Roger Kimball enjoys the New York Times’ dilemma on how best to suppress Jerome Corsi new book.

Oh dear, Oh dear, Oh dear. Jerome Corsi, author of the bestselling Unfit for Command in 2004, a book that turned the phrase “swift boat” into a verb and helped defeat John “Reporting for Duty” Kerry, has written a new book about Barack Hussein Obama (yes, I know I am not supposed to mention his middle name, but I am going to anyway) called The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. It’s officially published only today (you can order it from Amazon here), but already it is # 1 on The New York Times bestseller list with 475,000 copies in print so far. The Times, naturally, is in a swivet lest Corsi’s book undermine The Messiah’s planned advent in November and they have wheeled into print with a longish dismissal masquerading as a review today. “Significant parts of the book,” the authors write (the Times requires two reviewers when a serious demolition job is commissioned), “have already been challenged as misleading or false in the days since its debut on Aug. 1.”

“Challenged”? Who would doubt it? Anything can be challenged: “Who goes there?” But have those “significant parts” been shown to be false? ...

That’s one of many questions the public should be asking about Barack Hussein Obama. Today’s piece in the Times veritably weeps with anxiety. Corsi’s book has dwarfed a similar effort to discredit John McCain (35,000 in print): is there no justice in the world? The Times was in a tough spot with this book. The paper’s usual procedure with books it dislikes is to ignore them. Someone must have made the calculation that it was better to try to head off Corsi’s book at the pass, to strangle it in the crib as it were. I think they will rue the decision. Most people who read the Times would probably have been only dimly aware of The Obama Nation had the Times not brought it to their attention. Now they have had it rubbed in their faces. The paper did its best to dismiss the book, but questions and doubts will linger–not so much about Jerome Corsi but about Barack Hussein Obama. Who is he? Who are his friends? What does he believe? Is he the sort of person the American public wants leading the country? Is he a “stealth radical liberal”?

Actually, I think a Tuesday slash-and-burn article under Politics combined with studied non-recognition in the Book Review itself is pretty much Times’ standard operating procedure.
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Earlier Obama Nation post.

Nancy Pelosi’s new book, Know Your Power, has been less than well-received.

It’s ranking 1576 this morning on the Amazon best-seller list, and 23 of 34 reviews give it one star (Amazon’s most negative rating).

Lone Pony reports that Nancy Pelosi has leaned on Amazon, forcing the on-line bookseller to remove more than 200 negative reviews. How lame is that?

Via Pam Geller.

Giotto, The Kiss of Judas, c. 1305, Fresco, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.

Michael Reagan explains that McClellan did it for money, revenge for being sacked, and to crawl back into the good graces of the establishment media. History will reserve for Scott McClellan a special place in its accounting of the Bush Administration.

It’s amazing what some people will do for 30 pieces of silver.

Scott McClellan was given the signal honor of being the spokesman for the president of the United States, a distinction few Americans have ever achieved. Being the spokesman for the world’s most powerful political figure is no small thing, and I’m sure that the men and women who have held the post view their service as an honor more given that deserved.

It doesn’t appear as if McClellan sees it that way. He is not the first press secretary to be forced out of the job, and he won’t be the last. But he’ll be the first to sink his teeth into the hand that gave him the job in the first place.

It is a tough job, especially when the spokesman of a president the liberal media despises wears a large bull’s eye on his chest. It’s an even tougher job when the person who holds the job is clearly not up to it, as was the case with McClellan. He was an easy target for the nastier members of the largely hostile White House Press corps.

His lack of competence is what cost him the job, and it is now obvious that he left the White House burning with resentment over his forced departure. The fact that he had held the job as long as he did obviously created no sense of gratitude for his having been given the post to begin with.

His act of vengeance has delighted the media who once excoriated him. Their onetime foe is now their hero, an ally in their never-ending campaign to portray George Bush, a good and decent man, as a bumbling fool if not an outright criminal.

London Times:

A recent history, titled 1940-1945 Erotic Years: Vichy or the Misfortunes of Virtue by Patrick Buisson, argues that France’s surrender to Nazi Germany was more complete than is generally recognized.

A new book which suggests that the German occupation of France encouraged the sexual liberation of women has shocked a country still struggling to come to terms with its troubled history of collaboration with the Nazis. ...

