Posted 2/28/2004 09:07:58 PM by Edward Driscoll
TAX CUTS DO WHAT? Thomas Sowell explains why it's important for economists to combat public ignorance. Great strides were made in the 1990s, which is why you've probably invested some of your money in a mutual fund instead of a passbook savings account. (When I was a financial planner in the early to mid-nineties, I can't tell you how many times I'd explain basic--and I do mean basic--economic principles to people who told me, "man, we never were taught this in school!) But as Sowell points out, a lot more work needs to be done before the majority of people in the US understand basic economics.

Posted 2/28/2004 07:39:20 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE MAGIC NUMBER: Rob Schwartz, head of distribution for Newmarket, the distributor Gibson hired for The Passion when no major Hollywood studio would pick the film up, says it's well on its way to reaching the magic $100 million mark. As of yesterday's box office, it's already grossed $64,578,000. On Friday morning, we found an amusing way to put those numbers into context. UPDATE (2/29/04): Box Office Mojo, which Drudge uses to track, well, just that, estimates that the film should go over the $100 million mark today. And Sunday seems like a perfectly appropriate day for it to occur on.

Posted 2/28/2004 05:33:15 PM by Edward Driscoll
HISTORIAN DANIEL J. BOORSTIN DIED: He was 89. (Via Betsy Newmark.) UPDATE (2/29/94): John J. Miller of National Review has some thoughts on Boorstin.

Posted 2/28/2004 04:55:42 PM by Edward Driscoll
IT'S ALL RELATIVE: Is 5.6 percent unemployment a low figure, or a high one? For CNN, it all depends. As the Power Line blog says, try to guess what the key variable is.

Posted 2/28/2004 04:50:32 PM by Edward Driscoll
SPEAKING OF MODERN HOLLYWOOD BLACKLISTS, Richard Corliss of Time writes:

For some of the industry’s moguls to deny [Mel Gibson] employment because they don’t like what he said, or because he made a controversial film, would send a creepy message to the public: that a liberal is someone who will defend to the death your right to agree with him.

Actually, I'd say that's a precise definition of what modern liberalism has morphed into. Just ask any conservative on a college campus. (Via The Corner.)

Posted 2/28/2004 10:58:42 AM by Edward Driscoll
YOU WILL RESPECT OUR AUTHORO-TIE! Is the Screen Actors Guild blacklisting South Park actors? Sean Hackbarth has an interesting post on the topic. Of course, there's no blacklist in Hollywood. Absolutely none.

Posted 2/28/2004 10:43:58 AM by Edward Driscoll
COMES EQUIPPED WITH HIS OWN ZAPRUDER FILM: When most people go into their home theaters, they put their feet up and watch DVDs of the latest movie by George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. John Kerry watches himself, in 1969:

Consider this scene from a remarkable profile of Kerry published in the Boston Globe in October 1996, when Kerry was in a tough reelection battle: Kerry told reporter Charles Sennott the oft-repeated story of the February 1969 firefight in which Kerry attacked the Viet Cong who ambushed his Swift boat. Kerry won the Silver Star, as well as a Purple Heart, for his efforts. But the story wasn't just the firefight itself. It was also Kerry's reaction to it. The future senator was so "focused on his future ambitions," Sennott reported, that not long after the fight, he bought a Super-8 movie camera, returned to the scene, and reenacted the skirmish on film. During their interview, Kerry played the tape for Sennott. "I'll show you where they shot from. See? That's the hole covered up with reeds," Kerry said as he ran the tape in slow motion. Kerry told Sennott that his decision to reenact the fight on film was no big deal — "just something I did, no great meaning to it." But it's clear that the old movie is a huge deal. "Through hours of watching the films in the den of his newly renovated Beacon Hill mansion, it becomes apparent that these are memories and footage he returns to often," Sennott wrote. "Kerry jumps repeatedly from the couch to adjust the Sony large screen TV in his home entertainment center, making sure the picture is clear, the color correct. He fast forwards, rewinds and freeze frames the footage. His running commentary — vivid, sometimes touching, sometimes self-serving — never misses a beat." In John Kerry's home-entertainment center, it's always 1969.

