Author Thankful Osama Recommended His Book
Behold the birth of Osama’s Book-Of-The-Month Club…
Twenty-four hours after Osama bin Laden told the world that the American people should read the work of a little-known Washington historian, William Blum was still adjusting.
Blum, who at 72 is accustomed to laboring in relative left-wing obscurity, checked his emotions and pronounced himself shocked and, well, pleased.
“This is almost as good as being an Oprah book,” he said yesterday between telephone calls from the world media and bites of a bagel. “I’m glad.” Overnight, his 2000 work, “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower,” had become an Osama book.
In gray slacks, plaid shirt and black slippers, Blum padded around his one-bedroom apartment on Connecticut Avenue. A portrait of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the ’50s hung on his kitchen wall. Bookshelves bowed under the weight of secret histories of the CIA. The cord on his prehistoric phone let him roam across the living room. He’d already done CNN and MSNBC. A guy from the New York Post knocked on the door to take pictures. The BBC rang, then Reuters and Pacifica Radio stations on both coasts.
From Blum’s end of the conversations, you could tell the reporters were expecting him to express some kind of discomfort, remorse, maybe even shame. Blum refused to acknowledge feelings he did not have.
“I was not turned off by such an endorsement,” he informed a New York radio station. “I’m not repulsed, and I’m not going to pretend I am.” He patiently reiterated the thesis of his foreign-policy critique — that American interventions abroad create enemies.
You know, it takes a special kind of twit to be happy about their work being used in war propaganda against their own country. There is a reason Osama wants Americans to read Blum’s book. It is because Osama knows (as too many left-wingers don’t) that the “blame America first” sort of Vietnam-era defeatism is the key to turning our country into the “paper tiger” he has long labled us as. Osama would like us all to believe that we cannot win in our war against Islamic extremism and that we are really making things worse when we attempt to spread freedom and democracy in the world, and people like Blum are just the right sort of tool for that job.
Lenin called these people “useful idiots.” Not word yet on what Osama’s pet name is for people like Blum.
(via Link Mecca)