Buisson dedicates a chapter in his book to cinemas, which he describes as hotbeds of erotic activity, particularly when it was cold outside. “At a few francs they were cheaper than a hotel room,” he writes, “and, offering the double cover of darkness and anonymity, propitious for all sorts of outpourings.”

The French even had sex in the catacombs, the underground ossuary and warren of subterranean tunnels in Paris: war, Buisson argues, acted as an aphrodisiac, stimulating “the survival instinct”. He said in an interview: “People needed to prove that they were alive. They did so by making love.”

It has been claimed that prostitutes staged the first rebellion against the Nazis by refusing to service the invaders but Buisson called this a myth. The Germans, he claimed, were welcomed into the city’s best brothels, a third of which were reserved for officers. Another 100,000 women in Paris became “occasional prostitutes”, he said.

Elsewhere, members of the artistic elite drowned their sorrows in debauchery. Simone de Beauvoir, the writer, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher, were devotees of allnight parties fuelled by alcohol and lust.

“It was only in the course of those nights that I discovered the true meaning of the word party,” was how de Beauvoir put it. Sartre was no less enthusiastic: “Never were we as free as under the German occupation.”

De Beauvoir wrote about the “quite spontaneous friendliness” of the conquerors: she was as fascinated as any by the German “cult of the body” and their penchant for exercising in nothing but gym shorts.

“In the summer of 1940,” wrote Buisson, “France was transformed into one big naturist camp. The Germans seemed to have gathered on French territory only to celebrate an impressive festival of gymnastics.” The author said he did not want to make light of a tragic part of French history, but there was a need to correct the “mythical” image of the occupation. “In this horrible period, life continued,” he said.

“It is disturbing to know that while the Jews were being deported, the French were making love. But that is the truth.”

Noah Pollak, at Commentary, notes that the blockade is on with respect to reviews of Douglas Feith’s book in the leading organs of the liberal establishment.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are the book review editor of a major newspaper, and a book has been written by someone who was a high-level public official deeply involved in what has been the biggest and most controversial story of the past half-decade.

This official has been mentioned in news stories in your paper on hundreds of occasions, your paper’s editorials have regularly railed against him and his colleagues, and your paper’s op-ed columnists have penned an entire oeuvre of scathing indictments of the policies he helped implement. The official, subjected to years of obloquy in your pages, writes an account of his involvement in the story that by any fair estimation is not just detailed and serious, but one of the most important and useful of its kind to date. Do you choose to review the book, or do you simply pretend that it was never written?

The book I’m talking about, of course, is War and Decision, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith’s account of his role in the Iraq war. And it is being subjected to an astonishing and shameful blackout from many of America’s biggest newspapers. Noting the decision of the Washington Post and New York Times not to review the book, Rich Lowry wrote, “Apparently it’s OK to heap every failure in Iraq on Feith’s head, but then to turn around and pretend he’s a figure of no consequence when he writes a book.”

Curiosity got the better of me, so I checked to see whether the book has been reviewed by other large newspapers. The MSM does not disappoint: There has been no mention of War and Decision in USA Today, the LA Times, NY Daily News, Houston Chronicle, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, or Miami Herald. What charming behavior from our nation’s journalism professionals. You would think the book interfered with the preferred narrative or something.

The Telegraph offers a list of 50 detective story authors with a recommended title from each.

Missing from the list? I’d suggest including:

Nicholas Freeling was an Englishman and resident of the Continent, who brought keen intelligence and a serious and humane philosophical perspective to the detective genre. His best work was probably the series of novels revolving around criminal investigations conducted by Dutch Inspector Van der Valk. Most readers felt that Van der Valk’s death in the line of duty—Aupres de ma blonde aka A Long Silence (1972)—was a mistake, and Freeling’s replacement, French detective Henri Castaing, made for less compelling reading.

Read: Love in Amersterdam aka Death in Amsterdam (1962)

Robert van Gulik was a Dutch diplomat and orientalist, who translated an 18th century Chinese detective story about the adventures of a Tang Dynasty Imperial official. Inspired by the original, Gulik proceeded to produce his own series of further adventures of Judge Dee, running to 16 volumes of individual novels and short stories or thereabouts. The Judge Dee mysteries offer a fascinating picture of a distant time and place, viewed specifically from a Confucian perspective.

