MoDo and Sarah, Femina lupa femines

Like sharks in a feeding frenzy, they're at Sarah Palin again. But that red you see in the water is Maureen Dowd's hair.

Palin resigned the governorship of Alaska, and everyone is aghast, right and left.

Maureen has yet another column devoted to the woman she loves to hate, the second in as many weeks.

After this one, dated July 4: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/opinion/05dowd.html?_r=1

"Sarah Palin showed on Friday that in one respect at least, she is qualified to be president.

"Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy."

She gives us this one, dated July 7: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/opinion/08dowd.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

"Sarah Palin's secret diary."

Less hysterical, but in their own way equally as vicious, were Sally Quinn's two consequtive columns questioning Palin's qualifications as a mother.

The logic on the left side of the fence seems to be: we savage your children, joke about your 14-year-old daughter being raped (Oh, Letterman meant the 18-year-old? Well that's quite all right then), publish unspeakable comments about your Down's Syndrome baby - and then call you a bad mother for exposing your kids to all this.

Yeah, sounds about right to me.

Palin's family has a half-million dollars in legal fees to pay down from ethics complaints pretty obviously frivoulous - except that there's nothing frivolous about corrupting the justice system to destroy political opponents.

The state of Alaska is on the hook for a few million investigating same.

Palin's resignation puts into office the Lt. Governor who is philosophically compatible, and will have the advantage of incumbancy when the next election rolls around.

Is there a problem with this? I think it's fraking brilliant from the viewpoint of Alaska politics! The attack dog machine doesn't know this guy and will have to switch directions in mid-leap.

Ohhh I bet they're pissed.

The motive for attacks on Sarah from elite women, some of them on the right, are obvious enough and have been commented on by more than one pundit.

Sarah has it all: a business of her own, kids, a life outside politics, and a loving and supportive husband who's such a mensch Bill Clinton has a man crush on him.

In short, Sarah would be the posterchild for feminist utopia if it weren't for the facts that she's a believer, she didn't abort her Down's baby, and she doesn't have the required opinions.

And most unforgivably, that mensch she married quite obviously had nothing to do with her success in politics.

Sarah is despised by powerful leftie women like MoDo and Sally who, though intelligent and talented enough, didn't exactly not sleep their way to the top. Her success is a reproach to them which they will never forgive.

I urge you to go over Maureen and Sally's articles, and see if you can find anything substantive. Sally's approach is sweet-reason-and-I'm-really-doing-it-out-of-concern-for-your-kids.

Maureen is just her usual whinny unpleasant self, "I can't get married and all my boyfriends dump me because I'm successful and intelligent."

No Maureen, you boyfriends dumped you because you're an unpleasant, self-obsessed person. They wanted to prong you because you're a looker, but now that you're on the cusp of losing that advantage, all that's left is the unpleasant, albeit snarkily witty self-obsession.

And BTW, Catherine Zeta-Jones is a better looker, intelligent, funny, and by all evidence a great mother - an accomplishment invariably beyond that of the self-obsessed. You think Michael Douglas dumped you because he was turned off by highly accomplished women? I'm not buying it.

And by the way, though you've got a way of turning a phrase, you actually don't seem all that bright, nor can you fashion a coherent argument. (Vis-a-vis your description of Sarah's speech as "rambling and incoherent.")

"She refuses to succumb to the “politics of personal destruction.” It’s no fun unless she’s the one aiming those poison darts, as she did when she accused Barack Obama of associating 'with terrorists who targeted their own country.'"

Hint Mo: the reason she "she accused Barack Obama of associating 'with terrorists who targeted their own country.'" is that he did. That is not the “politics of personal destruction” it's an established fact.

Of course, on the Left bringing up established facts is considered a foul.

If I ever ran for public office (not possible, but let's speculate) I'd have to face questions about the fact that I too have associated with and had friends among, real criminals, sexual deviants, and people at least marginally associated with the Ayers-Dohrn wing of the Weathermen.

What can I say? I've had interesting friends, not all of them the kind you'd bring home to meet mother. The legitimate question is, "Have you ever worked at common purposes with them?"

And that was a close call...

What I haven't seen comment on is what a close call the Palin famiy has had.

They almost had that swine Levi Johnson for a son-in-law.