His campaign as well, Byron York writes.

Posted 2/28/2004 12:14:18 AM by Edward Driscoll
ANOTHER VIEW: Dennis Prager was right--when it comes to The Passion Of The Christ, Jews and Christians are watching two entirely different films. My wife Nina wrote her own review of the film while I was writing mine, and I asked her if she'd mind if I posted it here: We left the theater where we had watched The Passion of The Christ about 5 hours ago. Since then we have spoken of little else. I, for one, have bawled my eyes out, and I’m exhausted. What a wonderful tribute to a filmmaker to have his movie engender thought, discussion and a deep emotional reaction. How rare for a movie to do this. Being Jewish, I was concerned that I would see the movie as anti-Semitic as some reviewers have done. I kind of like Mel Gibson, of the little I’ve read about him, and I really didn’t want to think that he had written, produced, and directed an anti-Semitic movie, so I dug around and read an interview with him which pretty much convinced me that he is far from anti-Semitic, and that in fact he did hope to present a film “about faith, hope, love and forgiveness.” I was happy to go into the theater with a much more positive and optimistic viewpoint than I had had after reading assorted reviews. We saw The Passion in an old theater that is usually empty, even for big hits, having been eclipsed by a 20-plex nearby. We’ve seen The Lord of the Rings, assorted Matrices, Star Wars: Episode II and other big openings there with only a handful of other theatergoers. We were surprised to see the 3:35 p.m. weekday crowd grow until the theater was more crowded than we’ve seen it in years. I found the first scene a tad over acted, and I couldn’t help thinking that I had wandered into a Lord of the Rings sequel with the uncharacteristically foggy atmosphere. But I quickly got into the movie, a real tribute to Gibson given the subtitles. Somewhere along the way I was hit by a medicine ball in the stomach. I don’t remember the scene, but a wave of fear came over me. “Oh my God,” I thought. Nothing more rational or coherent, just a deep visceral, almost genetic fear that once again we would be blamed. And tears welled in my eyes. That moment passed, but I could no longer not notice that Pontius Pilate was portrayed as a deeply conflicted human being, manipulated by the assorted look-alike Jewish priests. I couldn’t help myself from focusing on how often a Roman would be portrayed as having a moment of self-awareness or guilt, and how rarely a Jew was so portrayed. I couldn’t stop thinking that Gibson showed way more Jew’s stoning Jesus and weeping for him. I knew that I was watching a different movie from my husband, who is not Jewish, and a different movie from the one Gibson wanted me to watch. But it was like seeing the damn bunny in the clouds. Once that medicine ball hit me, I couldn’t help what I saw. Gibson’s obsession with physical pain appeared almost masochistic to me. Of course he wouldn’t be the first Catholic masochist, and certainly not the first person to view pain as a link with the divine. But what I didn’t see was grace. I’m not much of a theologian, and certainly not much of a Christian one. But Jesus knew his fate, he had accepted it intellectually. I do understand that physical torture takes away our intellectual understanding and acceptance. But at some point I believe Jesus reached a point of grace. I didn’t feel any grace at all in Gibson’s Christ. And the resurrection – it looked to me like someone had told Gibson, after the film was in the can, “Yo, Mel baby, it’s all kind of meaningless unless you at least mention the resurrection” so a resurrection scene was tacked on at the end. While my husband felt this scene was uplifting, I felt it was a mere afterthought overlaid on Gibson’s passion for suffering. I left the theater drained. I felt that if Gibson hoped to convey faith, hope, love and forgiveness, he had failed miserably. The physical pain was so overpowering that I didn’t feel Christ’s faith, only his loss of it; I saw no glimmer of hope in the nodding reference to the resurrection; the only love I saw was between Mary and Jesus and that was deeply personal; and ok, yes there was forgiveness. Well, one out of four isn’t too good. So do I think it was a bad movie? No, I think it’s a great movie. It’s great in that it has done what few movies do – made me think, touched deep emotions, caused great discussions with my husband. It is truly a work of art in that it’s an intensely personal communication – one man’s communication of his beliefs, laid out for all to see. That he didn’t succeed (at least with me) is of little merit. He still said what he wanted to say. My husband found a wonderful article for me to read by Dennis Prager, in which Prager states:

When watching ‘The Passion,’ Jews and Christians are watching two entirely different films. For two hours, Christians watch their Savior tortured and killed. For the same two hours, Jews watch Jews arrange for the torture and killing of the Christians’ Savior.

