November 4, 2006
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Today’s Blogs
Centrifugitive Information
By Michael Weiss
Posted Friday, Nov. 3, 2006, at 3:59 PM ETIt’s partisan warfare over the New York Times cover story on documents from prewar Iraq that give detailed instructions about manufacturing nuclear weapons. Also, bloggers give kudos to Borat for splitting sides and flexing gray matter.
Centrifugitive information: Friday’s New York Times cover story reports that detailed instructions about building nuclear and chemical weapons were accidentally included among the many seized documents from Baathist Iraq uploaded to a public government Web site. What began as a government exercise in full disclosure to allow bloggers and would-be I.F. Stones to analyze Saddam’s prewar weapons files has ended in an online furor over what, exactly, those files disclose.
Lefty Steven Benan at The Carpetbagger Report was all ready for a fun-filled day of mea culpas from the conservative blogosphere. Instead, “conservatives are thrilled by the NYT scoop because, as they see it, the administration published seized Iraqi intelligence documents. If there were detailed secrets about how to make a nuclear bomb, this means … wait for it … Saddam ‘had a nuclear weapons program and was plotting to build an atomic bomb.’ Uh, no. The NYT article said the documents offered ‘detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war.’ This little tidbit isn’t buried deep into the article; it’s right up in the second paragraph. It’s kind of hard to miss.”
However, the article also states: “Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990′s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.” Does the Times refer to the U.N. inspections directly following the first Gulf War or to those in 2002?
Righty Ed Morrissey at Captain’s Quarters argues for the latter interpretation: “That appears to indicate that by invading in 2003, we followed the best intelligence of the UN inspectors to head off the development of an Iraqi nuke. This intelligence put Saddam far ahead of Iran in the nuclear pursuit, and made it much more urgent to take some definitive action against Saddam before he could build and deploy it. And bear in mind that this intelligence came from the UN, and not from the United States.”
Jim Geraghty at the National Review‘s TKS thinks “the Times editors are counting on this being spun as a ‘Boy, did Bush screw up’ meme; the problem is, to do it, they have to knock down the ‘there was no threat in Iraq’ meme, once and for all. Because obviously, Saddam could have sold this information to anybody, any other state, or any well-funded terrorist group that had publicly pledged to kill millions of Americans and had expressed interest in nuclear arms. You know, like, oh… al-Qaeda.”
Lefty Oliver Willis is appalled by the unvetted uploads: “In their rush to muddy the waters, however, it appears that the Bush administration may have given rogue states like Iran access to information on how to build a nuclear bomb they never had before.”
Which is exactly one canard conservative “The Lightning Baron” at The Eyrie wants to eliminate once and for all: “This is an INSANE leap of logic considering Iran’s nuclear weapons program pre-dates 2003 by not just years but DECADES. Never mind the AQ Khan nuclear blackmarket, never mind the help Iran received from North Korea in recent years, never mind the help Iran received from Russia for over a decade. No, you see, Iran’s nuclear program was created between the Spring of 2003 and today.”
Libertarian Glenn Reynolds, aka InstaPundit, cautions his gleeful e-mailers: “[T]his doesn’t say that Saddam would have had a bomb in 2004. But it does say that he had all the knowledge needed to have a bomb in short order. And as we know he was looking to reconstitute his program once sanctions were ended — and that sanctions were breaking down in 2003 — that’s pretty significant. However, perhaps even more significant, given that we knew most of the above already, is that the NYT apparently regards the documents that bloggers have been translating for months as reliable, which means that reports of Iraqi intelligence’s relations with Osama bin Laden, and ‘friendly’ Western press agencies, are presumably also reliable.”
Read more about the Times story.
People’s democracy in America. With rare exception, everyone’s a fan of the new Borat movie. But it isn’t just the “cringe comedy” that has them applauding. They think Sacha Baron Cohen’s anti-Semitic, reactionary brainchild magnifies aspects of American culture we’d rather keep microscopic.
