March 11, 2026

MY ASSISTANT HAS BEEN EATING RED MEAT:  Hello.

Posted at 3:33 am by Sarah Hoyt

March 10, 2026

THINK OF IT AS CHINA HONORING JIMMY CARTER:

Posted at 11:14 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE DEMOCRATS’ SPIRITUAL CORRUPTION ON DISPLAY:

Related:

Posted at 11:10 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CHANGE:

Posted at 10:47 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Don’t disappoint me.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THIS IS A REAL OBITUARY OF IRAN’S THEOCRATIC DICTATOR FROM THE ECONOMIST:

The Economist just casually refers to America as “the Great Satan” in a story that focuses on the theocratic dictator of Iran’s unwavering spirit in the face of adversity.

You can feel the drama dripping from The Economist’s official obit:

Across the decades, Ali Khamenei built up countless reasons for his hatred of the West. They began with a fiery speech he heard at 13, when at school, inveighing against the monarchy that was backed by America and its allies. As a young man he was jailed six times, beaten and tortured by the Shah’s secret police. When the Shah fell in 1979, and the hotheads in Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s new Islamic Republic took American diplomats hostage, it was plain that America would seek to undermine Iran by any means. In the Iran-Iraq war of 1980 America even supported Iraq, ruled by a tyrant, rather than Iran. A decade later, when Ali Khamenei became Supreme Leader himself, attitudes had hardened on both sides. Increasingly, over the next 30 years, he knew he was personally in the Great Satan’s sights.

* * * * * * * *

Goodness, what a heroic and inspiring eulogy of the Islamic tyrant who who killed tens of thousands of his own people over decades of brutal, relentless rule.

All that from the people who are paid to write about … the economy?

Critics say The Economist was merely giving us Khamenei’s point of view. Well, you can certainly feel the passion Khamenei had as he hung yet another woman who had failed to cover her hair, or beat another Christian for renouncing Islam, or executed another poor soul who had run amok of his morality police!

That apparently was the obituarist’s goal: Death comes for the Economist:

Obituaries editor Ann Wroe explained “The art of writing an obituary” in a 2017 Medium interview. In Wroe’s explanation of the art, she commented on one Economist obituary that especially upset American readers (link in original):

The obituary you wrote for Osama bin Laden is very striking, particularly the passage about how he enjoyed taking his children to the beach and eating yogurt with honey.

I got into such trouble for that! Our American readers were incensed.

Do you have a different approach for someone like him?

You could just write a rant about how evil he was, but as I said, I don’t like to do it from the perspective of other people. I like to do it from his. I’ve done about three people who I think are pretty evil, and the thing is that they hang themselves with their own rope. They say or do something appalling, and you just put it in there. They condemn themselves, as far as I’m concerned. It’s true that there’s no such thing as being totally evil or totally good. We have to recognise that we all have the potential for good and for evil. When I found out ordinary things about bin Laden, I wanted to put them in. Why not mention them? You have to try and give a rounded picture of a person. They’re not entirely monsters. There’s a human somewhere in there. And that should make their evil all the more horrific by contrast. You wonder how those two things could co-exist.

Americans still have the notion that obits have to be of worthy people and that they should be praising like the eulogy you would give at a funeral. The New York Times does them really well, but most of the American press thinks it must be very reverential.

The Economist has undertaken such an exercise on an extremely limited number of occasions. The Khameni obituary can now be added to the list.

Wroe might have had a field day with Hitler. We can be grateful we have Mel Brooks’s portrayal of Franz Liebkind in The Producers to give us some idea of what Wroe would have wrought if only she had been on the case for The Economist in 1945.

Writing material from the point of view of someone who the rest of us view as evil can be a powerful tool for a writer or satirist. It’s the basis of most gangster movies; the 2008 German movie The Baader Meinhof Complex tells its viewers that those West German terrorists viewed the government of West Germany as the successors to the Nazis – and then cast the actors who played Hitler and Albert Speer in Downfall as the detectives pursuing them! But attempting to employ Tom Wolfe’s “New Journalism” writing strategies in obits to épater les bourgeois may be going a bit too far.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll