' thrive on punch-the-air choruses set to ecstatic surges of energy; 'Lots Sometimes', with its vocal repetitions and acceleration of pace, is a set-list classic-in-waiting.

But it's on other tracks, where Allan strips his emotions bare then goes deep inside himself to make dark and personal discoveries, that EUPHORIC///HEARTBREAK\\\ distinguishes itself. More often than not, the singer then filters those feelings through different voices, reaching for understanding or forgiveness and finding empathy by crafting characters and poetic short stories in song. These might be the perspectives of gay characters (on 'Stronger Than Dirt' and 'I Feel Wrong') or a prison inmate (closing track 'Change'); but they're the means for Allan to comfortably express and examine his own feelings.

"If you're too detached from the song, the bottom line is going to be hard to find," he explains. "But if you're not arm's length away from it, I think it becomes over-emotional. The direction, the focus, the execution of words on any poetic level - you're never going to deliver them the best way. I was right in the moment writing some of the songs on this album but, in a lot of ways, I sort of wasn't there. I was arm's length away from it, so that I could actually see it and execute it in the right way.

"It was the same with the first album. I wasn't sitting writing 'Daddy's Gone' crying into a sheet of paper. I actually had quite little emotion in me when I was writing that song. But I had a daydream, though; it was a total daydream. There's a difference between losing yourself in that little wormhole-imagination thing and being totally emotional when you're writing. There's a total hardcore focus, but it's not a total over-emotional focus."

The crossover point - and arguably the emotional high point of the album - is 'Dream Dream Dreaming', in which Allan puts words into his own father's mouth concerning the suicide of the singer's uncle. Initially the song came about as a response to 'Daddy's Gone', probably Glasvegas's best known track, which articulated, in uncompromising terms, a boy's bitter frustration with the father who had abandoned the family home.

" 'Daddy's Gone' was only one side of the coin with my father," Allan says now. "I felt a bit guilty about that song because who's to say what's round the corner for all of us, you know? I'd go on TV shows, and people would ask about it and say things about my father, and although it was only a snapshot in three minutes or whatever, it sort of ran away with itself. And I felt bad about that.

"But there were times when I'd be walking down the street, and a guy would come up to me and say how the song is about his life, how it relates to him so well, how it recognised the pain in him. Who am I to argue with those things? Who am I to say if it's right or wrong to write that song? A lot of other people have connected with it, so I'm still a fortunate person for that."

Through his love for American pop songs from the past, Allan made the mental leap from what he imagined to be his father's thoughts on the loss of his brother, to the romantic, almost tragic yearning that he hears in the likes of 'Mr Sandman' and 'All I Have To Do Is Dream'.

"I was fascinated by a human longing for something lost and something gained, something wanted and something unwanted. I was also fascinated by thinking about what a dream was. Sometimes in life, the only way to gain any kind of relief over something is through a dream. If that's all you've got, then you'll take it; you'll take anything because the longing can be that painful. Every time I go to see my father, he'll talk about his brother, every single time. He just misses him ... I've always got a picture of my uncle when we're playing that song. My dad's not actually heard it yet, but he'll hear it soon."

Allan's mother also has her place on the album, a very real physical presence on the closing track as she voices the fictional mother telling her son, about to be released from prison, to "be not led into temptation / And dare to resist not re-offending again".

"It was funny," Allan remembers. "When my mum came into the studio, she was telling Flood how to produce and telling me to swap the words around. She was like Diana Ross - bang, out the door, one take. It was the last song, and we were trying to get the rest of the songs to match each other. It was really sweet because I knew she was feeling under pressure about it. She never mentioned it, though, because she didn't want any extra pressure to go on me. Maybe I'm the guy with experience of a recording studio compared to the experience she's had, but, even in that moment, she's thinking to herself, 'I'm the mother, and I need to alleviate any pressure I can. I'll take the strain.'"

So, was there a blurring between the fiction of the lyric and the fact of the situation? "Even in the recording studio, man, she was playing the role of my mother and I was still the child," Allan agrees. "It's a memory that I'll always cherish. And she did say, 'Just think, boys: if this is the last song that you ever do, then mine is the last voice on the record ...'"

EUPHORIC///HEARTBREAK\\\ is released on April 4. Glasvegas play Aberdeen Music Hall on April 23; HMV Picture House, Edinburgh on April 24; and O2 Academy, Glasgow on April 25.

The Senators Sway

Before they wanted to kill Qaddafi, they were celebrating in his tent.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/
April 2, 2011 4:00 A.M.

John McCain, Joseph Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham are the Senate’s most energetic proponents of sinking the nation ever deeper into the Libyan morass. In a joint interview on Fox last weekend, Senators McCain (R., Ariz.) and Lieberman (I., Conn.) were breathless in their rendering of the “freedom fighters” and the “Arab Spring” of spontaneous “democracy.” Friday they upped the ante with a Wall Street Journal op-ed, rehearsing yet again what an incorrigible thug Qaddafi is and how “we cannot allow [him] to consolidate his grip” on parts of Libya that he still controls.

For his part, Senator Graham (R., S.C.) told CNN Wednesday that he would like President Obama to designate Qaddafi an “unlawful enemy combatant” with an eye toward legitimizing the strongman’s assassination. He and Wolf Blitzer discussed whether the hit could be pulled off by the covert intelligence operatives President Obama has inserted in Libya. The next day, in his plaintive questioning of Defense Secretary Robert Gates at a Senate hearing, Senator Graham wondered why American air power could not just “drop a bomb on him, to end this thing.”

As a matter of law, Graham’s proposal is ludicrous — no small thanks to federal law that Graham himself helped write, about which more in an upcoming column. What was especially striking about the hearing was the tone of righteous indignation Senators Graham and McCain took in whipping the Obama administration over government blundering.

But what about their own blundering? The senators most strident about the purported need to oust Qaddafi, to crush his armed forces, and to kill him if that’s what it takes to empower the rebels, are the very senators who helped fortify Qaddafi’s military and tighten the despotic grip of which they now despair.

It was only a short time ago, in mid-August 2009, that Senators McCain, Lieberman, and Graham, along with another transnational progressive moderate, Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine), paid a visit to Qaddafi’s Tripoli compound. If they seem to have amnesia about it now, perhaps that’s because the main item on the agenda was their support for the Obama administration’s offer of military aid to the same thug the senators now want gone yesterday.

A government cable (leaked by Wikileaks) memorializes the excruciating details of meetings between the Senate delegation and Qaddafi, along with his son Mutassim, Libya’s “national security adviser.” We find McCain and Graham promising to use their influence to push along Libya’s requests for C-130 military aircraft, among other armaments, and civilian nuclear assistance. And there’s Lieberman gushing, “We never would have guessed ten years ago that we would be sitting in Tripoli, being welcomed by a son of Muammar al-Qadhafi.” That’s before he opined that Libya had become “an important ally in the war on terrorism,” and that “common enemies sometimes make better friends.”

On and on it goes, made all the more nauseating by the reality that nobody was under any illusion that Qaddafi had truly reformed. McCain made a point of telling the press that “the status of human rights and political reform in Libya will remain a chief element of concern.” Note the gentle diplomatic understatement: Qaddafi is — and was, as McCain well knew — a savage autocrat. Yet this brute fact was softened into “an element of concern” regarding “the status of human rights and political reform.” Pretty sharp contrast from the senator’s sardonic grilling of the U.S. defense secretary on Thursday. The McCain who was face-to-face with Qaddafi was very different from the McCain who today rails about Qaddafi. Back in the tent, none of his concern would dampen the cozy mood. The Arizonan swooned over “the many ways in which the United States and Libya can work together as partners.”