James Rocchi at Cinematical is a fan: “What’s just as impressive about Borat [as the ethical questions it raises] is its scope. … Like Alexis de Tocqueville did in 1831, Borat’s come to see how the American experiment is working. And, just as in 1831, the journey suggests it’s a bit of a work-in-progress. Borat may be one of the most politically interesting comedies of the past 20 years, just in terms of the breadth and audacity of its ideas.”
J. Caleb Mozzocco of weColumbus, a Columbus, Ohio, citizen-journalism blog, also plumbs the depths of Baron Cohen’s mock peasant backwardness’ cultural significance: “It makes for a funny movie, but Cohen is obviously interested in doing a lot more than making us laugh. He uses the movie screen as a mirror reflecting back and the audience, and while it’s easy to laugh at Borat, his fictional version of Kazakhstan, and his various prejudices and superstitions, remember they’re not really real. The America and the Americans we see up there, and all of their superstitions, however, are.”
Read more about Borat.
Michael Weiss, a writer in New York, is co-founder and managing editor of Snarksmith.com.
Today’s Papers
“Just a Massage”
By Ryan Grim
Posted Saturday, Nov. 4, 2006, at 3:25 AM ETThe Washington Post leads with declining unemployment numbers and the New York Times does the same but puts them in the context of the midterm elections. The Wall Street Journal also goes prominently with the good economic news. The Los Angeles Times leads with the story of Israeli soldiers shooting and killing two Palestinian women in a group of about 200 who were attempting to help Palestinian gunmen flee an Israeli siege.
The NYT spills much ink on the attempt by Republicans to seize on just-released unemployment numbers, which show a drop in the jobless rate from 4.6 percent in September to 4.4 percent in October. But the Times itself shows how difficult that will be: By the sixth paragraph, the article has become a piece about the war in Iraq. Eventually, it gets back to the economic news but finishes by noting that President Bush’s campaign schedule has been “unusually light for a sitting president.”
The Post‘s above-the-fold, left-column space goes to a story about a U.S. attempt to keep information about CIA prisons secret. People being held in secret prisons, says the government, shouldn’t be allowed to discuss the “alternative interrogation methods” [scare quotes in original] being applied to them, even with their attorneys. Otherwise known as “torture” [TP's scare quotes], the government says the methods are needed to elicit information that suspects may have. Releasing details about the torture, says the justice department, will allow future captives to train for the specific methods used.
The L.A. Times goes below the fold, plus photo, with the story of morality coming full circle since Bill Clinton declared he didn’t inhale. Now we have Rev. Ted Haggard, just-resigned president of the 30-million-strong National Association of Evangelicals, admitting that he did buy meth from a gay prostitute but, as the NYT has it in their Quotation of the Day: “I was tempted, I bought it, but I never used it.” He also says that he only got a massage from the prostitute, a claim the prostitute denies. The LAT feels the need to note that meth is “a drug thought to heighten sexual sensation.” The Post has the story on A2 and focuses on attempts by the White House and the rest of the evangelical movement to distance themselves from Haggard. Best White House quote: “But there have been a lot of people who come to the White House.”
The NYT quotes religious-right leader and Haggard friend James Dobson lamenting that “[t]he situation has grave implications for the cause of Christ and we ask for the Lord’s guidance and blessings in the days ahead.” The cause of Christ he’s referring to is presumably the gay marriage bans to be voted on in the days ahead, but he may also be referencing the battle for control of the House. The LAT notes that two Republican districts in Colorado are further imperiled by the scandal and that evangelical turnout nationwide may be dampened.
Haggard, though, is not only liberal when it comes to drug use and prostitution. He has successfully urged evangelicals to take a strong position in favor of the environment. The LAT has a political scientist speculating that his fall could spell the end of days for green evangelism.
