Let John McCain, Iraqi War Supporter, be queried about the broader implications of this short Newsweek story of this “honor killing� of a 17-year-old daughter by her Iraqi father and brothers:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/27/iraq.military1

Any dispassionate observer of the Middle East would have to admit that the attitudes of this father, these brothers is endemic across very wide swaths of the culture in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, etc.

Essay question for McCain: are we fighting to SUPPORT this or CHANGE this? And if the answer is "change", we know who murdered Rand Abdel-Qader. We don't need an hour of Law and Order to figure that out. We know it was her father and her brothers, we know their names, we know where they live, they themselves will admit what they did as a point of pride.

So, John McCain -- what are you going to do, bring her murderer to justice? Or not? Not words, but action: are you going to do something, or nothing? And what do your actions, one way or the other, mean for this ultimate question: why, exactly, ARE we in Iraq?

The "Dallas" theory makes as much sense as Ronald Reagan being responsible for ending WWIII.

Maybe "Dallas" had its role, but what Eastern Europe really wanted was to live like the people in Western Europe, who they had more direct experience of (especially in East Germany, with the common language and family ties with the west).

When Lech Walesa came to America, after he'd won some reforms but before the fall of the Communist regime in Poland, one of his major indictments of the Polish government was that they'd hired permanent replacement workers for some of the Solidarity strikers. It never occurred to Walesa that a decent, free government could do such a thing, and he was surprised to find that it was common practice in the US; in fact, Ronald Reagan busted a union (PATCO) and hired replacement workers.

Noted political scientists Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick, in their book about SportsCenter called "The Big Show," are convinced that the Lake Placid Olympics played a similar role. They talk about how the Russian athletes, after being told for a generation that a digital watch was something only a plutocrat in America could afford, were shocked by the reality. It was the distance between the propaganda and the reality that did it.

Never watched the show. However, I hesitate to give any television program credit for bringing down an empire - far too simplistic and naive to believe that an electrified plastic box is anything more than opium for the masses.

@TCD: Simplistic and naive? From the Reason Foundation? You don't say? I don't understand why the Reason Foundation seems to continually get Op-Ed space in American newspapers. Libertarianism stops making sense to anyone who has moved beyond the bong-hits and beer adolescence, which I hope is the good lot of us. But who knows anymore.

Yes, it's all about us. These other countries have no histories, no local politics, nothing. Just us.

TV and rock 'n' roll rotted people's minds over there, I'm sure, but they rot minds all over the world without bringing down governments, much less whole systems of governing. As for "American values and institutions" -- yeah, right. No values and total anarchy is closer to the reality.

After decades of the superrich getting richer and the rest of us getting poorer, what TV show will we watch to convince us to overthrow the government?

The sure giveaway that mhr's post is a complete and total fabrication? When he begins by saying, "I have friends..." Sure you do, mhr. Sure you do.

I think mhr is stuck in about 1973. I don't know any liberals who have much use for the USSR or Castro.
On a much more important topic, Kevin, you should think hard about whether one would want to bring down the Iron Curtain at all. It might make more sense to talk of 'razing' the Iron Curtain.

I think Nick Gillispie visits Romania so he can get laid.

I bet you have been too much taken with the overpraised "Charlie Wilson's War," which I saw on DVD yesterday. I didn't like it--smug, empty, slow, and boring. Phillip Seymour Hoffman was the same way he is in everything except the Capote film. The bizarre stylistic choices for America's Sweetheart's coiffure were less like what some rich Texas hick would wear and more like the 'do worn by that famous heiress Millicent Rogers who created hammered gold jewelry in Taos back in the 1950s.

I guess the messages of "Charlie Wilson's War," besides those about 1980s television culture and the Soviet Union, are these: (1) It's dreadful, just dreadful, to start a war and not know how to finish it and not do follow-up or follow-through; and (2) It certainly is dreadful to be like the Soviet Union and viciously attack, maim, destroy, and damage another country, creating hoards of sworn enemies.

I think the movie is more appealing to people who are pretty ignorant about politics and issues because they can go to it and think, ooh, I'm behind the scenes of this deviant political culture and its skullduggery, how exciting! And it's a prestige Mike Nichols production!

Maybe y'all liked the picture, but ah dint. A big ol' snore like "Wagging the Dog" and that ludicrous opera picture starring Glenn Close.

MHR is s-o-o-o right. Libruls ALWAYS love people like Mao and Stalin and Castro. Oppression and ignorance is ALWAYS beloved by libruls. How very wise MHR is.

By the way, before you "buy" anything these morons say, you might want to recall their statement in the Washington Post in Novmeber 2007:

When conservatives feel comfortable mocking the victims gunned down by Clinton-era attorney general Janet Reno's FBI in Waco, Tex., in 1993, it suggests that a complacent and increasingly authoritarian establishment feels threatened.

There was no one gunned down by "Reno's FBI" in Waco, Tex., ever. Koresh torched his own compound after Reno became attorney general. The FBI didn't shoot anybody st Waco when Reno was Attorney General. Gillespie and Welch are clowns.

Spelling error: "HORDES of sworn enemies," as in "tatar hordes."

Yup, and Ozzie and Harriet was the real reason for the Western European and Japanese post-WWII economic miracle. First by radio, then through the miracle of TV, it provided a glimpse of a better life, of what might be--a reason to continue the struggle for freedom in the face of adversity--to war-torn and ravaged peoples.

And let's not forget the later but no less important contributions from I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and American Bandstand. And of course all those Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, which helped maintain Western unity in the face of Communist aggression before TV was widely available.

mhr: Liberals have always been favorably impressed by governments who say they are "for the people." Liberals never lived in any of them.

Yeah, like a government with a leader who said: "...and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth..."

For you younger readers out there, here's a case where rock music DID inspire a revolution in a communist country.
--------------------
Václav Havel told a startled Lou Reed when he met the Velvet Underground's former frontman in 1990, "Did you know that I am president of Czechoslovakia because of you?"

The Back Story:
In 1968 a rare copy of the Velvet Underground's first record somehow found its way to Prague. It became a sensation in music circles and beyond, eventually inspiring the Czech name for their bloodless 1989 overthrow of Communist rule, "the Velvet Revolution." The Plastic People, then a newly formed troupe that borrowed heavily from Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, quickly added a half-dozen songs from The Velvet Underground & Nico to their repertoire. The group was banned not long after the Prague Spring concluded but continued to play at weddings and secret shows.

Then, in 1976, four members were arrested on charges of "disturbing the peace." The Czech dissident movement, newly roused by Havel's open letter, made the trial an international cause. Havel, who intuitively grasped the symbolism of the case, was in the courtroom every day to witness and document the judicial farce. Just as George Orwell saw picking up a gun to shoot fascists in the Spanish Civil War as "the only conceivable thing to do," Havel understood this assault on freedom as one outrage too far. It was a turning point in his life. "Everyone understood," he wrote later, "that an attack on the Czech musical underground was an attack on a most elementary and important thing, something that in fact bound everyone together: it was an attack on the very notion of living within the truth, on the real aims of life."

His essay on the trial ends with a classic description of Havel bumping into a film director who didn't understand the sudden enthusiasm for defending some derelict rock musicians.

"Perhaps I'm doing him an injustice," Havel wrote, "but at that moment, I was overwhelmed by an intense feeling that this dear man belonged to a world that I no longer wish to have anything to do with -- and Mr. Public Prosecutor Kovarik, pay attention, because here comes a vulgar word -- I mean the world of cunning shits."