Folks, being a single mother sucks, and I have that from a lot of single mothers I know who are doing a truly heroic job.

But it's better to have a bastard in the family, than a bastard like that in the family.

Did anyone else notice that Levi posing in his shirtless hunkiness for magazines, his possible book deal, and whatever else he may reap from his closeness to the Palin family is only made possible from a devil's bargain to savage that family for the amusement of his new masters on the celebrity Left?

Enjoy your 15 minutes Levi. You're still a wuss who knocked up a nice girl and bailed on her and the kid.

Well! I don't know about y'all, but I feel better. I didn't call this blog Rants and Raves for nothing.

Note: Any Latin scholars out there? Did I get the inversion of the classic quote right?

Anybody notice this?

This is the Doonesbury strip from July 1.

Mother Boopsie says, "See how many female protestors there are? That'd be impossible in most Arab societies. Images like that are incredibly empowering to gals all over the Middle East."

Daughter remarks, "Arab girls need empowering."

First of all, let me say that I agree whole heartedly.

It almost makes me regret what I'm about to do to Gary Trudeau.

I've been following Doonesbury on and off since near the beginning. More off than on these days I'm afraid. Since Gary Trudeau became more a social commentator than a cartoonist he's been preachy, snide, and to put it baldly - either a liar or woefully ignorant of history.

He recently identified waterboarding as the same torture practices used by the Spanish Inquisition and the Japanese in WWII - a lie. Whether you excuse the practice of waterboarding by American interrogators or not, the fact is the torture techniques used by the Inquisition and the Japanese are similar only insofar as they use water.

But the worst sin of all is - he's not funny anymore. At least not as much or as often as he used to be.

As an Okie, I still treasure his hilarious take on the Oklahoma county commissioners scandal, lo these many years ago.

"Say, you're Emma Doonesbury's boy ain't you? Well, we just want you to know your Uncle Henry is a good 'ol boy who always took care of his people."

"Thanks, I appreciate that," Uncle Henry replies.

"Say Henry, do you think you could do my driveway afore you goes to jail?"

So it's with a certain "gotcha" feeling that I have to point out to Mr. Trudeau, IRANIANS ARE NOT ARABS YOU TWIT.

And furthermore, I am gobsmacked that anyone who has been so loud about his opinions on the war on terror (silly term though it is) and the Iraq strategy thereof, wouldn't know that.

Tea Party, July 4

I went to the nearest Tea Party I could find on the Fourth, which happened to be Jamestown, North Dakota, pop. 15,527, about 30 miles west of me.
Oddly, I didn't find any mention of one in Fargo - though there was a Hot Air Tour there on June 23. As far as I know, I was the only media person at that one. I did get there about a half-hour after it started, so some might have come and gone by then.

See: http://hotairtour.org/

There were at my count about 77 people at the Tea Party, including the kids. One of the organizers told me there was more interest than that, but a lot of people were out of town on the Fourth.

There was a fair amount of cars and bikes passing by honking their horns and waving.

As the march started shaping up I got a call from a friend in Oklahoma City. He said he was at the OKC Tea Party in front of the state capitol building, with about a thousand other people.

Folks, something is happening in this country. Jamestown impresses me even more than the much larger demonstration in OKC. When ordinary people start gathering to demonstrate in significant numbers in small communities (as opposed to marginalized fringoids gathering in major urban areas) it means something.

Now let's see what kind of media coverage the Tea Parties around the country get. When the MSM is made uncomfortable the sequence goes:
1) militantly ignore
2) ridicule
3) slander

They went from 1 to 3 pretty quickly on this phenomenon, which itself ought to tell us something.

Now here is something interesting about the Tea Party movement. Google "Tea Party" on the Internet, and you'll find a number of different sites, with different URLs. The various sites have state-by-state lists of planned Tea Parties - which to not coincide completely.

This suggests to me a movement so decentralized it has not yet developed a coordinating center, much less a national leadership. The hackneyed and much-abused term "grass roots" springs to mind.

I've sat in on meetings in Washington where a "grass roots" conservative revival was being organized within the Beltway from the gilded ghettos of D.C. think tanks, where there was nary a hint that anyone appreciated the irony of it all.

This could be the real thing, and if it can remain based in "flyover country" and avoid being taken over by a central committee with a Beltway office, maybe...