The LAT takes a look at the consequences of a victory by Democrats on Bush’s Iraq strategy and decides that a House or Senate takeover would put a lot of pressure on him to do something different. The Times also fronts a story on the trustees of the California teacher retirement fund voting to cut ties with investment firms that make large political contributions to the governor or other statewide officials.
NYT journalists witness a sniping and turn it into a haunting piece on the growing specter of snipers in Iraq. WSJ has a story on DreamWorks and Pixar coming out with similar stories about rats. The Post has a piece on the inability to hold corrupt contractors in Iraq accountable. The LAT reports that Bechtel is cutting and running from Iraq, despite the fact that reconstruction has essentially not yet begun. “In Iraq, Bechtel met its match,” writes the Times.
It’s funny cuz it’s true … John Kerry has apologized for his “botched” joke that called our troops in Iraq dumb, but Rosa Brooks still wants to know: Was Kerry right? Her LAT column shows that, in fact, the military is more educated than the general public. But, equally as important, children of parents who make more than $60,000 a year are pretty much nonexistent in the military. She notes researchers have found that “as the percentage of veterans serving in the executive branch and the legislature increases, the probability that the United States will initiate militarized disputes declines by nearly 90%.” Her advice: “Draft Congress!”
Ryan Grim writes for the Washington City Paper.Friday, November 03, 2006
Today’s Papers
How To Build an Atomic Bomb
By Daniel Politi
Posted Friday, Nov. 3, 2006, at 5:43 AM ETThe New York Times leads with word from weapons experts that documents posted on a Web site created by the federal government included a basic guide on how to build an atom bomb. The documents were part of a project to make public the 48,000 boxes of documents apprehended during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Washington Post leads with the final advertising push by Democrats and Republicans, who sent out more than 600 new television ads before network deadlines for the weekend. This will push the total spending on advertising past the $2 billion mark, which is $400 million more than what was spent in the 2004 presidential race.
USA Today leads with some daunting news for political junkies, as analysts warn that the use of provisional ballots could delay results for tight races by days or even weeks. The Wall Street Journal tops its worldwide newsbox with President Bush campaigning in places traditionally thought as safe Republican strongholds. The paper reports Nielsen figures revealing TV ads are up 31 percent compared with 2002. The Los Angeles Times leads with officials charging a 36-year-old auto mechanic with setting the fires in Southern California that killed five firefighters. The suspect pleaded not guilty.
The Web site was created at the behest of Republicans in Congress who said intelligence agencies never properly analyzed all the documents. The idea was to put the documents in cyberspace so people could analyze them and try to find answers about Saddam Hussein’s prewar activities. But recently, the site posted approximately a dozen documents with charts, graphs, and instructions on building an atom bomb that go beyond what is publicly available. Apparently, officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency expressed their concerns to the U.S. government last week, but it took an inquiry from the NYT to get the site closed down last night.
Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, President Bush kicked off his final six-day, 10-state, campaign swing that will take him to some of the country’s most conservative areas. Yesterday, the president visited Montana, where he tried to rally his base by warning them Democrats would block his judicial nominations, raise taxes, make the country less safe, and give up on Iraq. According to Slate‘s Election Scorecard, Montana has now joined Missouri, Tennessee, and Virginia as one of the “tossup states” that will determine who controls the Senate.
Contrary to previous midterm elections, the president’s final campaign blitz will not be very ambitious, and he will only travel to carefully chosen places where his party won big in 2004 and Republicans believe his presence could make a difference (Slate‘s John Dickerson will be taking a look at these speeches in the coming days to see “what we can learn about the messages the GOP thinks will move their people out the door on Election Day”).
Amid all the talk of negative campaigns this year, USAT goes inside with a dispatch from Vermont, where the race for the state’s only seat on the U.S. House of Representatives is quite friendly.
A few days after the WSJ reminded its readers to take ID with them on Election Day, the WP says the new identification laws in a dozen states has some Democrats worried it could adversely affect their party’s candidates and play a critical role in determining the winners.