This would build on the partnership with Qaddafi that, as I’ve detailed, was struck by the Bush administration, a blunder if ever there was one. But did McCain, Lieberman, and Graham have a problem with it — because Qaddafi is an incorrigible terrorist enemy of the United States, who must be exterminated right away? If they did, perhaps they’ll enlighten us. None of these gents is exactly a wallflower when it comes to telling us what he thinks on matters great and small. If they were protesting our Qaddafi policy, the public record is strangely silent on the matter. Truth be told, it runs decidedly in the opposite direction.

As is his wont, President Obama took President Bush’s blunder and ran with it. Not only did the new administration continue Bush’s aid to Qaddafi, the aid was stepped up. In fact, Obama increased military aid to Qaddafi’s regime only a few weeks before the current crisis began — support Hillary Clinton’s State Department said would go to further strengthening Qaddafi’s air force (the one our no-fly zone is now shooting down), to train his military officers (the ones the senators now want to bomb to smithereens), and to support what the Obama administration, echoing the Bush administration, insisted was Qaddafi’s staunch anti-terrorism.

With eyes wide open, the interventionist senators abetted the U.S. aid to Qaddafi and the legitimizing of his dictatorial regime. Given that this policy has contributed mightily to Qaddafi’s current capacity to consolidate his grip on power and repress his opposition, one might think some senatorial contrition, or at least humility, would be in order. But, no. Having been entirely wrong about Qaddafi, the senators would now have us double down on Libya by backing Qaddafi’s opposition — the rebels about whom McCain, Lieberman, and Graham know a lot less than they knew about Qaddafi.

As for what they knew about Qaddafi, the story gets even worse.

It goes without saying that the interventionist senators’ case for why Qaddafi must go always comes back to his terrorist past and, in particular, to the bombing of Pan Am 103. What they neglect to mention is that at the very moment they were huddling with Qaddafi, reports were circulating that the dictator was pressuring British and Scottish authorities (with the knowledge of the Obama administration) for the release of the Lockerbie terrorist, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi. In fact, while the senators were on their Tripoli jaunt, the imminence of Megrahi’s release was so well-known that the American embassy in Libya began advising that, because a celebratory “youth rally” was being planned, American citizens should steer clear of downtown Tripoli on August 20 and 21. Contemporaneously, President Obama was pleading with Qaddafi not to give the bomber “a hero’s welcome.”

In the event, Megrahi was in fact released five days after the senators’ visit. Upon being escorted home by another Qaddafi son, Saif, the terrorist was given a hero’s welcome at the Tripoli airport by thousands of Libyans — the liberty-loving civilians we are now risking American blood and treasure to protect, from the country that, by percentage of population, sent more jihadists to fight American troops in Iraq than any other.

What has been much missed is that Qaddafi discussed the prospect of Megrahi’s triumphant return with his distinguished senatorial guests. The Wikileaks cable indicates that McCain took the lead on this issue. In its August 21 report on Megrahi, the Associated Press mentioned in passing that the senators had “warned Libyan officials of possible damage to U.S.-Libyan relations if Megrahi’s return were to be handled in the wrong fashion.”

“If Megrahi’s return were to be handled in the wrong fashion” — mull that one over for a moment. There was no Libyan threat to the United States when Obama ordered our troops into battle last week. Intervention proponents seek to fill that inconvenient gap by stressing Qaddafi’s history of anti-American terrorism. Lockerbie, among other atrocities, is what McCain, Lieberman, and Graham say makes it urgent that we remove or even kill Qaddafi, the sooner the better.

Yet, there they were in Qaddafi’s tent only a year and a half ago, amiably chatting about our new bilateral “partnership” and plans to give this terrorist sundry assistance, prominently including military aid. Hovering over the meeting is Lockerbie. Far from ancient history, it is very much front and center because Qaddafi’s chief perpetrator of the attack is on the cusp of being released. So, with this powerful a reminder of Qaddafi’s monstrousness staring them in the face, do the senators say, “Don’t you dare try to spring that bomber”? Do they declare Lockerbie to be Exhibit A in the case that Qaddafi is an incorrigible terrorist who must be removed? Do they assure Qaddafi that if he rubs our nose in that mass-murder again by feting the murderer, there will be hell to pay?

No. Instead, it was taken as a given that the Lockerbie bomber would be released at Qaddafi’s insistence. The only thing left to talk about was the fashion in which Megrahi’s return to Libya would be handled. There appears to have been none of the indignation reserved for televised Senate hearings. Echoing Obama, the senators merely insisted that Megrahi’s return to Libya be managed lest it disrupt our growing “partnership” with Qaddafi, lest it complicate the important work of bulking up his regime on the backs of American taxpayers.

Having taken the measure of his guests, and of President Obama, Qaddafi — being Qaddafi — went right ahead with the raucous celebration his regime had planned for its returning terrorist hero. And, just as Qaddafi figured, the U.S. responded by continuing to support his regime, then by increasing support for his regime, and, until a few weeks ago, by envisioning a long-range, bilateral partnership with steadily escalating support for his regime. All of this appears to have been done with nary a peep from McCain, Lieberman, and Graham.

We all make bad mistakes. For most of us, they are occasions for introspection, for saying, “I’m sorry.” In the case of Libya, the senators’ miscalculation about Qaddafi is a fine opportunity to acknowledge that we’ve already botched things badly enough, that maybe we should avoid additional entanglement in a place where we have no vital interests, risking more American lives and dollars at a time when we are militarily stretched and financially tapped out.

For most of us, a mistake is not an occasion for doubling down, for fits of pique, or for painting everybody else as the fool.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Syria’s ‘Reformer’

Why the delicacy for Assad?

By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.nationalreview.com/
April 1, 2011 12:00 A.M.

Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.

— Hillary Clinton on Bashar al-Assad, March 27

Few things said by this administration in its two years can match this one for moral bankruptcy and strategic incomprehensibility.

First, it’s demonstrably false. It was hoped that President Assad would be a reformer when he inherited his father’s dictatorship a decade ago. Being a London-educated eye doctor, he received the full Yuri Andropov treatment — the assumption that having been exposed to Western ways, he’d been Westernized. Wrong. Assad has run the same iron-fisted Alawite police state as did his father.

Bashar made promises of reform during the short-lived Arab Spring of 2005. The promises were broken. During the current brutally suppressed protests, his spokeswoman made renewed promises of reform. Then Wednesday, appearing before parliament, Assad was shockingly defiant. He offered no concessions. None.

Second, it’s morally reprehensible. Here are people demonstrating against a dictatorship that repeatedly uses live fire on its own people, a regime that in 1982 killed 20,000 in Hama and then paved the dead over. Here are insanely courageous people demanding reform — and the U.S. secretary of state tells the world that the thug ordering the shooting of innocents already is a reformer, thus effectively endorsing the Baath party line — “We are all reformers,” Assad told parliament — and undermining the demonstrators’ cause.

Third, it’s strategically incomprehensible. Sometimes you cover for a repressive ally because you need it for U.S. national security. Hence our muted words about Bahrain. Hence our slow response on Egypt. But there are rare times when strategic interest and moral imperative coincide completely. Syria is one such — a monstrous police state whose regime consistently works to thwart U.S. interests in the region.

During the worst days of the Iraq War, this regime funneled terrorists into Iraq to fight U.S. troops and Iraqi allies. It is dripping with Lebanese blood as well, being behind the murder of independent journalists and democrats, including former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. This year, it helped topple the pro-Western government of Hariri’s son, Saad, and put Lebanon under the thumb of the virulently anti-Western Hezbollah. Syria is a partner in nuclear proliferation with North Korea. It is Iran’s agent and closest Arab ally, granting it an outlet on the Mediterranean. Those two Iranian warships that went through the Suez Canal in February docked at the Syrian port of Latakia, a long-sought Iranian penetration of the Mediterranean.