And so it was with me and my husband. We saw different movies, but we were also able to believe and trust in each other’s visions. I was able to share things about myself I had never told him, and in fact and never verbalized before. But I still can’t believe Gibson could be so blind to how Jews would see the movie. In that way, this is a naïve movie. And that too adds to its personal flavor, and intimacy.

Posted 2/27/2004 11:37:31 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: In many respects, it's Rashomon all over again. As Dennis Prager wrote, in an extraordinary early article on the film written this past fall (do yourself a favor and read the whole thing), your background and baggage determine how you'll view the movie:

When watching "The Passion," Jews and Christians are watching two entirely different films. For two hours, Christians watch their Savior tortured and killed. For the same two hours, Jews watch Jews arrange the killing and torture of the Christians' Savior.

And I'll go one better--for the conservative, no matter what his faith his, one admires that such an intensely religious film could be made today. For someone on the left, one fears just that, a point Prager makes as well:

Jews also need to understand another aspect of "The Passion" controversy. Just as Jews are responding to centuries of Christian anti-Semitism (virtually all of it in Europe), many Christians are responding to decades of Christian-bashing -- films and art mocking Christian symbols, a war on virtually any public Christian expression (from the death of the Christmas party to the moral identification of fundamentalist Christians with fundamentalist Muslims). Moreover, many Jewish groups and media people now attacking "The Passion" have a history of irresponsibly labeling conservative Christians anti-Semitic.

Or as Michael Medved wrote:

In this context, many Jewish observers worry because The Passion of The Christ is such a powerful piece of cinematic storytelling: if Christian fervor led in the past to persecution of Jews, isn't the movie inherently dangerous because of the likelihood that it will inspire that sort of emotional reaction? The many Jews who react in this fearful manner to the prospect of deepening Christian commitment in the United States have allowed the past to blind them to the present--and the future. In today's America, the notably philo-Semitic tone of born-again Christianity makes it more common for Christians to support and defend their Jewish neighbors than to persecute them. American Christians emphasize the Jewish roots of Jesus more strongly than ever before--a trend very much echoed in Mel Gibson's movie. Contrary to the fears and expectations of some Jewish leaders, an agnostic, left-leaning college professor at an Ivy League university is much more likely than a Southern Baptist preacher to harbor anti-Jewish attitudes.

I agree with Medved, but I think he's simplifying things to a certain degree. Obviously, I don't expect mobs from a Frankenstein movie to roam the night burning crosses and lynching Jews. But I do question what Gibson was thinking when he and his co-writer Benedict Fitzgerald were writing the screenplay. The film goes to great lengths to make Pontius Pilate a three-dimensional character. We see him away from the angry crowds, racked with, if not guilt, then at least concern of what his actions should be. His wife Claudia, is, if anything, an even more sympathetic figure, as she both softens his concerns, and brings a linen cloth to Mary and Mary Magdalen to wipe the blood of Jesus after His scourging. Why couldn't such scenes have been written for the Jewish priests of the film? Why are they portrayed as two-dimensional characters who all but twirl their Snidely Whiplash moustaches in anticipation of Christ's murder? Prager wrote:

Jews need to understand is that most American Christians watching this film do not see "the Jews" as the villains in the passion story historically, let alone today. First, most American Christians -- Catholic and Protestant -- believe that a sinning humanity killed Jesus, not "the Jews." Second, they know that Christ's entire purpose was to come to this world and to be killed for humanity's sins. To the Christian, God made it happen, not the Jews or the Romans (the Book of Acts says precisely that).