The WSJ goes inside with a dispatch from Oregon to try to examine what happens when the minimum wage is increased, which would be one of the top priorities for Democrats if they win control of Congress. Oregon increased the minimum wage in 2002 despite concerns it would cause businesses to leave the state and increase unemployment. Four year laters, none of these fears materialized.
The NYT fronts word of a provision tucked inside a military authorization bill that orders the termination of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. Now lawmakers from both parties are saying they did not realize the provision was slipped in and want to reverse the decision.
Everyone mentions that the U.S. military announced the soldier who was kidnapped in Baghdad last week is still alive, and there are currently talks in place to try and obtain his release. A U.S. military spokesman confirmed the kidnapped soldier is 41-year-old reservist Ahmed Qusai al-Taayie, who is married to an Iraqi woman.
The LAT goes inside with news that five U.S. troops died in Iraq yesterday.
Violence continued in the Gaza Strip yesterday, where Israeli troops fought against Palestinian militants for a second day. At least 12 militants, five Palestinain civilians, and one Israeli soldier have died in the operation, which was intended to stop Palestinian rocket attacks. But so far, it has not gone as planned, as at least 17 rockets have been fired into Israel in the last two days.
The Wall Street Journal mentions in the top spot of its worldwide newsbox news that the president of the National Association of Evangelicals resigned yesterday after a male escort said the influential Christian leader paid him for sex. The escort said in interviews he had a three-year sexual relationship with the Rev. Ted Haggard, who denied the allegations.
The WP fronts an investigation into two nonprofits that paid for expensive trips for 12 members of Congress and 31 staffers. It seems they were both fronts for foreign lobby groups.
Everybody fronts or reefers the results of a new study claiming that the world could run out of seafood by 2048 if current trends continue. Fourteen researchers from several countries spent four years analyzing data and concluded that overfishing, coupled with other environmental factors, would cause a “global collapse” of all the currently fished species. Sushi lovers shouldn’t panic just yet, as the authors say the trend can be reversed.
The NYT reports a federal judge in Virginia upheld an earlier ruling ordering the paper to disclose the identities of three sources used by columnist Nicholas D. Kristof in a series of pieces about the anthrax mailings of 2001.
Daniel Politi is a writer living in Buenos Aires, Argentina.13 Steps to Successful Blogging
By Ant Onaf
Blogs can be a very marketable and very profitable tool if used correctly. Profiting from blogs is just a matter of grabbing the attention of an audience and not doing any actual salesmen selling. In this article you will learn the 13 most essential steps to successful blogging.
1) Where to start?
You should begin your blog with a free blog hosting service such as Journal Home or Blogger. Starting with a free blog hosting service allows you to begin blogging instantly without having any advance knowledge of scripts, hosting, or programming. It allows you to focus on your content and not the internal maintenance of the blog. The best benefit of starting with a free service is, in the case your blog doesn’t become successful you do not lose any money or are you left holding the bill. The great thing about a blog is that they are organized in chronological order, your latest entry is displayed first. When your blog traffic grows greatly and you are ready to upgrade to your own domain then you can simply make your last blog entry the announcement of your “move”. Simply add a last entry stating that your blog has “moved” and type the new blog URL address. Which directs visitors to your new blog site, keeping your following, without a major inconvenience to anyone. Upgrade as you need to…but only when you need to!
2) Niche
A niche is a targeted product, service, or topic. You should first decide on a product, service, or topic which interest you. Choose an area which you can enthusiastically write about on a daily basis. You can use keyword research services like Google Zeitgeist or Yahoo! Buzz Index to find popular searched topics. It does NOT matter if your topic is popular as long as there is a audience for your topic and the topic is precisely focused then your blog should be successful. Anything can be considered a niche as long as it has a target audience no matter how large or how small the audience is. A blog about your cat can be a niche or a blog about the species of the cat family can be a larger niche market, if there are people who are interested in hearing about your cat or the species of the cat family…you can even choose to build your audience for a market which an audience does not exist, but first you must build your blog.