The Defense of Ft. McHenry/The Star Spangled Banner

Note: A shorter version of this appeared as an op-ed in the July 4 weekend of the paper.

O! say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?

On the night of September 13-14, 1814, a 35-year old American lawyer and amateur poet stood on the deck of the Royal Navy ship HMS Tonnant, as it took part in the bombardment of Ft. McHenry in Baltimore harbor. Francis Scott Key was moved to write the poem, which set to music became the national anthem of the nation founded on July 4th, 38 years earlier.

In 1812, the United States declared war against Great Britain which, still smarting under the humiliation of losing half its North American empire, had been blockading U.S. trade with its enemy France, impressing American seamen into the Royal Navy, and supporting Indians on the Northwest frontier attacking American settlements.

The British felt keenly that America had betrayed their common kinship by aiding Napoleon, the greatest threat to England in centuries.

“Now that the tyrant Bonaparte has been consigned to infamy, there is no public feeling in this country stronger than indignation against the Americans,” declared the London Times, demanding Britain, “not only chastise the savages into present peace, but make a lasting impression on their fears.”

Key was on board the Tonnant to negotiate the release of a prisoner, Dr. William Beanes of Upper Marlboro, Maryland.

Beanes, a part-time sheriff, was taken prisoner after arresting some rowdy British stragglers, who according to some accounts were caught robbing a chicken coop.

After receiving testimonials the British prisoners were well-treated, Major General Robert Ross and Admiral Alexander Cochrane agreed to release Beanes. But because the delegation had seen the strength of the naval forces ready to besiege Baltimore from the sea, they were detained through the night, though treated as guests.

The naval bombardment began in coordination with a land attack on the city by the British Army, flushed with success after invading and burning Washington almost unopposed. The Royal Navy had to attack at night when the tide was full, and sail out of the harbor shortly after dawn, or be left stranded and vulnerable in the shallows at low tide.

Key and the others could do nothing but watch the bombardment by naval guns and Congreve rockets.

And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

In the morning as the smoke cleared, and one has to have some experience with black powder firearms to appreciate how much smoke they generate, Key could see an American flag waving from the battlements of the fort.

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Key wrote the poem on the back of a letter. It was later set to the music of a popular English drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven.” Why that particular tune is anyone's guess. It is very difficult to sing, as it goes higher and lower than most people's vocal range. It actually works better as a poem in the later verses, which are so little known to Americans that author Isaac Asimov once wrote a humorous short story about catching a German spy by getting him to reveal that he actually knew the third verse!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.


Key died in 1843 after a long and distinguished career in the law. Ironically, his grandson was interned in Ft. McHenry during the Civil War for pro-Southern sympathies.

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson ordered "The Star-Spangled Banner" be played at official occasions, but it was not actually declared the national anthem until a law was signed by President Herbert Hoover in 1931.

It beat out “America the Beautiful” for the honor, which still has its advocates among the squeamish who feel “The Star Spangled Banner” is embarrassingly warlike.

O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

SEX!

Boy that got your attention didn't it?

It seems to have everyone's attention these days. At the latest count there are two political sex scandals in the news, one writer humiliating her soon-to-be-ex husband in print, and 24/7 coverage of the death of an accused pedophile pop megastar.

To wit:

- Senator John Ensign (R-NV) revealed he had an affair with a staffer - and was by the way cuckolding another staffer.

He came clean after they pulled what looks suspiciously like a Badger Game on him.

Anyone else remember that idiom? Its' an old con: woman seduces man, her husband walks in...

No less a politician than Alexander Hamilton fell for that one.

Ensign's wife issued a statement, "Since we found out last year we have worked through the situation and we have come to a reconciliation."

Since "we" found out? Was Ensign sleepwalking during this affair? Perhaps he had amnesia?

Of course liberals are ecstatic about this one. Oh the hypocrisy! Ensign is a born-again Christian and got awful holy about Clinton's adulteries a while back.

Leftist politicians are by definition not hypocrits about sex and extramarital affairs. It's only hypocrisy if you believe what you're doing is wrong.

The likes of Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy are not hypocrits, merely opportunistic liars. Their only regret is getting caught.

The hypocrits are the feminist leadership who make excuses for them when they treat women as disposable conveniences to be used and discarded, sometimes in shallow bodies of water.