Read: The Chinese Bell Murders (1958)

And how could they possibly have missed?

John D. McDonald, a Harvard MBA, tried his hand at fiction while serving in WWII, and after his discharge settled down to produce a well-crafted series of hardboiled crime thrillers in the manner of James M. Cain. 1950s paperback racks were filled with McDonald’s pulpy novels, each with its cover featuring a buxom broad in provocative déshabillé. In the early 1960s, McDonald the professional sat down and carefully designed the ultimate series hero, one of the detective genre’s all-time great protagonists, Florida “salvage consultant,” thinking man’s action hero, and rueful philosopher Travis McGee.

Read: The Deep Blue Goodbye (1964)

WorldNetDaily:

Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded,” says Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of the new book, “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness.” “Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave.”

While political activists on the other side of the spectrum have made similar observations, Rossiter boasts professional credentials and a life virtually free of activism and links to “the vast right-wing conspiracy.”

For more than 35 years he has diagnosed and treated more than 1,500 patients as a board-certified clinical psychiatrist and examined more than 2,700 civil and criminal cases as a board-certified forensic psychiatrist. He received his medical and psychiatric training at the University of Chicago.

Rossiter says the kind of liberalism being displayed by the two major candidates for the Democratic Party presidential nomination can only be understood as a psychological disorder.

“A social scientist who understands human nature will not dismiss the vital roles of free choice, voluntary cooperation and moral integrity – as liberals do,” he says. “A political leader who understands human nature will not ignore individual differences in talent, drive, personal appeal and work ethic, and then try to impose economic and social equality on the population – as liberals do. And a legislator who understands human nature will not create an environment of rules which over-regulates and over-taxes the nation’s citizens, corrupts their character and reduces them to wards of the state – as liberals do.”

Dr. Rossiter says the liberal agenda preys on weakness and feelings of inferiority in the population by:

creating and reinforcing perceptions of victimization;

satisfying infantile claims to entitlement, indulgence and compensation;

augmenting primitive feelings of envy;

rejecting the sovereignty of the individual, subordinating him to the will of the government.

“The roots of liberalism – and its associated madness – can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind,” he says. “When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious.”

Friday Book Review by Geoffrey Norman:

Blackway, the villain in “Go With Me,” Castle Freeman Jr.’s short novel, is a creature of the cut-over, used-up back-country of Vermont, where people once logged timber and now clip coupons. He is the product of a culture of easy violence, a man to be feared.

When he stalks a young woman and kills her cat, she logically asks for help from the local sheriff. And the sheriff logically sends her to see the boys down at the mill. It used to make furniture, but now “they made a better Windsor chair in North Carolina, in Taiwan, than they did in Vermont.” The boys at the mill don’t run lathes anymore; they drink beer and talk. When Lillian shows up asking for help, they team her up with Lester and Nate. The three set off on a quest to find Blackway and deal with him.

There is a clear moral arc to this storyline, and suspense too. But “Go With Me” is also a literary novel, with echoes of “Deliverance” and Cormac McCarthy. The primitive at the heart of the book is a staple of American fiction. He can be noble like Natty Bumppo or downright evil, like Faulkner’s Popeye. His symbolic function was summed up by D.H. Lawrence:” The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.“

Robert D. Kaplan, in the Atlantic, discusses in detail a number of Vietnam War books exemplifying the warrior ethos which are widely admired in professional military circles (just check the prices of those out-of-print Jean Larteguy titles), but which are not nearly as well known by the general public as they deserve to be.

Wikipedia profile quotes David Lipsky saying of Robert D. Kaplan:

Kaplan, over his career, appears to have become someone who is too fond of war.

Andrew J. Bacevich:

If Kaplan is a romantic, he is also a populist and a reactionary.”

Michael Ignatieff:

Mr. Kaplan is the first traveler to take us on a journey to the jagged places where these tectonic plates meet, and his argument—that our future is being shaped far away ‘at the ends of the earth’—makes his travelogue pertinent and compelling reading.”

David Rieff:

This is breathtaking. Here is a serious writer in 2005 admiring the Indian wars, which in their brutality brought about the end of an entire American civilization.”