3) Update Daily (nothing less)
This step is a must and not a suggestion. Updating your blog daily not only keeps your blog more interesting to readers, but it also gives your blog fresh content on a day to day making it more appealing to search engines. Not updating your blog on an occasional holiday or one day here and there is understandable to most, but missing days at a time or weeks is unacceptable and will most likely result in your blog being unsuccessful. To keep your blog traffic and retain your visitors interest it is a must to update your blog daily with multiple entries. You should try to update your blog everyday with at least 3 or more daily entries. The best way to accomplish this is to set aside 1-2 hours a day for tending to your blog and adding new entries. It may even be wise to schedule a set time which you dedicate to your blog each day. Give yourself work hours and treat your blog as a job, what happens if you don’t come to work for days or weeks…you lose money or worse you get fired! Same applies here…if you don’t update your blog for days or weeks you’ll lose visitors.
4) Traffic
It’s no secret. You must have traffic to profit from blogs. There are numerous ways to build traffic. Paid advertising, free advertising, viral marketing, search engine marketing, RSS/XML feeds, and word-of-mouth. You should always use your blog URL address in the signature of your email, forum discussions, message boards, or any other communication media. You should submit your blog URL address to search engines and blog directories. You should submit your RSS/XML URL feed to blog ping services like Technorati, Ping-O-Matic, and Blogdigger. You should confidently share your blog with family, friends, co-workers, associates, and business professionals when it relates. Many blogs can be considered as a collection of articles, for this purpose you should submit your blog entries (those that are valuable and lengthy articles) to content syndicators like GoArticles.com or ArticleCity.com. Once submitted your articles can be picked up and published by others. The trick is to make sure you include your Blog URL address in the “About the Author” passage. What this does is create link popularity and backlinks for your blog, when someone picks up your article from the syndication then publish the article on their website the “About the Author” passage is included with each publication and the link you included is followed, crawled, and indexed by search engines. Imagine if your article is popular enough or controversial enough to produce 10,000 publications across the web. The search engines is bound to find your site in no time with that many publications and credit you a authority on the topic, in return increasing your rank on search engines. The small effort of writing a well written article is rewarding. You should try to write at least 1 full length article every week for syndication and submit your article to at least 10 article syndicators.
5) Track Your Blog
How do you know if your blog has traffic? Just because no one is leaving comments doesn’t mean your blog isn’t growing. Many visitors do not leave comments but they are returning visitors. I know it sounds crazy but with blogs people are more interested in what “you” have to say! Many visitors do not comment their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd time. Some do not comment at all, but are active daily visitors.
Tracking your blog does not have to be overly sophisticated usually a simple free page counter like .. or Active Meter will do the trick. Install (copy/paste) the code into the html of your blog template and start tracking your visitors. Its better to use a service which gives you advanced traffic analysis, such as keyword tracking information, referral information, and search engine information. Visitors, returning visitors, and unique visitors should be standard for any page counter service you choose.
6) Listen to Your Audience
When using the proper page counter you should begin to see how others are finding your blog and if through search engines then which keywords are being used to find your blog. If constantly your blog is being found by 1 or more keywords then focus your blog around those keywords to make it even more powerful. When writing entry titles and entries use the keywords as often as possible while keeping the blog legible and interesting.
7) Multiple blogs
Use multiple blogging accounts to attract more people. This means you should have a blog with JournalHome.com, Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, Blog-City.com, tBlogs.com, etc. The more blog accounts the better. You can copy/paste from 1 blog to all others. Having different blog accounts is like having a publication in different newspapers. This enables you to attract more visitors and this also increases the chance that 1 of your blogs will be in the search engine results for your focused keywords.