Ensign showed a measure of backbone by refusing to be blackmailed.* Like the Duke of Wellington when a would-be blackmailer threatened to publish some damaging correspondence.

"Publish and be damned!" Wellington replied.

Of course, by that time the Iron Duke was in the House of Lords and didn't have to stand for no steenking election.

The Ensigns have three kids.

Note: remember that I foretold you here: http://rantsand.blogspot.com/2008/10/perfect-storm-of-left.html

Starting I think a year after Obama takes office, if there is a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, it's going to get very bad.

If the Republicans succeed in keeping a one or two-vote filibuster number, how much do you want to bet the news media can find a scandal or two to knock at least one Republican politico out of congress?

Told you.

- South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford (A Republican with a libertarian bent) fessed up he's been having an affair for, evidently a while now. His wife kicked him out of the house a while back, and more importantly didn't stand up with him in public while he made his obligatory public abasement. (Good for her!)

The thing that makes this scandal actually, you know... interesting, is the sheer airheadedness of the way Sanford sent emails which wound up in the hands of a local paper for months before the scandal broke, and left the state without doing his constitutional duty to turn the office over to the Lieutenant Governor during his absence.

By now EVERYONE knows emails should be considered about as private as a postcard. His ineptness in covering a flight to Argentina**, where he spent five days crying in homage to Evita, suggests that on some level Sanford wanted to be caught.

Governor Sanford's public confession was a weird mixture of painful and kind of sweet to watch.

It's always painfully embarrassing to watch a man fall apart in public. What was kind of sweet was, as he was maundering on about his Argentine inamorata, it became plain the guy's in love with her.

This isn't a Bill Clinton/Ted Kennedy-style conquest f**k, Sanford plainly adores this woman. Can you doubt this after reading the emails?

Lust can make you do extremely stupid things, but it takes true love to really motivate you to screw your life up.

He could have pulled a Sarkozy, divorced his wife, and married the exotic hottie. Liberals are always going on about how the Europeans are so much more sophisticated about sexual matters than we grim American puritans, they'd scarsely be in a position to kvetch* - but he's got four young boys.

If you think they're not going to hurt for a long time over this, maybe forever, you're fooling yourself. That goes for you too Sandra.

- Tsing Loh, sweet chariot...

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Well, as Paul Harvey used to say, "After all guys, it is their turn."

Sandra Tsing Loh, writer and performance artist (with a B.A. in physics, I'm impressed) has a piece in The Atlantic here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200907/divorce

that has a fair number of conservatives in a twitter. (Oh wait, that means something different now. And BTW, Sandra makes puns on her own name as well. She once had a radio show called, "The Loh Life," which I thought was pretty clever.)

"Let's Call the Whole Thing Off"

The author is ending her marriage. Isn’t it time you did the same?

Sadly, and to my horror, I am divorcing. This was a 20-year partnership. My husband is a good man, though he did travel 20 weeks a year for work. I am a 47-year-old woman whose commitment to monogamy, at the very end, came unglued. This turn of events was a surprise. I don’t generally even enjoy men; I had an entirely manageable life and planned to go to my grave taking with me, as I do most nights to my bed, a glass of merlot and a good book. Cataclysmically changed, I disclosed everything. We cried, we rent our hair, we bewailed the fate of our children. And yet at the end of the day—literally during a five o’clock counseling appointment, as the golden late-afternoon sunlight spilled over the wall of Balinese masks—when given the final choice by our longtime family therapist, who stands in as our shaman, mother, or priest, I realized … no. Heart-shattering as this moment was—a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history—I would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my husband, which is what it would take in modern-therapy terms to knit our family’s domestic construct back together. In women’s-magazine parlance, I did not have the strength to “work on” falling in love again in my marriage. And as Laura Kipnis railed in Against Love, and as everyone knows, Good relationships take work.

The rest is rather rambling and disjointed. In the middle it reveals that she finds some of her friends are thinking of doing the same, claims her two daughters are just fine, and ends with a rousing call to... what? Get rid of marriage?

Not quite, in spite of the title and subtitle. She does point out that marriages over time tend to get almost intolerably dull.

One is tempted to congratulate her on the triumphant discovery of the obvious.

She says the company of a good man who is a great father was ultimately never going to be as heart-poundingly exciting as trysts with her lover.