Yet here was the secretary of state covering for the Syrian dictator against his own opposition. And it doesn’t help that Clinton tried to walk it back two days later by saying she was simply quoting others. Rubbish. Of the myriad opinions of Assad, she chose to cite precisely one: reformer. That’s an endorsement, no matter how much she later pretends otherwise.

And it’s not just the words; it’s the policy behind them. This delicacy toward Assad is dismayingly reminiscent of President Obama’s response to the 2009 Iranian uprising during which he was scandalously reluctant to support the demonstrators, while repeatedly reaffirming the legitimacy of the brutal theocracy suppressing them.

Why? Because Obama wanted to remain “engaged” with the mullahs — so that he could talk them out of their nuclear weapons. We know how that went.

The same conceit animates his Syria policy — keep good relations with the regime so that Obama can sweet-talk it out of its alliance with Iran and sponsorship of Hezbollah.

Another abject failure. Syria has contemptuously rejected Obama’s blandishments — obsequious visits from Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry and the return of the first U.S. ambassador to Damascus since the killing of Hariri. Assad’s response? An even tighter and more ostentatious alliance with Hezbollah and Iran.

Our ambassador in Damascus should demand to meet the demonstrators and visit the wounded. If refused, he should be recalled to Washington. And rather than “deplore the crackdown,” as did Clinton in her walk-back, we should be denouncing it in forceful language and every available forum, including the U.N. Security Council.

No one is asking for a Libya-style rescue. Just simple truth-telling. If Kerry wants to make a fool of himself by continuing to insist that Assad is an agent of change, well, it’s a free country. But Clinton speaks for the nation.

— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2011 the Washington Post Writers Group .

If there's no mission, when's it accomplished?

By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/sections/opinion/
April 1, 2011

If I recall correctly, we went into Libya – or, at any rate, over Libya – to stop the brutal Gadhafi dictatorship killing the Libyan people. And, thanks to our efforts, a whole new mass movement of freedom-loving democrats now has the opportunity to kill the Libyan people. As the Los Angeles Times reported from Benghazi, gangs of young gunmen are roaming the city "rousting Libyan blacks and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa from their homes and holding them for interrogation as suspected mercenaries or government spies." According to the New York Times, "Members of the NATO alliance have sternly warned the rebels in Libya not to attack civilians as they push against the regime of Col. Moammar Gadhafi." We dropped bombs on Gadhafi's crowd for attacking civilians, and we're prepared to do the same to you! "The coalition has told the rebels that the fog of war will not shield them from possible bombardment by NATO planes and missiles, just as the regime's forces have been punished."

So, having agreed to be the Libyan Liberation Movement Air Force, we're also happy to serve as the Gadhafi Last-Stand Air Force. Say what you like about Barack Obama, but it's rare to find a leader so impeccably multilateralist that he's willing to participate in both sides of a war. It doesn't exactly do much for holding it under budget, but it does ensure that for once we've got a sporting chance of coming out on the winning side. If a coalition plane bombing Gadhafi's forces runs into a coalition plane bombing the rebel forces, are they allowed to open fire on each other? Or would that exceed the U.N. resolution?

Who are these rebels we're simultaneously arming and bombing? Don't worry, the CIA is "gathering intelligence" on them. They should have a clear idea of who our allies are round about the time Mohammed bin Jihad is firing his Kalashnikov and shouting "Death to the Great Satan!" from the balcony of the presidential palace. But America's commander-in-chief thinks they're pretty sound chaps. "The people that we've met with have been fully vetted," says President Obama. "So we have a clear sense of who they are. And so far they're saying the right things. And most of them are professionals, lawyers, doctors – people who appear to be credible."

Credible people with credentials – just like the president! Lawyers, doctors, just like Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida's No. 2. Maybe among their impeccably credentialed ranks is a credible professional eye doctor like Bashir Assad, the London ophthalmologist who made a successful midlife career change to dictator of Syria. Hillary Rodham Clinton calls young Bashir a "reformer," by which she means presumably that he hasn't (yet) slaughtered as many civilians as his late dad. Assad Sr. killed some 20,000 Syrians at Hama and is said to have pumped hydrogen cyanide through the town: there wasn't a dry eye in the house, as the ophthalmologists say. Baby Assad hasn't done that (yet), so he's a reformer, and we're in favor of those, so we're not arming his rebels.

According to the State Department, Col. Gadhafi's 27-year-old son Khamis is also a "reformer." Or at least he was a few weeks ago, when U.S. officials welcomed him here for a monthlong visit, including meetings at NASA and the Air Force Academy, and front-row seats for a lecture by Deepak Chopra entitled "The Soul of Leadership." Ten minutes of which would have me buckling up the Semtex belt and yelling "Allahu Akbar!," but each to his own. It would have been embarrassing had Khamis Gadhafi still been getting the red-carpet treatment in the U.S. while his dad was getting the red carpet-bombing treatment over in Tripoli. But fortunately a scheduled trip to West Point on Feb. 21 had to be canceled when young Khamis was obliged to cut short his visit and return to Libya to start shooting large numbers of people in his capacity as the commander of a crack special forces unit. Maybe he'll be killed by a pilot who showed him round the Air Force Academy. Small world, isn't it?

Meanwhile, the same CIA currently "gathering intelligence" on these jihadist lawyers, doctors and other allies has apparently been in Libya for some time, arming them, according to a top-secret memo on their eyes-only clandestine operation simultaneously leaked by no fewer than four administration officials to the press. A reader suggested to me that they'd misheard the Warren Zevon song "Send Lawyers, Guns And Money," and were sending guns and money to lawyers. And, if some of the guns and money end up in the hands of "al-Qaida elements," I'm sure Janet Napolitano can have it re-classified as an overseas stimulus bill. In the old days, simpletons like President George W. Bush used to say, "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists." This time round, we're with us and we're with the terrorists, and you can't say fairer than that.

So this isn't your father's war. It's a war with a U.N. resolution and French jets and a Canadian general and the good wishes of the Arab League. It's a war with everything it needs, except a mission. And, if you don't have a mission, it's hard to know when it's accomplished. Defense Secretary Robert Gates insists that regime change is not a goal; President Sarkozy says it is; President Obama's position, insofar as one can pin it down, seems to be that he's not in favor of Gadhafi remaining in power but he isn't necessarily going to do anything to remove him therefrom. According to NBC, Gadhafi was said to be down in the dumps about his prospects until he saw Obama's speech, after which he concluded the guy wasn't serious about getting rid of him, and he perked up. He's certainly not planning on going anywhere. There is an old rule of war that one should always offer an enemy an escape route. Instead, British Prime Minister David Cameron demanded that Gadhafi be put on trial. So the Colonel is unlikely to trust any offers of exile, and has nothing to lose by staying to the bitter end and killing as many people as possible.

Meanwhile, the turbulence in the Middle East has spread to Syria, Kuwait, Yemen, Jordan and beyond. In Egypt, an entirely predictable alliance between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood seems to be emerging. The "Arab Spring" turns out to be a bit more complicated than it looks on CNN, and a CIA that failed to see the bankruptcy of its own pension plan looming is unlikely to be a very useful guide to the various forces in play. For the Western powers to be bogged down in the least-consequential Arab dictatorship's low-grade civil war desultorily providing air support to incompetent al-Qaida sympathizers may be an artful, if expensive, piece of misdirection.
Either that, or we haven't got a clue what we're doing.

©MARK STEYN

Of Gods and Men

By Mark Salter
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/
March 30, 2011

"There is a moment in every great story," Flannery O'Connor explained to a friend, "in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment."

The moment is hard to miss in the spellbinding "Of Gods and Men," France's official entry for best foreign language film at the 2011 Oscars. Nevertheless, like O'Connor's undiscerning readers, the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences failed to recognize it or were unaffected by it. Despite its many reverent reviews in the U.S. and its box office success in Europe, the Academy ignored the picture entirely; declining to include it even on its preliminary list of nominees.