Daniel Soar, in the London Review of Books, reveals that Vladimir Putin (along with some friends) published a book on Judo several years ago, which has more recently been translated into English as: Judo: History, Theory, Practice.

I suppose it is not surprising that a KGB officer would have trained in one or more the fighting arts. But Putin being a keen enough jūdōka actually to have written a book on the subject is definitely a surprise.

I find that his Wikipedia bio does discuss his involvement in martial arts.

One of Putin’s favorite sports is the martial art of judo. Putin began sambo (a Soviet martial art developed for the Red Army and NKVD) at the age of 14, before switching to judo, which he continues to study today. Putin won competitions in his hometown of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), including the senior championship of Leningrad. He is the President of the Yawara Dojo, the same St. Petersburg dojo he studied at as a youth. Putin co-authored a book on his favorite sport, published in Russian as Judo with Vladimir Putin and in English under the title Judo: History, Theory, Practice.

Though he is not the first world leader to practice judo, Putin is the first leader to move forward in the advanced levels. Currently, Putin is a black belt (6th dan) and is best known for his Harai Goshi, a sweeping hip throw. Vladimir Putin is Master of Sports (Soviet and Russian sport title) in Judo and Sambo. After a state visit to Japan, Putin was invited to the Kodokan Institute and showed the students and Japanese officials different judo techniques.

Putin is also an fan of mixed martial arts. He was in attendance at the BODOG Fight event in St.Petersburg.

Daniel Soar looks to Putin’s Judo to explain his technique for dealing with the United States.

The excellent thing about judo – in theory – is that you don’t have to be stronger than your opponent to beat him. The idea is that you use the momentum of his attack to keep him moving in the same direction, and then, with a little twist, you send him flying onto the mat. The bigger they are the harder they fall. This should be useful to Putin, since Russia is so heavily outgunned and outspent by the US military machine that it can’t win the arms race the old-fashioned way. Putin provides a striking metaphor to demonstrate the judo master’s technique. He calls it ‘give way in order to conquer’. Imagine you are a locked door. Your opponent wants to break you open with his shoulder. If he is ‘big and strong enough and rams through the door (that is, you) from a running start, he will achieve his aim’. But here’s the neat bit. If instead of ‘digging in your heels and resisting your opponent’s onslaught’, you unlock it at the last minute, then, ‘not meeting any resistance and unable to stop, your opponent bursts through the wide-open door, losing balance and falling.’ If you’re even more cunning, you can stop being a door and stick out a leg, causing him to trip as he sails through. ‘Minimum effort, maximum effect’, as Russia’s effortlessly effective president says.

The evident ingenuity of this technique made me wonder why Putin didn’t deploy it in the run-up to the G8 dojo. It was puzzling. On his way to Germany, Bush went on the offensive. He visited Poland and the Czech Republic to publicise his plan to install ‘exoatmospheric kill vehicles’ – little missiles designed to hit bigger missiles – on sites close to the Russian border. Putin’s counter-attack was very bold. He said that if America was going to play silly buggers with its Raytheon EKVs, then he would point his biggest ICBMs at Western European cities. ‘A new Cold War!’ the papers screamed. The leaders of the free world were righteously outraged, whereas Putin had merely closed the door. Any moment now he would flip the latch and stick out a leg.

But the analogy was troubling. When would the door open, and where was his leg? At first I wondered whether Putin was readying himself for the long game, hunkering down, raising the stakes to force the US to spend more and more money on more and more weapons until it bankrupted itself and went pop. Except, of course, that this would be playing into Bush’s hands, since American military spending is what the US economy depends on. The need for more weaponry would mean an even mightier America. So Putin wasn’t so clever after all: he’d forgotten all his old teaching and had taken up gunslinging in a fight he could only lose. Or so I thought.

On 7 June the full genius of Putin’s strategy was revealed. Earlier, Bush had said: ‘Vladimir – I call him Vladimir – you should not fear the missile defence system . . . Why don’t you co-operate with us on the missile defence?’ Ingeniously, Putin now called his bluff, and unbolted the new Iron Curtain. He quietly suggested that the US base its missile interception system on a Russian military installation in Azerbaijan, an unanswerable solution if – as the Americans claim – the EKVs really are intended to counter an Iranian nuclear threat. Bush’s people, wrong-footed, could only say that his proposal was ‘interesting’ and that the presidents would discuss it further in Kennebunkport, Maine at the beginning of July. But this is likely to be the end of the missile defence plan for Poland and the Czech Republic. Ippon!