Ditto.

Although, there is curiously little about her lover in the piece. He, like her husband and even children, appear briefly onstage as curiously two-dimensional characters. The only people in the piece who appear fully fleshed-out are her female friends, who seem to stand in as extensions of herself and her need to gas on endlessly about her favorite subject, herself.

And though her encomiums to her husband abound in the article and the videolog she's keeping about the divorce process, one has to wonder what he did to her to piss her off so much that she should humiliate him in public?

Oh, she never meant to do that when she implied, or actively stated that she found him a bore in bed and cuckolded him with someone so much more exciting?

And no doubt her children will never get it back from their schoolmates because little kids don't read The Atlantic, and their parents would never talk about that kind of thing in front of them.

But do read the article, she does in fact have some interesting things to say. Also a great many misleading ones, such as the prevalence of divorce in America.

"One in two marriages ends in divorce," is true but does not mean that most couples are going to get divorced. Most people do in fact wind up in stable, long-lived marriages.

What the statistics (and observation) reveal is that the divorce average is inflated by 1) people who have one early marriage that fails, remarry and stay married the next time, and 2) a much smaller number of much-married relationship junkies who raise the average way high all by themselves.

(An ex of mine had just divorced husband number five last I heard. Which was some time ago, she may have done even more to raise the average by now.)

Loh discovered that living with the same person for a long time can become, we shall say routine, and going to bed with a good book and a glass of Merlot is what she looked forward to every day.

This, as I mentioned, is not news to the vast majority of married couples. So what is to be done?

There's good old-fashioned cheating of course. But that involves deception, which Loh evidently couldn't live with.

For Christ's sake, even Dear Abby (the original, not her daughter who took over the family business) said, if you slip; bury it, live with it, and don't burden your partner with it.

Open Marriage*** has it's advocates, though Loh admits the concept is kind of icky.

It is indeed, and I would point out that over thirty-odd years, couples I've known with open marriage agreements have had a 100 percent failure rate. Making "open marriages" far less stable than merely adulterous ones.

Listen, I understand, really I do. The desire for sex with someone new is a drive probably hard-wired into our brains by evolution, and I'll deal with that in a subsequent post.

Perhaps even more than the discipline of fidelity, the responsibilities of marriage with children weigh upon one. No matter how happy or content you are, from time to time you are going to be tortured by the possibilities that would lie before you if you didn't have the responsibility of caring for little persons who would be helpless without you.

I don't mean the freedom to tom-or-tabbycat around. I still dream of building that oil-drum raft and pushing off into the Pacific ocean like that 70-year-old man I read about in my youth.

Maybe I will someday - but that day is not yet. Not while there are little ones relying on Daddy to be there for them.

- And then there's Michael Jackson, the celebrity death that surprised me least.

I really can't bring myself to say much about that sad, pathetic person-of-male-gender.

Was he an active pedophile? So far all we have is a Scotch Verdict, "Not proven."

De morituris nihil nisi bonum est, but...

1) Paying a multi-million-dollar settlement is not the behavior of an innocent man. On the other hand, after paying once and realizing it really encouraged others to make the same accusation, he did fight tooth and nail the next time it happened. On the other hand, the behavior of that "welfare mother" Geraldo Rivera so plainly despises looked a lot like a greedy mother getting a kid to "take one for the team" - shades of The Godfather!

2) The saddest thing of all is that he hired women to create children for him, to be his playthings. Anyone want to take bets on how their lives turn out?

3) If he wasn't an active pedophile, his behavior with little boys was still mega-creepy.

Rest in peace Michael. Sadly, this is probably the only peace you've ever known.



* I'm going to say this again. The leftie sophisticates' claim that sophisticated Europeans see nothing wrong about this kind of thing is misleading at best. True, many cultures European and non-European like the Philippines, allow a man to keep a querida on the side, but the rule is you do not let it affect your marriage and you DO NOT humiliate your wife.

** It has however, produced one really great joke. His staff misheard when they said he was hiking the Apallachian Trail. He actually said he was tracking some Argentine tail. Thanks Gov.

*** 'Open Marriage' was the title of a book published in 1973 by anthropologists George and Nena O'Neil that quickly entered the language as a synonym for what the Brits call a "relaxed marriage."

