Why he’s great:

In due course we will be told that what Hamas has been insisting on for years — the utter destruction of Israel — is not really a serious goal. Hamas should not be taken literally, and anyway it will be forced to moderate both its platform and its policies by the reality of governing. When, for instance, it repeats the words of its charter — “The solution of the problem [Israel] will only take place by holy war” — we will be assured that it is just throwing red meat to what in America is called “the base.” As for its truculent anti-Semitism — not to be confused in this case with anti-Zionism — it, too, will be dismissed as without consequence. Hamas will have to deal with reality — and Israel, in the region, is the mightiest reality of them all. Yasser Arafat came to understand that.

But Arafat’s Fatah movement was secular and nationalistic. In this sense it was modern — another secular nationalistic movement, much like Zionism. Hamas, on the other hand, can be traced back to the Muslim Brotherhood and its 1928 declaration: “The Koran Is Our Constitution.” It is not modern; it is medieval. It gleefully sends people off to their death as suicide bombers, spackling the walls of Tel Aviv restaurants with the flesh of the innocent while assuring the bombers a place in paradise. This is loathsome. This is terrifying. That is the whole idea.

The mistake of the Bush administration is to think, based on not much thinking to begin with, that people are people — pretty much the same the world over. This is why the president extols democracy. It must be what everyone wants because it is what everyone here wants. To denigrate this kind of talk suggests racism — You mean we are not all the same? — or a musty neocolonialism. But the hard truth is that culture and religion matter, and we should not expect moderation just because that’s how we would react. Toto knows the truth. The Middle East is not Kansas.

So hot.

Timothy Noah sums up the CBS 60 Minutes imbroglio:

At issue, you may recall, was whether some “cover your ass” memos purportedly typed for the file by George W. Bush’s superior, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian—files expressing dissatisfaction with Dubya’s special treatment in the Guard—were genuine. Immediately after the 60 Minutes story aired, multiple bloggers produced evidence “showing” that the documents couldn’t have been genuine, for technical reasons. This was accepted as gospel truth by Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post and other mainstream reporters. In the end, however, the evidence was found to be specious. We still don’t know whether the documents were genuine.

Crash is “like Triumph of the Will for Unitarians.”

Oscar thoughts tomorrow. But this first: Brokeback will a bunch of Oscars, obviously. It may go on to do Million-Dollar Baby or American Beauty numbers afterwards.

But this will be the lowest-rated Oscar telecast in 10, maybe 15, years.

Blog Crush, on the Enquirer story about Kirsten Dunst being mistaken for a stripper:

Let’s be clear, this story never ever ever happened. No one ever confused this anemic sabertooth zombie for a stripper at one of the biggest strip clubs in LA. Chernobyl, maybe, not LA. Maybe if you did a bunch of X in the desert and didn’t sleep for a week, you might think she was a dragon, but sure as hell not a stripper. This is the kind of thing publicists make up and plant in the tabloids, because, in the end, it’s really kind of a compliment. Kind of like how being burned in effigy is a compliment. It may seem insulting in first, but it’s still nice that people were thinking about you.

A nice fellow by the name of Charles Merrill is sending around a press release touting his gay rights civil disobedience action. Here’s the text of the email:

HENDERSONVILLE, N.C., Jan. 30, 2006 — Charles Merrill, a 71-year-old artist, and his partner Kevin Boyle, have announced they will not pay Federal or North Carolina Income Tax on over two million dollars worth of stock sales and income for 2004, because of unfair discrimination in the Federal and State Income Tax Codes.

Merrill said, “I have no intention of paying Federal and State Income taxes because my same sex partner and I cannot be legally married and receive the same tax benefits as other married couples.

“By not paying taxes, this is a deliberate act of civil disobedience towards a President that wants to make an amendment to the Constitution to only allow marriage between a man and woman, rather than two people who love each other, and that discriminate against us as full citizens of the United States.”

Charles Merrill and Kevin Boyle are founders of a group called Citizens Against Discrimination. In 1996 the organized and protested an anti-gay resolution in Rutherford County, NC, which caught the attention of national media.

I’ve never been much of a protestor, so I really don’t know from civil disobedience. But from my Quaker social studies classes, I had kind of gotten the impression that when you’re protesting by civil disobedience, you’re supposed to do something which costs you something; not something which makes you richer. And failing to pay taxes on $2 million of stock sales has got to add up to an extra–oh, I don’t know, let’s say $400,000, maybe more?–for Mssrs. Merrill and Boyle.

Maybe Ken Lay and Martha Stewart were just misunderstood protestors, too.

Latest Bullpen Report—the scatalogically inclined quarterly parody of a financial business newsletter—has been issued. I especially recommend the new year predictions article. here

The amusing, disarming, and multitalented Stewart Copeland, drummer for The Police, the English band also known as the only time Sting didn’t suck. WashPo WashPO He’s doing publicity for his Police documentary, Everyone Stares.

Besides the Hamas victory, the other two major stories of the week are NBC’s cancelling The West Wing and ABC’s killing Emily’s Reasons Why Not after just one episode. What gives? Only Lisa de Moraes can explain. First, as for The West Wing, it seems the producers thought the transition from one presidency to the next provided a “really wonderful way to end the series.” And apparently we are in for a surprise, after producers had “quite a brawl” over who should win the next election. Do we really think they would allow a Republican to win?

With regard to Emily’s Reasons Why Not, ABC’s Steve McPherson explained the show didn’t get to “where it needed to be.” (Has he even seen Boogie Nights?) Even better is de Moraes’s vicious analysis of ABC News’s anchor team of Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff:

Even on the promo clip shown to critics of various scenes of each out in the field, Woodruff looked like he’d just stepped off the cover of GQ, while Vargas looked like she’d gone out to walk her dog and found herself in Iraq.

Up on the stage, Vargas prattled on merrily about how having anchors out in the field changes the way they cover a story. “I mean, when I was in Iraq for that week, I did sometimes three reports for each broadcast, and those reports were two, three, four minutes long. We covered the story of the elections in Iraq that week far differently having an anchor on the ground than we would have having a correspondent there,” she said, oblivious to how bad that sounded.