Steven Grant on “Dictation Lessons”
I haven’t had much energy for tackling politics lately. Fortunately, Steven Grant has. Here’s a link to the political commentary section of his Permanent Damage column on the Comic Book Resources site.
It’s scary stuff, and I agree with about 99% of it.
January 20th, 2006 at 6:32 AM
link is not working – it’s probablya missing quotation mark or something
January 20th, 2006 at 7:32 AM
Grant’s politics are right on usually. He’s a little smarmy at time (i.e., “The Hand Puppet”), which would bother me if I was looking for something impartial. However, I’m a rabid lefty loony, so I think his jabs at His Majesty are great.
Good luck on the move. Don’t lose or break anything important!
January 20th, 2006 at 7:33 AM
I agree with about 1% of it. Here’s a few things Steven Grant neglected to mention regarding the Iran situation:
President Ahmadinejad was one of the group involved in the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Teheran back in ’79.
Ahamadinejad is an avowed Holocaust denier who has threatened to wipe Israel off the map. His speech at the Union of Islamic Students Association’s “World Without Zionism” conference was even more appalling than his first speech at the United Nations. “Very soon, this stain of disgrace will vanish from the center of the Islamic world.” (There’s much more than I’d care to type out in response to a blog, but it can easily be looked up.) Don’t feel sorry for Ahmadinejad, though. He has his admirers: the Russian, Chinese, and North Korean regimes, as well as the terror groups in Lebanon and Palestine supported by the Iranian government.
Oh, and President Ahmadinejad belongs to a sect devoted to a Messiah-like figure known as the Hidden Imam, who went into “occlusion” in the 9th century. He will return and bring peace to the world, but not until after chaos, war and bloodshed. Call it Armaggedon or Ragnarok or whatever you want, but Ahmadinejad wants his government to prepare for it.
We can certainly trust President Ahmadinejad when he says he’s not interested in nuclear weapons.
January 20th, 2006 at 7:59 AM
I agree that Iran is a horrible place that needs to be changed. I agree that the new guy in charge is a horrible, “evil” person who we can’t trust. Iran is a lot closer to the bullseye of the “war on terror” than Iraq would ever be. Some would say that Saddam was also a horrible person who made threats against the US, but it’s a false comparison. President Ahmadinejad is about as close to a Jihadist world leader as you’ll find.
I don’t trust him.
Saying that, I agree with more than 1% and less than 99% of what Grant says. He’s dead on the money in his depiction of what a bad situation America is in. From how the administration operates to the lack of journalism, to the lack of an opposition party, to what guys up for re-election are going to do. We’re in a pretty shitty place.
I just don’t think the lead up to Iran will be as bad as the lead up to Iraq. One of the main reasons why I didn’t think Iraq was justified was because there were better targets in the world. Iran being one of them. Iraq was a secular country, for christ’s sake!
I could go on and on, but I won’t. Even if I’m not 100% behind every word, it’s still a good read.
January 20th, 2006 at 8:01 AM
Oh, and I’m also in the minority in thinking that a war with Iran won’t happen. It’d be political suicide. We can’t handle Iraq (the cost or manpower), and Iran’s a whoooole lot bigger.
It’s also an election year. Things may change after 2006, and hopefully it’ll mean a Democratic congress that can put this administration back in its place.
January 20th, 2006 at 5:55 PM
I, too, agree with most of what Steven Grant says over in his column.
Yes, no doubt China and Russia in the UN Security Council will veto the US proposals for action on Iran, so the US can go for their favorite solution: military intervention.
I heard the current Iranian president’s comments on Israel on the radio. Let’s say they could be taken as racially villifying. Genocidal, even.
According to the Wikipedia entry on him Ahmadinejad has an interesting history in covert ops. As the recent mayor of Tehran he has been an avid opponent of Iran’s moderate politicians, and reversed many of their reforms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad
See, Iran is mostly a democratic country. Ironically, the revolution of 1979 not only created the current Islamic republic, but introduced a democratically-elected president. Certain legislative powers are controlled by an elite of conservative clerics appointed by the president. This group, called the Gaurdian Council, effectively vetos many moderate reforms.
President Ahmadinejad was directly elected by the people with promises to help the poor of Iran, and he’s a working man, not a man of the rich (but, hey, he’s a politician and was involved with covert operations, so who knows where the truth lies with him).
I oppose US military intervention because Iran is already a democracy, with a few more decent reforms it could be a great democracy. But with the war on terror, the moderates (sometimes called ‘liberal’ islam) is truly in a political wilderness at this time-stuck in opposition. It was from 1997-2005 that the former president Khatami, who was a moderate, ruled and made some overtures to the west (Britain and the EU had started talking to Iran again), but his job was made as difficult by Iran’s conservatives as Bill Clinton’s was by US conservatives.
Any Islamist political group, not allied with the US, is going to be called ‘radical’. There’s some pretty horrendous human rights violations against the “separatist” Thai Muslim culture currently peaking in Thailand, an ally of the US in the war on terror.
So, while I don’t support Islamists, there is a current of islamic liberal democracy bubbling away, just as there is in many western countries with liberal democrats, some social democrats and greens.
The problem is always the conservatives’ stranglehold on power.
January 20th, 2006 at 6:28 PM
A correction to the above: the Gaurdian Council is appointed by the Supreme Leader (currently the Ayatollah Khamenei, who in 1989 succeeded Khomeini). The SL is the religious head of state, and is superior to the office of president.
The position of Supreme Leader is not by election.
January 21st, 2006 at 2:49 AM
Link fixed.
January 21st, 2006 at 3:52 PM
There’s now way we’re going to war with Iran – The thing that I don’t think most people get is that the Iraq war was deeply personal, it had nothing to do with 99% of the reason’s given (9/11, WMD’s,etc.), it was manufactured from an existing grudge…
January 22nd, 2006 at 6:27 AM
I’m wondering,
Who decides what the criteria is for possessing nuclear technology and nuclear weapons?
Why is one country allowed to have nuclear technology and/or weapons and another is not?
January 26th, 2006 at 8:51 PM
While I often disagree with Steven Grant’s opinions, in the years that I have been corresponding with him, I have never known him to make a statement of fact that he wasn’t prepared to back up with hard data.