The book was basically about marriage where the couple were comfortable enough with each other that they didn't feel the need to live in each others' laps, gave each other their space, etc. Stuff that sounds pretty orthodox now.

In precisely one short chapter they discussed the possibility of non-monogamous relationships - which were seized on by bunches of readers as permission to cat around.

They came to bitterly regret this, and Nena specifically argued for fidelity in a subsequent book. Largely because every one of the couples they knew with 'open marriages' got divorced in the interval between the first book and the second.

Previous posts on marriage, sex and relationships:

http://rantsand.blogspot.com/2008/11/bad-time-for-lovers.html

http://rantsand.blogspot.com/2006/12/have-some-free-relationship-advice.html

UPDATE: That article where Tsandra Tsings is evidently striking a chord. The morning after this was posted I opened MSN to find the article in full and a video interview of Sandra, with the obligatory defense of marriage shrink by her side.

Sandra's argument is weak, though to be fair she probably had all of 90 seconds to make it. The interviewer paraphrased it for her first: marriage is an invention of agrarian societies because intact family units were needed to work the farm.

No, marriage predated agriculture. It is a universal feature of hunter-gatherer societies as well.

Sandra made a revealing statement before the video cut off, "I decided I had better things to do with my time than over-parent my kids."

So is she divorcing her husband or her kids?

* UPDATE: Nope, it now turns out Mommy and Daddy were paying off the couple to the tune of $96,000 - so far as of the time of this update. That's not bad for pimping your old lady. The payments were explained as "gifts" to the wife, husband, and children.

I hope she was good John, that is one expensive piece of tail.

Hey kiddies, Mommy's taken an extra job to earn your college money.

Demonstrations that bring down governments

Note: A slightly different version of this appeared as the weekend editorial in the paper..

I’m watching the demonstrations in Iran with the oddest feeling I’ve seen this movie before. In fact, I think I was an extra in a street scene.

In late 1996 I was living in Sofia, Bulgaria, and working at the Institute for Foreign Languages as an English teacher. It was interesting work, my students were a delight to teach, and the country was very beautiful.

Unfortunately, the work was rewarding only in the spiritual sense. I was getting paid in the local currency, Bulgarian leva, which was inflating at the rate of about 10 percent a day. My last payday amounted to $40 for the month, which became $36 dollars by the end of the day without me spending any of it.

On top of that, government offices would not accept their own country’s currency for fees and permits.

About that time, I heard that a friend of mine, Tomas Krsmanovic, a Serbian dissident, was being leaned on by the secret police. After communicating with a dissident-support network I worked with, I decided to relocate to Belgrade, on the theory that if I lived in Tomas’ lap, the thugocracy wouldn’t want to murder him in front of a foreign witness.

What was happening in former Yugoslavia were demonstrations in the capital, Belgrade, and many other cities around the country, to protest electoral fraud attempted by the government of Slobodan Milošević after the 1996 local elections.
Before I left, I marched with the people of Sofia down the yellow brick road (I’m NOT kidding) past the government offices, in a protest that brought down the last communist/coalition government.

A British traveller told me, "You ought to head to Albania, you're on a roll!"

Within 24 hours I was in Belgrade in the middle of their demonstrations.
My friend helped me find jobs at two language schools and a room to rent (payment in Deutchmarks.) The lawyer of one school helped me get work and residence permits in order. (She was, by the way, a lovely young woman who bore, with reasonably good humor, the name Biljana Dracula.)

The demonstrations in Belgrade went on for 96 days and nights from November 1996 to February 1997, when Slobodan Milošević recognized the opposition victories.
Every night an estimated 17 percent of the city’s population (about 1,182,000 though it was hard to tell with war refugees and constant in-migration from the countryside) were on the streets marching, singing and making as much noise as they could during “pandemonium half-hour” when the official government news was broadcast. People not on the streets made noise from their apartment windows and balconies. Construction of homemade noisemakers was a thriving cottage industry.

I marched with students, working people, elegant ladies with furs, and little, old Babushkas beating on metal soup bowls. I couldn’t help it, the demonstrations were impossible to avoid. After work I just took the first demonstration heading home.
The government lined the streets with heavily armed paramilitaries recruited from Bosnian Serb refugees who had no connection with the local people - because the army announced they would not leave their barracks or fire on civilians.
The president’s wife, Mira Markovic or “the Red Queen,” made no secret she wanted the paramilitaries to fire on the demonstrators, but ultimately couldn’t find anyone willing to give the order. The order went down as far as it could go, to a vice-police chief who refused even after they had his son beaten up.