Based on the true story of French monks at a Trappist monastery in Algeria's Atlas Mountains who were murdered by Islamist insurgents during Algeria's civil war in the 1990s, "Of Gods and Men" offers no political or historical argument. An Algerian government official complains as he urges the monks to return to France that the terror that threatens them is yet another consequence of France's former colonial presence in his country. Not another moment in the movie concerns itself with political disputes. Its subject is piety -- and the love, servility and sacrifice it compels.

The one insurgent who has a featured role is portrayed sympathetically in his interaction with Brother Christian, the monastery's prior. Each man quotes passages from the Koran in an effort to forge a mutual respect that might delay, if not for long, the savage expression of a political antagonism that claims religious authority.

The film plays like a liturgy. The days pass alike. The monks rise before dawn. Tired and silent, they dress in their robes for Mass. They study the testaments. They eat in silence and see to their work dressed as laborers; tending gardens and beehives, caring for villagers in the monastery's modest clinic. They chant their devotions in their affecting, though not otherworldly harmonies.

They are not removed from the world. They are the foundation of the small Muslim community they protect. They are involved in its daily life. They don't proselytize. They serve man's worldly needs. As one villager observes, "We are the birds; you are the branch. If you leave, we will lose our footing."

The moments when grace waits to be accepted or rejected arrive as the brothers struggle toward their decision: whether to flee to safety or stay and face almost certain death. Some are adamant they should stay. Some want to go. Others grope to understand God's purpose for them. All are afraid. None see martyrdom as glory.

The grace of the film is in the honesty and power of its performances, the unromanticized humanity of the characters these gifted actors convey so compellingly. They flash anger. They are confused. They reveal glimpses of cowardice. They give in to despair. They acquiesce modestly to the fate their faith has brought them. Those portrayals, and the tension and austere beauty the director, Xavier Beauvois, infuses in almost every scene, no matter how ritualistic or ordinary the action, make the film utterly enthralling.

No scene in the film is more mesmerizing than one near the end that alludes to the Last Supper; when the monks, having resolved to stay, feel grace descend and fill their hearts. They gather for their evening meal, and Brother Luc, the monastery's physician, played by the extraordinary Michael Lonsdale, opens bottles of wine, and presses play on an old tape recorder that fills the room with Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake.

Through the experience of worldly pleasures, the monks' expressive faces convey with a dignity that sacrifices none of their humility, a spiritual transformation that is impossible to express in language. Only the visual arts and music can manage it effectively.

No one speaks. The camera pans slowly from face to face. This one exhausted; another ancient; that one careworn; this one pensive; perplexed; afraid. And then, as Tchaikovsky's ballet swells to its climax, contentment, joy, love.

Why aren't movies like this made here? I don't mean that as a typical conservative rant against Hollywood, but as an appeal to action. Perhaps the power brokers in Hollywood believe that for all the advanced alchemy of modern filmmaking, their talents are ill-suited to conveying a transcendent spiritual experience. Maybe the studio's accountants can show that American moviegoers prefer that they treat heroes romantically or cynically, but not as earnest people, struggling unostentatiously with their convictions. As for the snub by the Academy on Oscar night, maybe they were put off by - or didn't comprehend -an overt religious message.

But in the full theater where I watched "Of Gods and Men" on a recent Saturday afternoon, no one left their seat before the credits finished rolling. No one applauded. No one exclaimed their approval or disapproval to another. Everyone left slowly and quietly, looking stunned, as I was, by the power of the magnificent art we had shared.

It's unlikely they were all Catholics or confessors of any faith. Even without faith, the human heart responds to the message that great art can convey: we are saved by love so that we will love, and have the courage for it.

Mark Salter is the former chief of staff to Senator John McCain and was a senior adviser to the McCain for President campaign.

Time to Unmask Muhammad

Editor’s note: Below is an English translation of an op-ed piece that Geert Wilders published in the Dutch magazine “HP/De Tijd” on March 30, 2011.

By Geert Wilders
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
March 31, 2011

Portrait of Mohammed from Michel Baudier's Histoire générale de la religion des turcs (Paris, 1625). It was sold at auction by Sotheby's in 2002. The same image was incorporated into the cover of issue #2195 of the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur.

To know why Islam is a mortal danger one must not only consider the Koran but also the character of Muhammad, who conceived the Koran and the entirety of Islam.

The Koran is not just a book. Muslims believe that Allah himself wrote it and that it was dictated to Muhammad in the original version, the Umm al-Kitab, which is kept on a table in heaven. Consequently one cannot argue with the contents. Who would dare to disagree with what Allah himself has written? This explains much of Muhammadan behaviour, from the violence of jihad to the hatred and persecution of Jews, Christians and other non-Muslims and apostates. What we in the West regard as abnormal, is perfectly normal for Islam.

A second insuperable problem with Islam is the figure of Muhammad. He is not just anyone. He is al-insan al-kamil, the perfect man. To become a Muslim one must pronounce the Shahada (the Muslim creed). By pronouncing the Shahada one testifies that there is no god that can be worshipped except Allah, and one testifies that Muhammad is his servant and messenger.

The Koran, and hence Allah, lays down that Muhammad’s life must be imitated. The consequences of this are horrendous and can be witnessed on a daily basis.

There has been much analysis of Muhammad’s mental sanity. In spite of all the available research, it is rarely mentioned or debated. It is a taboo to discuss the true nature of the man whom one and a half billion Muslims around the world regard as a holy prophet and example to be followed. That taboo must be breached in the West, and here in the Netherlands.

Ali Sina is an Iranian ex-Muslim who established the organisation for apostates of Islam Faith Freedom International. In his latest book[1] he posits that Muhammad is a narcissist, a pedophile, a mass murderer, a terrorist, a misogynist, a lecher, a cult leader, a madman, a rapist, a torturer, an assassin and a looter. Sina has offered 50,000 dollars for the one who can prove otherwise. Nobody has claimed the reward as yet. And no wonder, as the description is based on the Islamic texts themselves, such as the hadiths, the descriptions of Muhammad’s life from testimonies of contemporaries.

The historical Muhammad was the savage leader of a gang of robbers from Medina. Without scruples they looted, raped and murdered. The sources describe orgies of savagery where hundreds of people’s throats were cut, hands and feet chopped off, eyes cut out, entire tribes massacred. An example is the extinction of the Jewish Kurayza tribe in Medina in 627. One of those who chopped off their heads was Muhammad. The women and children were sold as slaves. Confronted with the lunacy of Islamic terrorists today, it is not hard to find out where the lunacy comes from.

In Vienna the women’s rights activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was recently sentenced to paying a fine for insulting a religion by calling Muhammad a pedophile. However, that is the truth. Numerous hadiths contain testimonies by Muhammad’s favorite wife, the child wife Aisha. Aisha literally says: “The prophet married me when I was six years old, and had intercourse with me when I was nine.”

According to the historian Theophanes (752-817) Muhammad was an epileptic. Epileptic crises are sometimes accompanied by hallucinations, perspiration form the forehead and foaming at the mouth, the very symptoms which Muhammad displayed during his visions.

In his book “The other Muhammad” (1992) the Flemish psychologist Dr. Herman Somers concludes that in his forties the “prophet” began to suffer from acromegaly, a condition caused by a tumor in the pituitary gland, a small organ that is situated just below the brain. When the tumor in the pituitary gland causes too much pressure in the brain, people start to see and hear things that are not there. Somers’s psychopathological diagnosis of Muhammad’s condition is: organic hallucinatory affliction with paranoid characteristics.

The German medical historian Armin Geus speaks of a paranoid hallucinatory schizophrenia. A similar analysis can be found in the book “The Medical Case of Muhammad” by the physician Dede Korkut.