I agree with that entirely. If Gibson does as well, why couldn't he do something to soften the men doing God's will? Regarding the violence, it is a very violent film. I'm not sure how much of that reflects what Gibson felt audiences have come to expect of movies of all genres (ranging from slasher films, to cop films such as Mel's own Lethal Weapon movies, all the way to war films such as Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down), and how much he equates, as Andrew Sullivan wrote, Jesus' torture with the intensity of His beliefs and the importance of His mission. Sullivan:

Would our sins have been expiated if Jesus had only been flogged twenty rather than forty times? (The Gospels do not tell us how brutal this process was. For some reason, the evangelists reduced the episode to a couple of sentences. Gibson makes the flogging the centerpiece of the whole film.) If Jesus had been roped to the cross and died of asphyxiation, rather than being nailed there, would we still not be saved? If the nails had been placed in his wrists rather than his palms, would we not have been redeemed? Of course some of these details are there in the Gospels; but Gibson's loving obsession with them, his creepy love of watching extreme violence, is nowhere found in the Gospels. Let's take a few clear examples. The Gospels do not tell us that the jailers of the High Priests beat Jesus to a pulp before he was even delivered to the Romans, or that he was thrown in chains over a prison wall, almost garrotting him. That's Gibson's sadistic embellishment - so that Jesus already has one eye shut from bruises before he is even tried. The Gospels do not say that the flogging of Jesus was so extreme and out of control that a centurion had to stop it because it had gone beyond any of the usual bounds of Roman punishment. That again is Gibson's invention. In the crucifixion scene, the Gospels do not say that in hoisting the cross, it fell down by accident so that Jesus was pinned headfirst between the cross and the earth, his crown of thorns thrust even deeper into his skull. Again, that's Gibson's interpolation. It's as if Gibson's saying that being crucified isn't bad enough - you've got be crushed face down by timber first if you are going to save all mankind.

All that being said, perhaps I've been numbed by the ultraviolence of today's films, or if I had expected far worse from most critics' reviews. The violence is very, very intense and brutal, as is the bloodletting. But it's certainly watchable, given the story that surrounds it. On a much more minor note (pardon the pun), I'd also question the soundtrack. We're never going back to the era of overwrought 1950s Miklos Rozsa-style scores for biblical films, but the synthesized soundtrack to The Passion sounded virtually interchangeable with Peter Gabriel's score to The Last Temptation of Christ. All that said, The Passion is obviously an intense experience. Given Prager's opinion that Jews and Gentiles will see two entirely different movies, it's probably not surprising that I found myself uplifted at the end much more than I expected to be. I found its subtle final scene surprisingly powerful, especially in contrast to the blood and gore throughout the film that preceded it. I do think that this is a film that everyone should see, and I'm very glad I did. But obviously, your mileage may vary. (For my previous posts on the film, click here, and here. For my wife's very different take on the movie, click here.)

Posted 2/27/2004 07:18:53 PM by Edward Driscoll
BACK FROM THE PASSION: An amazing--if far from perfect--film; Gibson singlehandedly is keeping the 1950s and '60s notion of the auteur alive. I'm not sure how well it all worked, and I'll have more thoughts later, but this is most assuredly a film worth seeing, if only to make up your mind about the most controversial movie of the year--if not the decade.

Posted 2/27/2004 01:38:18 PM by Edward Driscoll
WORDS THAT DON'T MATTER: Victor Davis Hanson looks at the new buzzwords of anti-Americanism.

Posted 2/27/2004 01:32:00 PM by Edward Driscoll
CAPITALISM, THY NAME IS CASTRO: The world's favorite communist dictator "has amassed a personal fortune of $195 million", according to Newsmax. (Via The Country Store.)