Finally, they had to cave in to the demands of the protesters, and the regime’s days were numbered. In revenge, they had the vice-chief murdered with machine guns Chicago-style, in a pizzeria not far from my work.

Milosevic had to resign from the presidency of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 2000 and ultimately died in prison while on trial in the Hague for crimes against humanity.

That’s how tyrannies fall, and that’s what we should watch for in Iran. Whether the demonstrators win this round or not, my gut tells me this is the death rattle of a dying regime.

Maybe later than sooner - this regime may indeed be willing to shoot down demonstrators by the hundreds. But if it does, it'll never be able to pretend legitimacy again, and our diplomatic president will have a really hard time explaining how his silver tongue will fix everything.

What's going on in Iran?

Note: This appeared as the weekend editorial in the Valley City Times-Record.

Lots of trouble it seems. Supporters of opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi in the recent presidential race are claiming President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole the election.

There are riots in the streets of the capitol Tehran which have spread to other cities, and reports of demonstrators being killed.

So did Ahmadinejad steal the election, as all three opposition candidates claimed? It's hard to tell. It's not like he wouldn't, the results were announced suspiciously quickly and nobody really believed that he'd go quietly if he did lose.

Obviously, given the looming danger that a country ruled by crazy people will soon be a nuclear power, a lot of folks in Washington must be hoping this is the beginning of the end of the reign of the ayatollahs.

On the other hand, every time America meddles with Iran it gets burned. Iranians are still mad about Mohammad Mosaddeq, Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 until 1953 when he was overthrown by a coup d'état sponsored by the U.S. and Britain after he nationalized foreign oil companies.

They hold grudges longer than we do, since we seem to have all but forgotten the Iranian hostage crisis when Islamic radicals held American diplomatic personnel for 444 days in 1979-80. Former hostages say they seem to remember a guy who looked a lot like Ahmadinejad among their captors.

President Obama has taken a cautious, non-committal stance, though for once France and Germany are actually making forceful protests.

So who are these people in this “far off country of which we know little”? (Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on Czechoslovakia after the German invasion.)

Iran is an ancient country, once one of the largest, most powerful empires in the world back when it was called Persia. Iranians are not Arabs and get testy if you make that mistake. Iran means “Land of the Aryans,” and today is still the 18th largest country in the world with a population of over 70 million. And of course, they have oil.

Iranians are mostly Muslims, but Shia, a sect whose adherents make up about one-third of all Muslims worldwide. And to make things interesting, there are minority communities of Baha'is, surviving Zoroastrians (the ancient indigenous religion of Persia), Yazidis, Iranian Jews, and no-fooling devil worshipers.

There are doctrinal differences between Shiites and the majority Sunni Muslims, but the division basically goes back to an ancient power struggle over the leadership of Islam.

When the Prophet Muhammad died in 632 A.D. Shiites believe Ali, Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, was his rightful successor. However, Ali didn't take power for 35 years, while three Caliphs rose and fell. He finally took power in 656 A.D. after the third Caliph was assassinated, and ruled until 661 A.D. when he was assassinated in turn. After that it gets really complicated.

What makes it so difficult for westerners to wrap their heads around politics in the Islamic world is, there's little difference between religion and politics.

Until the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran was a monarchy ruled by a dynasty all of three generations old which ruled from 1925. It replaced another dynasty which ruled Iran from 1794 to 1925. That's the pattern, from time to time a vigorous new dynasty from the outlands rides in a takes over, but must rule through the educated administrative class which provides continuity.

The tradition was broken when the revolution did away with kings because the last Shah was a cruel tyrant – that and he was trying to drag Iran kicking and screaming into the 20th century.

So are the demonstrators going to overthrow the tyrant and create a liberal democracy so we can all be buds again? Would be nice.

However we should remember that Ahmadinejad is only the president. Above him is Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, head of the council of Muslim jurists that wields the real power.

Khamenei can always throw Ahmadinejad to the mob and say, “See? All fixed now.”