In his book “Psychology of Mohammed: Inside the Brain of a Prophet” Dr. Masud Ansari calls Muhammad “the perfect personification of a psychopath in power.” Muhammad had a unhinged paranoid personality with an inferiority complex and megalomaniac tendencies. In his forties he starts having visions that led him to believe he had a cosmic mission, and that there was no stopping him.

The truth is not always pleasant or politically correct. On the basis of the research referred to above it can be argued that the Islamic creed obliges one and a half billion people around the world, including the one million living in the Netherlands, to take Muhammad as their example. There is no turning back once one has become a Muslim. For even though article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that every person has the right to “change his religion or belief,” in Islam there is a death penalty for leaving the faith.

Anyone who voices criticism of Islam and Muhammad is in grave personal danger – as I have experienced. And whoever attempts to escape from the influence of Islam and Muhammad risks death. We cannot continue to accept this state of affairs. A public debate about the true nature and character of Muhammad can provide insight and support to Muslims all over the world who wish to leave Islam.

Apostates are heroes and more than ever they deserve the support of freedom loving people all over the world. Party politics should not be at play in this matter. It is time for us to help these people by exposing Muhammad.

Geert Wilders is an MP in the Netherlands. He is the Chairman of the Party for Freedom (PVV).

Link:

[1] http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Features/Article.aspx?id=104835

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/03/31/time-to-unmask-muhammad/

OBAMA CRIED, KIDS DIED

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
March 30, 2011

"Humanitarian" seems to be the Democrats' new word for "absolutely no national interest."

The Democrats were not so interested in a "humanitarian" intervention against a much more brutal dictator in Iraq. But, of course, taking out Saddam Hussein, a state sponsor of terrorism who harbored one of the perpetrators of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, would make Americans safer.

Democrats are furious whenever American boys (girls and gays) are put in harm's way -- unless the troops are on a mission that has nothing whatsoever to do with defending the United States.

Obama ignored the murder, imprisonment and torture of peaceful Iranian protesters demonstrating against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's theft of an election in 2009. But he was hopping mad about Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak getting rough with a mob in Tahrir Square with less distinct objectives.

We knew what the Iranian students wanted: a stolen election overturned.

What did the Egyptians want? At the time, liberals angrily cited the high unemployment rate in Egypt as proof that Mubarak was a beast who must step down.

Have they, by any chance, seen the recent employment numbers for the U.S.? The only employment sectors showing any growth are Hollywood sober-living coaches and medical marijuana dispensaries. Are we one jobs report away from liberals rioting in the streets?

As The New York Times recently reported, since Mubarak stepped down, the driving force in the new government is the Muslim Brotherhood. America is worse off because Mubarak stepped down, which was Obama's exact foreign policy objective.

On Monday night, Obama gave a speech intended to explain America's mission and purpose in our new Libyan adventure. He said: "Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different."

He forgot to add: "However, the United States of America will be turning a blind eye to atrocities in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, the Ivory Coast and Bahrain."

One searches in vain for a description of some American interest in supporting the rebels in Libya.

True, Gadhafi was responsible for numerous terrorist acts against Americans in the 1980s, including blowing up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people, including 189 Americans.

Soon after President Bush's 9/11 speech vowing to go to war not only with terrorists, but those who supported them, Gadhafi accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and paid the victims' families $8 million apiece.

After Bush invaded Iraq, Gadhafi suspended Libya's nuclear and chemical weapons program, inviting international inspectors to verify that the programs had been halted.

A few years after that, Gadhafi paid millions of dollars to the victims of other Libyan-sponsored terrorist attacks from the '80s. In return, President Bush granted Libya immunity from terror-related lawsuits.

Only Fox News' Bill O'Reilly thinks Obama is intervening in Libya to avenge the Lockerbie bombing.

However far off the mark Gadhafi is from being the Libyan George Washington, he poses no threat to the U.S. -- whereas the rebels we are supporting might.

But Democrats couldn't care less about the interests of their own country. Indeed, if there were the slightest possibility that our intervention in Libya would somehow benefit the United States, they would hysterically oppose it.

When it came to the Iraq War -- which actually served America's security interests -- Democrats demanded proof that Saddam Hussein was 10 minutes away from launching a first strike against the U.S. They denounced the Iraq War nonstop, wailing that Saddam hadn't hit us on 9/11 and that he posed no "imminent threat" to America.

What imminent threat does Libya pose to the U.S.? How will our interests be served by putting the rebels in charge?

Obama didn't even suggest the possibility that our Libyan intervention serves the nation's interest. Last weekend, his defense secretary, Robert Gates, said the uprising in Libya "was not a vital national interest to the United States, but it was an interest." So, not a vital interest, but an interest. Like scrapbooking, surfing or Justin Bieber.

When it came to Iraq, liberals proclaimed that invading a country "only" to produce a regime change was unjustifiable, contrary to international law, and a grievous affront to the peace-loving Europeans.

But they like regime change in Egypt, Libya -- and the Balkans. The last military incursion supported by liberals was Clinton's misadventure in the Balkans -- precisely because Slobodan Milosevic posed no conceivable threat to the United States.

Indeed, President Clinton bragged: "This is America at its best. We seek no territorial gain; we seek no political advantage." Democrats see our voluntary military supported by taxpayer dollars as their personal Salvation Army.

Self-interested behavior, such as deploying troops to serve the nation, is considered boorish in Manhattan salons.

The only just wars, liberals believe, are those in which the United States has no stake. Liberals warm to the idea of deploying expensive, taxpayer-funded military machinery and putting American troops in harm's way, but only for military incursions that serve absolutely no American interest.

COPYRIGHT 2011 ANN COULTER

‘Ten Commandments’ Review:’ Cecil B. DeMille’s Masterpiece Arrives on Blu-ray Today

By John Nolte
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/
March 29, 2011

If you want to understand why, 55 years on, Cecil B. DeMille’s epic retelling of the story of Moses, from his birth to ascendancy into Heaven, is still as beloved today as it was when released during the first term of the Eisenhower administration, all you need do is watch the director explain the theme of his masterpiece in the short segment that opens the film. It’s an odd moment. After all, how many movies open with the director stepping out from behind a curtain to lay the groundwork for what’s to follow? This unconventional decision more than works, though, as it sets a thoughtful and reverential tone that will carry you through the upcoming 220 minutes.

Mr. DeMille tells us outright…

“The theme of this picture is whether man ought to be ruled by God’s law or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator like Ramses. Are men property of the State, or are they free souls under God? This same battle continues throughout the world today.”

Yes, today, and not just where “The Ten Commandments” is set — throughout the Middle East in countries such as Egypt — but also here in America as we watch an ever-growing federal government burden us with debt and chip away at our liberties. I’m not comparing Egypt’s current struggle with our own in any way other than how DeMille’s use of this universal theme speaks in some way to everyone and will for as long as there’s a civilization. As his epic unfolds, this is the theme DeMille holds on to, straight through to the story’s final line of dialogue — Moses’ (Charlton Heston) parting words to Joshua (John Derek) before he joins the God who has put him through so much:

“Go. Proclaim liberty throughout all the lands, unto all the inhabitants there of.”

Last week I watched the entire film straight through twice, once on the big-screen at a special event commemorating the film’s Blu-ray release, and again just a few days later on the actual Blu-ray. The finest compliment I can pay one of Hollywood’s all-time great epics is that I could watch it again tonight and enjoy it just as much. DeMille’s world is so vivid, so detailed and all consuming, that after spending nearly four hours visiting, you just want to return to lose yourself into it again and again. The story stays with you for days and you truly do miss spending time with those wonderfully drawn characters.