The Plastic People trial spurred Havel and his friends to form Charter 77, a human rights organization built around a petition that asked, simply, that the Czechoslovak government adhere to the Final Act of the 1975 Helsinki Agreement -- specifically its covenants on civil, political, and economic rights -- to which it had recently become a signatory. Living up to Helsinki would have meant allowing free expression, "freedom from fear," freedom of religious practice, and other rights then quashed by the Communists. This narrow, legalistic tactic, which has since been emulated the world over, allowed the dissidents to claim that they were not, after all, agitating against the regime, but rather asking it to follow its own acknowledged legislation.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/28781.html

Since British television is %1000 times better and more sophisticated than American TV, they could have picked a better role mode. Thinking "Dallas" was typical of American life is like thinking a drag queen's camp imitation of Cher is exactly how she is.

Sure glad they got a realistic portrayal of life in a capitalist paradise.

I understand Don Rumsfeld was against torture until he saw the complete season 2 of "24."

Dallas glamorized capitalism to exactly the extent that The Godfather glamorized organized crime. One with a moral center does not admire Michael Corleone or J.R. Ewing, and each production viewed as a whole surely withholds approval from their arch anti-heroes (cf the sequence in which the baptism of Michael's child is juxtaposed with all the hits he has contemporaneously ordered). But if your moral core has been eaten away by totalitarianism, or consumerist anomie, you are more likely to cheer for outlaws like Corleone or J.R. (or 50 Cent), from the vantage point of your own impotence and alienation.

Bush acts like JR Ewing.

I think someone is stealing my ideas, Mr. Drum...

Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. The metaphor of Dallas is best exemplified by this:

The Democratic Party and liberals as a whole are personified by JR’s short, cloying little adversary, named Cliff Barnes. Cliff is unimaginative, scheming and is, in layman’s terms, a “player hater.� He ruins himself by trying to play in JR’s world. He is not ready for prime time, to put it into the parlance of the day. The ladies laugh at his attempts to put the pipe into the ground and remove oil--he cannot compete with the wily venture capitalist that is JR Ewing.

Suck eggs, liberals...

Great? Well maybe "Dallas" helped bring down the USSR, but maybe it helped bring down civilization as a whole. Just google for "peak oil" and check out the scoop. Well all be sucking eggs soon enough, Norm, and your kind is heavily to blame.

Libertarianism stops making sense to anyone who has moved beyond the bong-hits and beer adolescence, which I hope is the good lot of us.

Yeah, Reason mag is really staffed by pussies. I mean, how can they whine about executive power and illegal wiretaps when we're under attack by Islamic radicals? Don't they realize there's a war on? And they'd happily cripple our domestic law enforcement by taking away vital tools such as assault rifles and civil asset forfeiture. Really, it just boggles the mind how anyone can care about that stuff. I bet they're against torture too.

Thank God our president isn't concerned with trivialities like individual liberty and government restraint. Imagine what a mess this country would be if those selfish potheads at the ACLU got their way.

Norman poops his pants when someone from the Boston area visits his blog. Why, Norman? We don't dislike you, we just want to play on your beautiful lawn!

Message to Washington Monthly Moderation Unit:

The person who posted at 6:14PM on this blog has brought hate speech to my blog. Comments deleted from my blog, from this person, whose Internet Protocol Address will likely trace to the Boston, Massachucetts area, include using hateful terms like "fag," "homo" and various other terms that no reasonable person wants to have to deal with.

I may be a lot of things, but I'm not a bigot or a hateful man. It's true--I mock the lot of you and laugh heartily when you talk about public policy and business, but I don't tolerate that kind of hate.

Nor do I play with third-rate talent like our obsessive friend here, who is banned from my blog.

Kindly observe that something "unhinged" about this person smells to high heaven...

mhr, you moronic, halfwitted, retard - we do have all those crises - and they were created by republican stupidity passed off as policies.

"but I'm not a bigot or a hateful man."

If you're a "conservative" that's the ONLY thing you can be. Everything you people spew is filtered through a sewer pipe of bigotry and hate. Otherwise you couldn't possibly form the synapse patterns that create the tripe you try to pass off.

Develop free wifi infrastructure and flood the areas you want to influence with $150 laptops that can be powered by a crank.

