http://www.politico.com/blogs/anneschroeder/1108/No_girly_dog_for_the_Obamas.html

I don't even care that he called lapdogs "girly dogs." I just love his disdain for them.

The more I read about Obama's presumed National Security Advisor, James L. Jones, the more I like him. (I also like the fact that his name sounds like James Earl Jones, but that's neither here nor there, really.) I like his background, I like his strategy for Palestinean statehood, I like what I can tell of his character.

Eli Lake wonders, though, if Obama won't be setting up an internal war between Jones and Hillary Clinton, à la Powell-Cheney. All I can say is, if such a war were to ensue, it would speak only to Hillary's discredit. I have confidence in her at State, and certainly supprt the idea -- but I hope Obama and his team take Jones' lead, especially on Israel-Palestine.

I can't tell whether it makes me smug or concerned to hear Rove praise Obama's economic team.

Surely, though, this is part of some kind of plan to come out and say, "See! We knew it all along!" if the Obama team delivers on the success it seems to promise. He's trying to position his side as gracious, complimentary, centrist.

I just need to soothe my worry that something must be wrong with Obama's economic appointments if Rove has commended them. But surely, sincerity is too much to expect from him.

I should confess that I've been on the fence about Slavoj Zizek for a long time. I've read books and essays here and there, but nothing systematically except for The Ticklish Subject, which I learned a lot from in places. In his case I have shamelessly indulged in that very bad habit of reading more about someone than by him, because Zizek the pop phenomenon is significantly more interesting than Zizek the philosopher.

I've been kept on the fence by a real lack of clarity about whether the broad strokes of Zizek's anti-liberalism are of the astute-if-esoteric or the glibly-sensationalist sort. That is, I have always known that Zizek and I do not share the same critiques of liberalism -- but I had still been wondering whether he couldn't be some kind of helpful ally.

But, Adam Kirsch is right. Zizek's popularity is either genuinely terrifying or deeply depressing -- here's hoping it's the latter.

There is a name for the politics that glorifies risk, decision, and will; that yearns for the hero, the master, and the leader; that prefers death and the infinite to democracy and the pragmatic; that finds the only true freedom in the terror of violence. Its name is not communism. Its name is fascism, and in his most recent work Zizek has inarguably revealed himself as some sort of fascist. He admits as much in Violence, where he quotes the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk on the "re-emerging Left-Fascist whispering at the borders of academia"--"where, I guess, I belong." There is no need to guess. ...

In this way, Zizek's allegedly progressive thought leads directly into a pit of moral and intellectual squalor. In his New York Times piece against torture, Zizek worried that the normalization of torture as an instrument of state was the first step in "a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone." This is a good description of Zizek's own work. Under the cover of comedy and hyperbole, in between allusions to movies and video games, he is engaged in the rehabilitation of many of the most evil ideas of the last century. He is trying to undo the achievement of all the postwar thinkers who taught us to regard totalitarianism, revolutionary terror, utopian violence, and anti-Semitism as inadmissible in serious political discourse. Is Zizek's audience too busy laughing at him to hear him? I hope so, because the idea that they can hear him without recoiling from him is too dismal, and frightening, to contemplate.

I have to think that Zizek is more than smart enough to understand all of this -- that is, to understand that his own radicalism is actually the linchpin of the domestication of much of American intellectual culture into milquetoast bourgeois po-mo leftism. I have to think he must only be laughing about it -- and that is even more disgusting.

Anne Applebaum writes at Slate about why the attacks on Mumbai should make us most afraid: because days later, the global experts are still stumbling around trying to figure out who these people are.

In the coming days, more will surely be learned about the gunmen, some of whom have been captured by the Indian police. Their weapons will be traced, their motives will become clearer, their methods better understood. Their leaders will acquire names and personalities. Still, it is worth underlining, emphasizing, and remembering this initial moment of total ignorance: If nothing else, it's a reminder of some things we learned on Sept. 11, 2001.

Or perhaps we should say, didn't quite learn.

It's not that we haven't made any advances. As Applebaum points out, it is only a matter of time before we trace the intelligence we have and figure out how to categorize the Mumbai terrorists. We now have a vastly more complex understanding of who commits acts of terror, and the many reasons for which they do so. We are, I hope, becoming more adept at identifying the place of particular acts or groups within the matrix of motivations, techniques, and networks of alliance that is (post-)modern terrorism.

But the fact that attacks such as these could come out of the blue, with no immediately obvious source or target, signifies that terrorism is still a renewable resource. In part because of the "franchise model" of Al-Qaida that Applebaum describes, the greatest danger will always be posed by the enemy we haven't met yet.

Rumsfeld said it best -- "but there are the unknown unknowns -- the things we do not know that we do not know."