8) Short & Concise
Aside from the lengthy article a week for syndication and publication your blog entries should be short & concise (if you can help it). Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule and you have no choice but to blog lengthy entries, but try to avoid this as much as possible. You do not want your blog entries to become hours of reading. Visitors like to easily find information and skim through your entries. It is good to be detailed and provide useful information, but do not include useless information or run away sentences that veer away from your topic.
9) Digital Art
Try to include non-advertising graphics, pictures, photos, and art in your blog entries. Not too much. Once a week is fine. Graphics can sometimes bring your blog to life. Of course, the content of the blog is the most important aspect and you do not want to overshadow your content with graphics, but displaying graphics can add a bit of spice to the blog. Be choosy about your graphics and make sure they fit your entry topic. You should add content with the graphic, at least a caption. Original graphics, photos, pictures, and art is recommended.
10) Keep it Personal
A blog is most successful when it is kept personal. Try to include personal experiences which relates to the topic of your blog entry. Stay away from the business style of writing. Write with a more personal style and use first-person narratives. Do not write any of your entries as sales letters, instead share product reviews and personal endeavors.
11) Interact With Your Visitors
You now have the traffic you deserve. You should begin interacting with your visitors. Create a regular theme such as: “Monday Money Tip” or “Picture of the Week” which entices your readers to look forward to each week.
Give your readers advance notice about a product, service, or topic which you are going to review and then talk about later. If the President was scheduled to give a speech then in your blog you should state that you “will discuss the speech and give your opinion after the speech airs. Comments will be appreciated”.
Try your best to find exclusive information that not many have. Do not disclose any confidential or secret information which is deemed illegal or can potentially get you into trouble, but try to get the scoop before everyone else does. Such as: If your blog was about Paris Hilton (the socialite) and you had a blog entry about “Paris Hilton Getting Married” then it would be interesting to your readers if you had a actual picture of Paris Hilton engagement ring. Give your best effort to dig and search the internet for exclusive information and you will possibly come up with something useful. Your readers will appreciate this and they show their appreciation through word-of-mouth referrals. Imagine how many readers will tell their friends, family, and others about information they only can find at your blog.
12) Make Money
Once your blog has gained some real momentum and your blog traffic is increasing then it is time to start thinking about turning your traffic into profit. You should use contextual advertising, like Google Adsense or Chitika. Contextual advertising is usually text links which use the content of your blog to publish targeted ads on your blog. The payout is usually based on a pay-per-click model, meaning for ever click an ad receives you are paid a small percentage of the profits. In addition to contextual advertising it is good to also use graphical advertising such as: BlogAds.com, Amazon.com, MammaMedia, or General Sponsored Advertising.
13) You’re a Professional
You’re a professional now! What are you still doing with that free blog hosting service? It is time to upgrade to a domain hosted solution. You need to get a web host and choose a domain name for your blog then check its availability. Select the blogging software you wish to use, such as: Squarespace.com, WordPress.org, MovableType.org, etc. When you have your new blog domain setup and ready for traffic then it is time for you to announce your move on all your previous blog accounts. Your last entry to the blog should be a “move” announcement. The title should be “Moved” and the blog entry should state something like “Old Blog has been moved to New Blog please follow and bookmark this link for future reference: http://www.YourNewBlogDomainName.com”. This way all returning visitors and new readers should not have any problem finding your new blog domain.
At the level of a professional blogger you may want to team up with 1 or more other bloggers. This will create a more interesting and more powerful blog. The old saying “two heads is better than one”, more authors mean more advertising and exposure because each author will have a vested interest in the blog. The idea of a team blog is to make it profitable and rewarding for all authors, while continuing to target the blog topic and keeping the blog interesting for visitors.
Following these blogging techniques should make your blogging experience much more rewarding. There is no guarantee that your blog will become popular or a household name, but the effort should at least put you one step closer. Making money online is not an overnight experience like many may think, but making money online is definitely a foreseeable possibility. As well, growing popularity on the web is not an overnight experience, but through time, dedication, and persistence you will be rewarded with all the royalties of blogging.