Actually, Norman, #1 said none of those things.

...that can be powered by a crank...

Stop making this so easy !

TV. The end of intelligent western civilization.

Books, discussion, reading, and thinking stopped. TV. The end of intelligent western civilization.

Haven't owned one or wanted one my entire adult life. It's amazing what you can get done without this life sucking device.

"Haven't owned one or wanted one my entire adult life."

Than that would pretty much disqualify you in any serious discussion of the pro's and con's of owning one. Or do you just want to pontificate about things you know nothing about?

I grew up in Romania during Ceausescu's regime, and yes, I remember Dallas. Yes, it was a huge hit. The official line was that it shows how inhuman and greedy and heartless capitalism is, and maybe some people believed that. However, the vast majority of people were seeing in Dallas the image of what could be to live in the West; of course, at the same time, contrasting it with their lives. I'm not sure how much this show triggered the overthrow of Ceausescu, or made people dissatisfied with their conditions (you did not need a visual prop to know that not finding food is not a good thing), but it's certain that it did contribute some. At the same time, it was not the only source of "factual" information about the easy living in the West.

Oh, and to address the comment about the sign-in notebook in every house -- I'm not sure where that came from, but I've never heard or seen anything remotely like that.

Haven't owned one or wanted one my entire adult life.

I'm sorry, but the time of flouting your moral and intellectual superiority because you "don't even *own* a TV" is long past. These days it's all about how you don't have a cell phone.

And, plus, really, not having a TV doesn't make you a better person. It actually makes you unaware of what other people experience in their lives. You think we'd care about your opinion about how music affected the lives of people if you told us that you never listened to music or had a desire to?

I meant "flaunting your moral and intellectual superiority." Cripes, I can't believe I wrote "flouting" there. Even when composing the sentence, I was thinking to myself, "some idiot would use 'flouting', but I won't."

There may be some truth to the Velevet Underground story. I recall an ex-USSR official claimed that The Beatles opened the door to Western cullture among the Soviet youth. The kids then wanted records, blue jeans, electric guitars, etc. The more the govt. tried to prevent it, the more intense the underground became. 20yrs later some of those teens would've been in their 40s ... during the Reagan yrs.

Who was watching Dallas when Miami Vice was on?
BTW, Colin Farrel is no Don Johnson.

I see my untalented stalker is out in force. I am well on my way to the big time and you are a low-rent fool who can't get a coherent thought together.

As for the Velvet Underground having ANYTHING to do with anything, please. They are a noisy combo and nothing more. I have examined their "music" and found them to be ridiculous and untalented. They drone where melody would suffice, and they howl where there should be quiet patter between the instruments. Would it have killed them to tune up first? Would it have killed them to find a drummer who could hold time? When I played music, we had an excellent drummer who could do all manner of things, just like Buddy Rich. If Buddy Rich were alive today, you people wouldn't know what to do with yourselves. THERE was a man who could keep time.

I know what music is, and I've often said--if you have a fine audio system and a turntable, you put Houses of the Holy on and you turn it up so loud you can feel the hair in your ears trill and vibrate. When the panic sets in, you'll know what music is supposed to be. And it is supposed to be men, playing as loud as can be, a sound unlike anything a beast could make, rattling your windows and scaring your neighbors into their car at 3AM...

My "Dallas" recollections:

Backpacking in Spain in 1983, wandering through Algeciras, the main smuggling port between Spain and Morocco. Walked into a waterfront dive full of sinister types: one-eyed, scarred, tattooed, knives on their belt, giving my friend and I evil looks- looked like the bar from "Airplane". We wondered if we were going to get out alive. Somebody notices the time, and they all start shouting at the bartender to turn on the TV.

Football game, or the lottery?- a chance to slip out unnoticed, anyway- nope, it's JR and Bobby.

Same thing in Tetouan, Morocco. Sitting on cushions around brass tables, in a coffee bar smoking hookahs, men and women separated by a curtain- very orientalist- but everything stops for "Dallas".

