MJT: The Jezebel Interview

Strangest interview I’ve ever done, over at the online women’s magazine Jezebel.

Welcome back to “That’s So Jane’s”, a really bad pun we use both as an homage to Jane/Jane’s Defence Weekly magazines and as an excuse to blog about something other than celebrities and drinking and fucking and all our stupid little affluent society problems. There’s a whole Third World out there! And really, don’t take a hot dictator’s word for it: They’re trying to blow us up. In this edition Anonymous Lobbyist talks to Michael Totten, an independent journalist and foreign-affairs expert whose idea of a great vacation spot is Libya. (Though the wife is nagging him to indulge her this year and go to North Korea.) In other words, he’s crazy! This week the two take on A-jad’s hotness versus Blackwater mercenaries’ hotness, Afghanistan’s drug scene, and just when the fuck we’re going to be getting some OIL out of this grand Ponzi scheme to liberate Iraq.
Q: So, first things first: Is there drinking in Iran? Or do they just skip right over that part of the Winehouse catalog and go straight for the H?
A: Oh, they totally drink in Iran. Christopher Hitchens was there a few years ago and he wrote about in it Vanity Fair. He was like, everyone except some dorky mullah gave me a glass or a shot when I went to their house. Porn and heroin are the big new things, though, you’re right. It’s better than Seattle.
Q: Since lots of people in the Western world are calling abstinence the new promiscuity, does that make the hijab the new miniskirt? In all the pictures we see on the TV of Iran, it seems to be pretty popular with the women there.
A: The hijab is the new bikini, actually. Burkhas are the new miniskirts. But women who show too much ankle in Iran get arrested and have their feet plunged into buckets of cockroaches, like on Fear Factor or something. It’s totally gross over there.
Q: Okay, so let’s cut to the chase: Ahmadinejad: hot dictator? Or hottest dictator?
A: Dude needs a shave and a haircut. And a few more inches, if you know what I mean. (He’s short.) And he’s not really a dictator. Ayatollah Khamenei is the real dictator and he’s, like, old. He’s even older than Bob Dole. None of those guys are hot. All the hot ones get strung up and tortured, especially the women who don’t like the new miniskirts. Actually, Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards don’t have as much power and influence as they used to. There’s this unspoken agreement between the people and the government: you pretend to arrest us, as we’ll pretend to behave. Again, it’s like Seattle, only with occasional public hangings.

Read the whole thing.
For entertainment purposes only.