About The Author
Ant Onaf is the owner and founder of http://www.JournalHome.com He is an online internet marketer, content writer, and IT consultant. Ant Onaf has years of IT-related experience and Internet-related experience. His ingenuity, dedication, and passion for technology, internet marketing, & writing have made him a monumental icon in the World Wide Web. His blog can be visited at http://www.journalhome.com/AntOnafBorat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation
The Running of the Jew
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation”Sacha Baron Cohen gives us one of the funniest and most pointed satires in years — and also one of the most complex.
By Stephanie Zacharek
Nov. 03, 2006 | Great humor is often cruel, and by laughing, we — the audience — are complicit in that cruelty. “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” the faux documentary starring (and conceived by) English comedian Sacha Baron Cohen and directed by Larry Charles, is a pure example of the way good satire can never be clean, either for the perpetrator or for the viewer. The movie has already attracted some controversy: The Anti-Defamation League has released a statement about it, acknowledging that Cohen uses “humor to unmask the absurd and irrational side of anti-Semitism and other phobias born of ignorance and fear” before moving in for the clincher: “We are concerned, however, that one serious pitfall is that the audience may not always be sophisticated enough to get the joke, and that some may even find it reinforcing their bigotry.”
But that, I’m afraid, is the way the knish crumbles. If the public needs to be protected from humor, then there’s no way humor can do its job — particularly if that job is sometimes a dirty one. In “Borat,” Cohen plays Borat Sagdiyev, a joyously anti-Semitic, bigoted, sex-obsessed, disco-dancing, English-mangling Kazakh TV journalist who comes to America to report on the customs and mores of the American people. This is one of the funniest and most pointed satires in years, but it’s also one of the most complex, not so much because of the way it so outrageously exaggerates Borat’s anti-Semitism, but because Cohen’s methods — which depend on bamboozling ordinary citizens — are sometimes morally suspect. I’ve seen “Borat” twice, and I laughed almost as hard the second time as I did the first. But both times I left the movie feeling a little shaky, as if I’d just taken part in an amusement achieved by questionable means. Everyone who sees and enjoys “Borat” will walk away with a favorite line from it. (I’m somewhat partial to the way he approaches a pleasant Midwestern woman running a yard sale and, believing she’s a gypsy, shakes an old Barbie at her accusingly: “Who is this lady you have shrunk?”) But the true brilliance of “Borat” may lie deeply buried between the almost infinite number of quotable lines: Sometimes we can’t face up to our own capacity for cruelty — but at least we can get a gag out of it.
We first meet Borat in his small Kazakh hometown, a jumble of huts and dirt roads, where he introduces us to his sister, who is the region’s top prostitute (she puts the capper on the gag by proudly brandishing a trophy), and also to “the town mechanic and abortionist.” At one point he waves toward a bunch of kids playing in the dirt, with guns, identifying it as the town kindergarten. Borat explains his assignment: The state-run TV network is sending him to America, with his producer and cameraman Azamat (Ken Davilian), to film a documentary that will help them modernize things at home. And so Borat arrives in New York, wearing a drapey, gray off-the-rack suit that seems vaguely out of date, in an Old World kind of way, but not so weird that anyone on 42nd Street would look twice at it. His hair is teased high into a disco-Glasnost pompadour; his mustache, a furry love letter to Groucho, or maybe to Tom Selleck, sets off a row of Pepsodent-white choppers — even his teeth are in love with capitalism.
Borat is a naif in a strange land — awed by the luxury of his standard midtown hotel room, he freshens his face with water from the toilet bowl — but he doesn’t come to America unarmed: He has the ability to charm us and to skewer us, and he does both. In New York, he meets with a group of women called Veteran Feminists of America; as they earnestly and valiantly try to explain to him that women are the equals of men, he cuts them off with a smirk: “Give me a smile, baby, why angry face?” But he does learn something from these women: He has fallen deeply in love with Pamela Anderson’s “Baywatch” character, CJ, after catching a rerun on his hotel-room TV, and he asks the feminists if they know her. One of them explains, rather patiently, that CJ is just a character, but the actress who plays her is Pamela Anderson, and she lives in Los Angeles. So Borat, secretly hoping to get to L.A. to meet his true love, convinces the reluctant Azamat that they must leave New York to discover the “real” America, a land of cowboys and rodeos, of Southerners and “chocolate faces.”
At a West Virginia rodeo, Borat strikes up a friendly conversation with an older gent in a cowboy hat who agrees with him that homosexuals should be run out of town or exterminated; he attends a dinner party among genteel white Southerners, where he needs instructions on how to use toilet paper; he treks to Washington, where he meets with former Georgia congressman Bob Barr, offering him a gift of cheese made with milk from his wife’s tit.
Cohen doesn’t choose his targets indiscriminately, and some of them are certainly people we’d like to see fall: Borat meets with conservative nutcase Alan Keyes, and while the sequence is funny enough, you wish Cohen had gone further with it. But one of the nastier angles of “Borat” is that Cohen seems determined to prove how stupid Middle America is. (He is, of course, an equal-opportunity offender, in that he goes after seemingly sophisticated New Yorkers, too.) Sometimes Cohen seems to be drawing stereotypical behavior out of people, instead of simply locating it. Even so, what’s remarkable about “Borat” is that for every American who rises to the bait he so temptingly dangles, there are at least two more who go out of their way to be kind to him: A Southern etiquette coach doesn’t miss a beat when he “innocently” shows her some obscene pictures — she simply tells him that he might not want to share those pictures at a dinner party. And a gun-shop owner deflects Borat’s questions of whether a particular weapon is good for killing Jews: He doesn’t want to be rude to Borat, but he sure doesn’t want to play along, either. (And he refuses to sell him a gun.) In the end, “Borat” may say more about the openness and good intentions of the American character than it does about our closed-mindedness and willful ignorance.
And the movie is straightforward about one thing: Borat’s moral beliefs come straight out of folklore. He introduces us to a favorite event in his hometown, “The Running of the Jew,” in which grotesque costumed figures (their oversize papier-mâché heads come complete with horns) are chased merrily and viciously by the townsfolk; when he comes to America, he takes along “a jar of Gypsy tears, to protect me from AIDS.” “Borat” has infuriated some people (one of Borat’s targets in the film, sculptor Linda Stein, one of the earnest feminists, told the New York Post that she had been led to believe she was participating in a serious documentary that would help third-world women) and confused others (the Kazakhstan government, fearing that the movie would give people the wrong idea about the country, recently took out a four-page ad in the New York Times, touting the advances of its glorious nation).
Even though no one likes to be the butt of a joke, some of these “victims” only end up justifying the reasons jokes like these need to be made in the first place. But in addition to just ruffling some feathers, Cohen’s pranks may have done some actual harm: Dharma Arthur, the TV producer who booked Borat on a Jackson, Miss., television show (footage from which appears in “Borat”), wrote in Newsweek that Cohen’s gag set off a chain of events that ultimately caused her to lose her job.
The fact that a woman could lose her job, at the hands of self-serious small-town TV types, because of a comedian’s prank is itself evidence that Cohen’s satire is right on the money. But when a comedian’s brilliance leads to that kind of damage — when his being extraordinarily good at his job means that someone else loses hers — the joke gets a bitter, unpleasant edge. “Borat” is an astonishingly entertaining picture, and it’s a testament to Cohen’s gifts that he can pull off a feat as extravagant and as fully realized as this one is. (Not to mention that the movie’s big nude-wrestling scene is a farcical masterpiece in itself.) But “Borat” is not a guilt-free pleasure. We can laugh at Cohen’s unwitting marks, because they’re not us. But really, we’re just lucky that we weren’t in his line of fire.
– By Stephanie Zacharek