When I was living in Beijing in 1986 I was told that the first American show allowed on Chinese TV was "My Favorite Martian"- everybody loved Uncle Marty. Wonder how that affected the development of "socialism with Chinese characteristics", aka capitalism?

As Sen. Hillary Clinton has ‘managed’ to take the Pennsylvania state, the Democratic race for nomination is very much alive – and most likely to be decided by superdelegates. Indiana ,Idaho and west Virginia are still to come.

If you’re tired of waiting around for those super delegates to make a decision already, go to LobbyDelegates.com and push them to support Clinton or Obama

If you haven't done so yet, please write a message to each of your state's superdelegates at http://www.lobbydelegates.com

It takes a moment, but what's a few minutes now worth to get Obama in office?!

Sending a note to current Obama supporters lets them know it's appreciated, sending a note to current Clinton supporters can hopefully sway them to change their vote to Obama, and sending a note to the uncommitted folks will hopefully sway them to vote for Obama. It's that easy...

Clinton Supporters:

It takes a moment, but what's a few minutes now worth to get Clinton in office?!

Sending a note to current Clinton supporters lets them know it's appreciated, sending a note to current Obama supporters can hopefully sway them to change their vote to Clinton, and sending a note to the uncommitted folks will hopefully sway them to vote for Clinton. It's that easy...

REALLY easy to identify the superdelegates and reach out to them ! It includes a list of names, addresses, and affiliations of superdelegates from each state including your state

What drivel! The Soviet Union was collapsing, something that the CIA missed because neocons were putting out information that made them look much stronger than they were in order to support a stronger military and missile defense. (I would provide a link but I do know Wolfowitz was a major player - surprise!) They were going to collapse anyway, although Reagan's military build up may have hastened it. The biggest factor was that Gorbachev was actually a realist, not an ideolgue. Other leaders had pretended that things were just fine and refused to change, like our commander-in-chief does now.
As for the impact of Dallas, I think it did have an effect, along with Reagan's promotion of the Ayn Rand "greed is good" worldview. The impact, however, was on our culture and it was not positive. This, along with the deregulation promoted by Reagan and Phil Gramm (John McCain's trusted economic advisor)is the main reason we have suffered so many greed-fueled crises - S&L, LTCM hedge fund, dot-com, and now the mortgage meltdown.
Americans who should be economically secure are carrying record amounts of debt to live up to the lavish lifestyles promoted by shows like Dallas. Yes, I know many are just trying to get by, but I am astounded by the number of seemingly affluent people I know who are in debt over their heads. Living above your means was considered disgraceful when I was growing up and was therefore much rarer.
So I would argue that if Dallas and what it represents is responsible for the collapse of any system, it may well turn out to be our own.

Had an exchange student from eastern europe a while back. They insisted on taking a greyhound back to NYC via South Fork.

I think we should have had a TV show about unshaven old men drooling on your shoulder on the bus just to prepare these kids better for their visits.

norman rogers: "As for the Velvet Underground having ANYTHING to do with anything, please"

Václav Havel told a startled Lou Reed when he met the Velvet Underground's former frontman in 1990, "Did you know that I am president of Czechoslovakia because of you?"

if anybody doubts my velvet underground story, check out this google search. thanks.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=The+Plastic+People+Havel+the+velvet+revolution+underground

Yes--Lou Reed was "startled" because he was stoned out of his gourd and couldn't believe anyone liked the second Velvet Underground album.

Ha! These jokes just write themselves. Thank God I have a blog where I can put them.

there certainly were people who liked the second velvets album,[myself included] but that wasn't the most important one, and it wasn't the one that influenced the plastic people so heavily as anyone not interested in cheap shots would know if they read the original articles.

Oh, blow it out your ass, Grandpa. They sucked!

ah, now you're just being silly.
when you can show me how "houses of the holy" helped bring down a government, then we'll talk.