What’s most remarkable about the new Blu-ray is that it is easily the most beautiful film I’ve ever screened on television. Though the print I saw in the theatre Thursday night was a full, frame by frame restoration and jaw-dropping all on its own, the Blu-ray is, impossibly, even more beautiful. The VistaVision widescreen Technicolor pops right off the screen in ways I didn’t think possible. The richness of the colors, the stability of the blacks, and the details of everything, including fabrics and architecture, pull you deeper and deeper into the world of the film. The work DeMille put into the look of each frame is detailed in a terrific 75-minute “making of” documentary included only with the Blu-ray gift set, and my guess is that even the director himself never saw his work displayed as beautifully as this Blu-ray.

After watching “The Ten Commandments” at home Sunday afternoon, I made the mistake of screening Errol Flynn’s “Robin Hood.” Suddenly, what was once my favorite-looking film on DVD now looks positively wan in comparison. I’m not happy about that at all.

Also included in the pricey but well-worth-it Blu-ray gift set is DeMille’s original 1923 silent version of “The Ten Commandments,” which I’d never seen before and is well worth a look. Only the first hour covers the actual story of Moses and except for the visual splendor of all those magnificent sets and the parting of the Red Sea, it’s the least interesting part of the film. The problem is that it unfolds like a moving pop-up book hitting on the beats of Moses’ journey but without all the palace intrigue, character development and complicated relationships that make the 1956 version so addictive. The remaining 90 minutes, however, are set in 1920s America and tell the compelling story of two brothers who love the same woman. One is good and a believer in God. The other rejects God and is so rigid in his non-belief he destroys himself while in the process of proving life can be good if you dedicate yourself to violating the Commandments.

Not being a silent film fan, I popped in the 1923 version only out of a reviewer’s obligation and even then busied myself with something else while it played in the background. About two hours in, I realized I was missing something special, started the whole picture over again and sat there spellbound until two in the morning. That doesn’t happen very often.

The gift set is gorgeous, a real treasure-trove, and not only includes the “making of” documentary and the 1923 film version (on Blu-ray), but also a wonderful hardcover photo book and a replica of the 1956 souvenir program. There’s also a set of cards with costume sketches of all the main players and some truly fascinating archival reproductions that include a wonderful hand-written letter Charlton Heston sent to “Mr. DeMille,” a man he obviously held an enormous amount of personal affection and respect for. Using footage from 2002, Heston also appears in the “making of” documentary, and again, it’s always “MISTER DeMille.” To command that kind of respect from a man like Charlton Heston is quite the compliment.

I know that there are those who accuse the film of being campy, but I see it more as something that’s larger-than-life. Anne Baxter’s frequent use of “Moses, Moses…” catches most of the flack but let me tell you, when she turns evil in the third act it is very effective. Another performance poked fun at is Edward G. Robinson’s Dathan, but I find him hilarious in the way I think I’m supposed to. He’s so unashamed of being a scumbag that when he’s dancing like a Goldwyn Girl in front of the golden calf, I practically fall out of my chair. I think it’s a marvelous performance by a genius actor who added something no one else could.

At the center of it all, though, stand two giants. If it’s impossible to see anyone but Heston playing Moses (and it is), it is even more impossible to see anyone but Yul Brynner as Ramses II. Not only is he a convincing and formidable antagonist to a man able to summon the very power of God, but DeMille’s direction of this character is absolutely brilliant. Repeatedly, Ramses is slighted by the woman he wants and even his own father, and yet never once does DeMille cut away to a reaction shot of Brynner looking wounded. And yet, thanks to Brynner’s extraordinary screen presence, Ramses is never one-dimensional. But because DeMille never asked us to sympathize with him, when he’s finally beaten, when he finally says, “His God is God,” it is an unforgettable defeat that might prove the power of God even more than the parting of all that water.

Though God is obviously DeMille’s star, Heston is the sun around which everything else revolves. His ability to speak some very difficult lines with complete sincerity is probably the greatest testament to his abilities as an actor. For any actor, that kind of straightforward dialogue, much of it spoken as grand proclamations, is a tightrope without a net. The risk of looking foolish is enormous and yet Heston never comes close. It’s a legendary and iconic performance no amount of words can do justice.

The rest of the cast is just as perfect. Yvonne DeCarlo is simply breathtaking as Moses’ shepherd wife Sephora; Nina Foch is utterly believable as Bithiah, Pharaoh’s sister and Moses’ adopted mother; Cedric Hardwicke as Pharaoh gives humor and humanity to a real monster; Vincent Price as Baka the builder is deliciously sleazy; and Martha Scott as Moses’ birth mother Yochabel is the perfect contrast to Bithiah. Finally, there’s John Carradine as Moses’ brother Aaron — a presence and voice all his own; John Derek and Debra Paget as star-crossed lovers; and Lisa Mitchell as one of Jethro’s beautifully innocent daughters — a lovely woman I met at the screening who along with Heston’s son Fraser (who plays the Baby Moses), carries the torch of the film’s legacy wherever she goes. Her stories, insight and anecdotes are a real highlight of the “making of” documentary.

And don’t get me started on Elmer Bernstein’s PERFECT score, which has been stuck in my head for nearly a week.

Soon, I’ll watch the film again in order to enjoy the full feature-length commentary by Kathryn Orrison (who I also met at the screening), author of “Written in Stone: Making Cecil B. DeMille’s Epic The Ten Commandments.” Unfortunately, I just didn’t have time for a third screening, but the commentary I did hear during my five favorite scenes/sequences…

1.Moses meets his birth mother for the first time
2.The Burning Bush
3.The final plague/Passover
4.The Exodus from Egypt and parting of the Red Sea
5.The juxtaposition between God’s writing of the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai and the G-rated orgy around the golden calf.

…was some of the best I’ve ever heard. She knows everything and obviously has enormous respect for the film and all of those who made it possible.

It was 1980 and I was 14 years-old. On Easter weekend, my brother, who was only a baby at the time, broke his leg in a freak accident and was hospitalized for almost a week. Obviously, we all held vigil around the clock and I’ll never forget sitting in a waiting room all by myself on Easter Sunday as ABC broadcast “The Ten Commandments” in its entirety over five hours. It was such an awful situation for our family and yet here was this deceptively small story playing out against an epic backdrop to keep me company. Fourteen is an impressionable age and how lucky was I to have experienced such a powerful lesson in faith, courage and freedom?

What I’m most grateful for is that repeated viewings never diminish the power of MISTER DeMille’s final film to inspire, entertain, and teach. What I’m not especially happy about, though, is that this Blu-ray transfer is so drop dead gorgeous, that I’m now likely to become dissatisfied with an embarrassingly large DVD collection I’ve spent two decades and a ton of money building.

“The Ten Commandments” Blu-ray was released today. You can choose between the gift set – which I reviewed here, the two-disc special edition Blu-ray, or the two-disc DVD.

Afghanistan: The Futile Conflict

By Tom Bethell from the March 2011 issue of The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

The war in Afghanistan, called Operation Enduring Freedom, has proved to be enduring indeed. Now in its 10th year, it could drag on a lot longer. In November's congressional elections it was hardly an issue. But if we are still mired in this futile conflict a year from now, it could become a big headache for President Obama.

He must be kicking himself because if he had pulled out soon after becoming president, claiming that this war was not benefiting the United States, his argument would surely have prevailed (over the furious objections of Max Boot and John Bolton). Obama could reasonably have said that he was elected to end these costly and unwinnable wars. But as early as 2007 he was persuaded that Afghanistan was "the war we need to win." In 2009 he sent in 30,000 additional troops. More recently, he postponed scheduled U.S. troop withdrawals. As Al Regnery wrote here last fall, Afghanistan is now Obama's Achilles' heel.

He has no good choices. If he withdraws, he will be seen as the commander in chief who first aimed for victory then settled for retreat. Withdrawal, said Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph, will be viewed as "the first defeat of the most powerful military alliance in history at the hands of a small band of fanatics armed with little more than rifles and IEDs." More on Moore in a minute.