Hat tip to Richard Fernandez at PJM.

Perhaps just a bit envious of the acclaim won by Jonathan Franzen’s recent novel The Corrections, also in last Sunday’s Times Book Review, Daniel Mendelsohn does his level best to savage Jonathan Franzen’s latest miscellaneous writings collection The Discomfort Zone.

Mendelsohn goes so far as to indict Franzen for insufficient Alzu-Karl-Braun-lichkeit.

This illumination that “The Discomfort Zone” provides about the origins of that persona helps explain, in turn, a wider failing in Franzen’s work: its lack of humanizing softness…

What can you do with someone who professes to love “Peanuts” but doesn’t understand a word of it? “The Discomfort Zone” features an odd but suggestive paean to the creator of the comic strip that, more than anything else in American popular culture for many decades, celebrated the comic side of something Franzen professes to know a lot about: discomfort — the sheer, poignant, foolish awkwardness that comes with being human. Recounting the unappealing facts of Schulz’s biography, Franzen emphasizes that the cartoonist was a difficult, embittered, resentful man — the kind of person who still seethed over perceived insults he’d received four decades before. Yet the author is quick to defend Schulz — the, um, artistically brilliant, tormented, somewhat geeky Midwestern offspring of Scandinavian parents — as a hero of Art. “To keep choosing art over the comforts of normal life … is the opposite of damaged.”

Franzen’s insistence on seeing this repugnant person as an ideal is, no doubt, what leads him to his wrongheaded interpretation of the comic strip itself. “Almost every young person experiences sorrows,” he rightly points out at the beginning of his exegesis of “Peanuts” — a sentence that gives you hope that the geeky child still hiding inside the adult Franzen is going to admit that, like everyone else, he loved “Peanuts” because he, too, identified with the perpetual awkward, perpetually failed, and yet just as perpetually optimistic Charlie Brown. But no: for Franzen, who, even as a child, “personally enjoyed winning and couldn’t see why so much fuss was made about the losers,” the real hero of “Peanuts” is not the “depressive and failure-ridden” Charlie Brown, but the grandiose beagle, Snoopy: “the protean trickster,” as Franzen calls him, “the quick-change artist who … before his virtuosity has a chance to alienate you or diminish you” can be “the eager little dog who just wants dinner.” But Snoopy’s self-proclaimed virtuosity does, in the end, alienate and diminish: he’s amusing, with his epic grudge against the Red Baron (and the Van Gogh and the spiral staircase he lost when his doghouse burned down), precisely because he represents the part of ourselves — the smugness, the avidity, the pomposity, the rank egotism — most of us know we have but try to keep decently hidden away. Franzen, like most of us, is very likely an awkward combination of Charlie and Snoopy; the difference being that whereas most of us think of ourselves as Charlie with a bit of Snoopy, Franzen clearly doesn’t mind coming off as a whole lotta Snoopy with the barest soupçon of Charlie: a person, as this lazy and perverse book demonstrates, whose very admissions of weakness, of insufficiency, smack of showboating, of grandiose self-congratulation. For my part, I’ll stick with Charlie. Who, after all, wants the company of a character so self-involved he doesn’t even realize he’s not human?

My sympathies are with Snoopy, and Franzen. I haven’t actually read the new book, but I’ve read other reviews, reviews quoting the usual sort of conformist intelligentsia condescension concerning George W. Bush, and I’d say Franzen could use a larger component of Snoopy to replace the undesirable liberal Lucy in his makeup.

Henry Alford, on the back page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review, assembled various real obituary quotations into mock obituaries for Impossible Author (male) and Difficult Writer (female). In case you didn’t believe him, he footnoted the quotations.

Example:

[Impossible] himself began writing in the 1940’s, locking himself in a stall in the men’s room in the subway. Making his base of operations the Angle bar at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, he sold drugs at times and himself at others, not always with notable success.