But if he digs in -- as in fact he has done -- Obama's liberal supporters may turn on him. It is literally a "no win" situation, because military victory in Afghanistan would require an enormous army of occupation and that is not going to happen. Our NATO allies are already heading for the exits.

Why are we there? "We're there because of 9/11," said the late and much admired Richard Holbrooke. "And that's a simple matter of fact." Holbrooke's title was also his mission impossible: special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. He died in December of a torn aorta, but it might as well have been called a broken heart. A few months earlier he said that a "pure military victory in Afghanistan is not possible."

Killing more tribesmen will avail us nothing, and may do more harm than good. They become automatic martyrs, and Afghanistan (population approaching 30 million) has lots more tribesmen in reserve. Some no doubt are ready to become "terrorists." An increasing number of Afghans don't know what we are doing there and the same uncertainty could be attributed to more and more Americans.

Initially, we invaded Afghanistan because, in about 1996, al Qaeda set up a mountain encampment there and used it to plan the 9/11 attack. How many Afghan tribesmen ever knew about al Qaeda, or ever heard of Osama bin Laden? As we have been told many times, Afghanistan basically had no government, and it still doesn't.

After 9/11 George Bush said we wanted bin Laden "dead or alive." My guess is that he is dead, but the intelligence agencies may not want to go on the record. War planners, I suspect, would prefer bin Laden alive. If he's dead, we could claim "mission accomplished." Anyway, al Qaeda or what's left of it is said to have decamped to Pakistan, whose government is not really cooperating with us.

The Vietnam comparison still works in Obama's favor. In 1968, about 320 U.S. soldiers were killed there every week. In Afghanistan, in 2010, we suffered about 10 deaths a week. That's a big disparity, and Obama will want it to stay that way. His best option may be to keep U.S. forces in a defensive posture, the (unstated) goal being to minimize casualties. That way the war just might stay out of the headlines long enough for him to be reelected. But if the casualties keep mounting, as they have in the past two years, he could be in trouble.

One almost feels sorry for Obama because his instinct was to extricate the U.S. from these unwinnable wars. It was the one area where he at least wanted to resist the expansion of state power. In other policy areas, as we know, he actively encouraged the natural bureaucratic instinct to expand, resulting in a budget deficit that is approaching $1.5 trillion for the current year.

Since World War II, the most effective pressure in Washington has come from senior officials of government agencies, all pushing to expand their own missions and budgets. The military very much included. Take a look at Bob Woodward's book Obama's Wars. He reports in detail Obama's conversations with Vice President Biden (who favors U.S. withdrawal) and with senior military officials in Washington. The Pentagon won almost every one of these "battles" with Obama. A good case can be made, incidentally, that Obama prevailed over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries because he was more committed to pulling the U.S. out of these no-win wars. But he has been unable to do so.

Here's a further comment from Charles Moore, who was once the editor of the (conservative) Daily Telegraph and since then has been writing Margaret Thatcher's biography. He asks if opponents of this war "have any conception of what a defeat would mean for the world order [and for] civil peace in every European city." Don't they see that this fight "will be seen not as a battle for control of some jagged mountains, but between values, and that if our values do not win, they will lose?"

His article ended there, and he didn't say what these values are. But the Afghan values are fairly clear. They want to get foreigners out of their country, even if they (we) are passing money around in an attempt to buy friends. Anyway, it's a good bet that we would feel the same way if strange tribesmen with a lot of hi-tech gadgets landed in the Rockies and tried to control our government.

Afghans also believe in God. I'm not sure that we do anymore.

BUT HERE IS ONE VALUE we are certainly fighting for: women's rights. Mrs. Bush, Mrs. Obama, and Mrs. Clinton have all signed on. Take a look at the Time cover story last August 9, showing a woman with part of her nose cut off. The headline read, "What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan." No question mark. The victim's story "raises important questions for those working to establish this young democracy," Laura Bush wrote. "Will Afghanistan embrace and protect the rights of all people?" The New York Times agrees: "The basic civil rights of Afghans -- particularly women and girls -- cannot be up for negotiation."

Actually, they don't really have rights in most of the Muslim world. Theirs is a system based on power and force, and in such a world men indeed can easily dominate women, and do. Maybe instead we should try converting them to Christianity? (Just kidding. Even to suggest such a thing shows how far we have traveled down the road of relativism.)

It's true that America's position in the world has declined, compared to other countries. But the great mistake has been to think that this can be remedied by seeking out countries that can be treated as military targets. Launching armed crusades against selected foreign countries is a military response to a cultural problem.

A lot of people in America would like to see a revival of the West, myself very much included. But that will require a revival of religion. What caused its decline? It is poorly understood, but I believe that rising prosperity brings moral laxity in its wake. That may be the key. American elites, with their persistent negativism about the human race (trees good, people bad), have also played a role in demoralizing the middle class. The rise of Islam over the past generation is mainly a response to the decline of faith-Christianity in particular. Islam is moving into the vacuum, and dropping bombs on them won't do any good. 

Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages, and most recently Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary? (2009).

Middle East Howlers

If we expect the successors of Mubarak and Qaddafi to be freedom-loving democrats, we will be dangerously disappointed.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/
March 30, 2011 4:00 A.M.


A “howler,” the Wall Street Journal called it in an editorial yesterday. That certainly is a fitting description of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s latest mindboggling foray into Middle East analysis. It makes sense, she maintains, for American armed forces to get “kinetic” in Libya but not in Syria because Moammar Qaddafi is a brutal dictator while brutal dictator Bashar Assad is really a “reformer.” Perhaps she has been watching too much al-Jazeera, this former first lady who was so instrumental in her husband’s airbrushing of the terrorist kleptocrat Yasser Arafat — a peace-seeking statesman . . . at least between intifadas.

Al-Jazeera is the Islamist communications hub. The network’s brightest star, Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi of the Muslim Brotherhood, fresh from his triumphant return to Egypt to dance on the grave of the pro-American Mubarak regime, recently issued a fatwa calling for Qaddafi’s murder. And in the network’s showcase cause, the annihilation of the Zionist entity, Assad and his Hezbollah confederates are just what central casting ordered. Yet, according to Secretary Clinton, al-Jazeera is the place to which people turn for the “real news,” the serious analysis you just can’t get from the talking heads on U.S. television.

Another howler . . . or is it? Fox News, for example, is fast becoming the Arab Spring Channel.

On its weekend talking headliner, Fox News Sunday, anchor Chris Wallace spent several minutes grilling Newt Gingrich on his marital infidelities. “Man to man,” the host hectored, the former House Speaker must have had some glass-house qualms. After all, he was cheating at the very moment when he was leading the charge against Mrs. Clinton’s intern-chasing husband. Gingrich — who is not yet even a declared presidential candidate — is a long shot for a nomination that won’t be decided until over a year from now. Yet Wallace thought it essential, right now, to get to the bottom of indiscretions that are nearly two decades old.

Tough questioning — fair, but tough and unyielding. That is Mr. Wallace’s trademark — or at least it was until Sunday’s program shifted to the breaking news in Libya. Without congressional consultation, much less endorsement, the Obama administration had just dispatched the nation’s armed forces to take sides in a civil war. Problem? Not at all, not for Mr. Wallace’s giddy guests. One after the other, Sens. John McCain (R., Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (I., Ct.), longtime Islamic-democracy-project enthusiasts, gushed over the “rebels” and the joys of America’s finally being aligned with the “Arab street” (i.e., the people who celebrated the 9/11 attacks and, just this month, the murder of the Fogels, a family of Jewish settlers in the West Bank). Without a hint of challenge from the formerly dogged Wallace, McCain and Lieberman seemed to compete over who could ooze more affinity for the “freedom fighters.”

The pattern continued through the program’s concluding panel of pundits, in which Fox’s Brit Hume, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, and Fortune’s Nina Easton glowed over the “rebels” of the “Arab Spring.” But who are the rebels? There was apparently no need to tarry over that seeming irrelevancy. It could only distract from the truly urgent question of whether we are doing quite enough for them — whether President Obama’s Alinskyite play of helping these “freedom fighters” while claiming not to help them will be enough for them to prevail.

Perhaps not, the consensus seemed to be. It will probably take arming them and providing other logistical support. It was left to the house lefty, Juan Williams, of all people, to point out that we really don’t know much about the rebels — except that some of them seem to be anti-American Islamists. Maybe, he suggested, we ought to find out more before we start passing out matériel that could one day be turned against us.

Williams had stumbled, at long last, on the fact so inconvenient that it must not be spoken: The “Arab Spring” is actually the Islamist Spring. Islamists as “freedom fighters”? Now that’s a howler. The very concept of “freedom” in Islam is markedly different from the “freedom” at the root of Western democracy. Islam envisions not individual liberty but its antithesis, perfect submission to Allah’s law — and the Judaeo-Christian notion of equality is nowhere to be found. There is a reason why Islam has no democratic tradition.

The Islamist mission is to impose this law, sharia, a totalitarian code to be enforced by rulers who would be just as authoritarian as the despots they are replacing. There is too much evidence to permit the Arab Spring heralds to refute this proposition head on, so they deflect. They spin Middle East developments as a major defeat for al-Qaeda and its philosophy of extorting change through violence.

This, however, confounds ends and means. Al-Qaeda’s approach — holding that even Muslims should be killed if they won’t hew to the terror network’s construction of Islam — has always been an outlier, attracting only a fringe of Muslims. In contrast, its goal of imposing sharia as the gateway to Islamicized societies is not merely an al-Qaeda goal; it is a majority position in the Muslim Middle East. It is not al-Qaeda that is trying to put Muslim apostates to death in Kabul; it is the U.S.-backed Afghan government. It is not al-Qaeda that is administering “virginity tests” in Cairo; it is the U.S.-built Egyptian military.

The biggest difference between Qaddafi and the coming Islamist despotism is that the latter, faithful to its ideology, promises to be intractably anti-Western and disdainful of non-Muslim religious minorities. Thus Arab Spring enthusiasts tend to develop laryngitis when it comes to the taxonomy of their “rebels.” Nor, other than the mantra that troop surges have succeeded, is there much chatter about the spring that came early for Iraq and Afghanistan — where non-Muslims are persecuted, homosexuals are abused under the guidance of the clerics, Iran’s influence grows, and the “Zionist entity” is dutifully reviled. (Anybody want to bet me on whom the new Iraq will support in kinetic Islam’s next faceoff with Israel?)

Only days before Secretary Clinton’s Assad howler, we had the Arab Spring’s first blooms in Egypt. In a referendum, Egyptians voted by more than 3 to 1 (an overwhelming 77 to 23 percent) to adopt a framework for swift new elections — the opposite of the deliberate transition process that would have given non-Islamist democrats a fighting chance to build effective secular democratic parties and institutions. The plan voters endorsed quite intentionally will enable the Muslim Brotherhood to achieve electoral success in parliament this September. The Brothers will then be poised to rig the presidential election three months later, and to control the drafting of any new Egyptian constitution. We already know that one part of the current constitution will remain sacrosanct: the article establishing Islam as the state religion and sharia as fundamental law.

Arab Spring fans told us the urbane Egyptians were even more determined “freedom” seekers than the tribal Libyan “rebels.” They scoffed at those among us who warned against having too much confidence in the Egyptian military — which has been mentored by American counterparts for the last 30 years — as a hedge against the slide toward Islamism.

In the event, the military — which, like the Brotherhood, mirrors Egyptian society — predictably favored the Brothers. To stoke the illusion of a true democratic uprising, Secretary Clinton sought to meet with the anti-Mubarak vanguard. They rebuffed her. It’s not hard to understand why: She is an American, and they despise Americans; she is tilting at windmills, and they are hardheaded Islamists. Meanwhile, campaigning Muslim clerics and activists publicly framed a “yes” vote as a call for more sharia and a denial to the Coptic Christian minority of an equal role in civic life (for in Islam there is no separating civic life from sharia). The Islamists won going away.

So what we can expect from the “rebels” if they oust Qaddafi? What can we learn from the Egyptian election — coupled, in Iraq and Afghanistan, with rampant anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and abuse of non-Muslims despite years of U.S. democracy-building? You won’t find out from watching the talking heads. They’ve decided not to ask.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Look Busy for the Boss: Bruce Springsteen Visits ‘Little Steven’s Underground Garage’

By DAVE ITZKOFF
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/
March 29, 2011, 2:30 pm

In the nine years that “Little Steven’s Underground Garage” has been on the air, Steven Van Zandt, this E Street Band guitarist and host of that radio program, has been visited by his share of rock ‘n’ roll luminaries, including Ringo Starr, Brian Wilson and Keith Richards. But one particularly impressive — and seemingly obvious — guest has eluded Mr. Van Zandt, until now.

Bruce Springsteen, Mr. Van Zandt’s longtime friend and colleague, will appear on “Little Steven’s Underground Garage” in a series of programs that will be broadcast on the weekends of April 1, 8 and 15 to celebrate the show’s ninth anniversary.

The conversations, in which Mr. Springsteen and Mr. Van Zandt talk about their musical influences and whatever else comes to mind, were recorded earlier this month at Mr. Van Zandt’s office studio in Greenwich Village but were in the works for considerably longer than that.

“I’ve been inviting him on since Day 1,” Mr. Van Zandt said in a telephone interview. “At least every anniversary. ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, I gotta do that.’ We just never have quite gotten around to it. He just finally showed up. It wasn’t like he wasn’t invited –- of course he was invited -– but you get busy, you get doing things. And I know how that is.”

Mr. Van Zandt said he tried to do as little preparation for Mr. Springsteen’s appearance as possible. “By the time we have that lengthy conversation about the show, that’s another show,” he said. “Let’s start with absolute, total spontaneity and just talk. We’ll just have a conversation, and then we’ll fill in the music later.” He added: “I knew it would be a good show, just from us talking. Because we’ve never really talked to each other, on record, official. Not only on my station, but anywhere.”

Though the men have known and performed with each other going back to the early 1970s, Mr. Van Zandt said he learned a few things from Mr. Springsteen during their conversation. For one thing, Mr. Van Zandt said, “I don’t think I quite realized how big a fan he was of the Four Seasons.”

Mr. Van Zandt said he was also surprised by a segment in which Mr. Springsteen picked up a guitar and demonstrated how his song “Prove It All Night” was more or less lifted from the Animals’ “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.”

“It’s going to be cool for people to hear that,” Mr. Van Zandt said. “I think we have a generation right now who thinks music falls off trees. Really, it’s very important that people know a lot of thought, a lot of work goes into this stuff. And maybe a lot of theft goes into stealing riffs, but that doesn’t mean you should steal the music.”

With a tinge of melancholy, Mr. Van Zandt noted that he and Mr. Springsteen were not often able to see each other these days, in part because of the complexity of his own schedule: in addition to hosting “Little Steven’s Underground Garage,” Mr. Van Zandt is also a music supervisor and executive producer for a new film by David Chase (his director on “The Sopranos”) about a young rock band in the 1960s.

Additionally, Mr. Van Zandt travels to Norway every other week to film his role in “Lillehammer,” a Norwegian television series on which he plays a former mobster who enters the witness protection program.

“I negotiated the weirdest deal in history by telling them I can’t come for four months straight, but I can come every other week,” Mr. Van Zandt explained. “They said yes.”

Now that he’s gotten Mr. Springsteen through the door of his radio studio, Mr. Van Zandt is hoping the Boss won’t take another nine years to make his return visit.

“I would love it,” Mr. Van Zandt said. “He’s welcome to do it. But coming once every nine years won’t be enough to promote him as a co-host.”

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