Posted 2/27/2004 01:09:40 PM by Edward Driscoll
BLESSED BY THE GODS AND GODDESSES DEPARTMENT: I haven't had a chance to check my stats page until last night, when I noticed that Slate's Mickey Kaus linked to my BBC airbrushing post. (Scroll down Krausfiles to February 16th.) And Virginia Postrel linked to my article on the electric guitar's "Technological Crossroads" in Tech Central Station. Thank you both!

Posted 2/27/2004 12:54:29 PM by Edward Driscoll
HELP, HELP, I'M BEING OPPRESSED--by Naomi Wolf! Hilarious letter discovered by Joanne Jacobs written by an Englishman who says he was the "victim of sexual harassment. And it was Naomi who harassed me".

Posted 2/27/2004 12:42:54 PM by Edward Driscoll
WE LOST--GIVE US MONEY! Tim Blair says both Wes Clark and Howard Dean have dropped out of the race, but could still use your help. As Clark writes on his otherwise tumbleweed-strewn Website, "The costs of shutting down a national organization are costly". Economics, thy name is Wesley.

Posted 2/27/2004 12:37:23 AM by Edward Driscoll
LET'S RUN THE NUMBERS: Comparing Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ and Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine, it might be possible to get an idea of which side is winning the culture battle by calculating how each film has done at the box office. According to The Internet Movie Database, here's the gross from the entire run of Bowling in US theaters: $21,244,913. According to The L.A. Daily News, here's the gross from the first day of The Passion's release: $26.5 million. As Brian Anderson wrote late last year, the right's not losing the culture war anymore. But will Hollywood notice this largely abandoned market, or blacklist Gibson?

Posted 2/26/2004 10:02:46 PM by Edward Driscoll
IS IT 1992 ALL OVER AGAIN? Well, maybe, but in reverse. Tim Blair quotes from an interview in which Christopher Hitchens says:

One reason I think this campaign is very lame -- it's supposed to have momentum, I wouldn't say it had much enthusiasm behind it -- [John Kerry] gives the impression that it's kind of his turn to be president and that he has a feeling of entitlement to the job. I think that is a very great disadvantage. I've never heard him or any of his supporters make any case why this is the moment for John Kerry. He hasn't been able to come up with a reason that would even persuade his wife, as far as I can see.

"A feeling of entitlement" was exactly the feeling that Bush 41 gave in 1992, along with a general feeling of disdain for the whole campaign process. Remember his looking at his wristwatch during the debates? He looked tired and haggard during the rest of the campaign, making the younger, flashier Bill Clinton look all the more appealing. Somehow, I don't think Bush 43 will make the same mistakes his father did when campaigning, not the least of which is because he got to observe those mistakes firsthand. And unlike his father or Kerry, Bush may be a multimillionaire, but disdain and entitlement are not auras he projects.

Posted 2/26/2004 09:43:25 PM by Edward Driscoll
THOMAS SOWELL says that parents with a backbone have done the seemingly impossible: gotten rid of one of an endless serious of fad school programs, in this case, "The International Baccalaureate Curriculum", taught in Fairfax, Virginia's high school. If it sounds like a card game Omar Sharif should be teaching the elderly passengers of some cruise ship, it isn't. Sowell writes:

It has a left-wing hidden agenda, as so many other fad programs do. One of the program's supporters gushed that it teaches students "how to think globally" and "how to make us part of the world." One of the parents critical of the program put it quite differently. She said it "promotes socialism, disarmament, radical environmentalism, and moral relativism, while attempting to undermine Christian religious values and national sovereignty." None of this is new. This kind of indoctrination has been going on for decades, and the kind of thinking behind it goes back a hundred years, when education guru John Dewey began promoting the idea that schools should be instruments of "social change." By substituting back-door indoctrination in place of education, John Dewey has done more damage than anyone without an army.

"What is new", Sowell adds, "is that some parents are finally waking up and fighting back". The Washington Times has more.

Posted 2/26/2004 08:58:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
AS THE PROFESSOR WOULD SAY, more crushing of dissent in Ashcroft's America. I'm sure Donald Luskin will be picking up on this shortly.

Posted 2/26/2004 08:27:13 PM by Edward Driscoll
IS KATIE COURIC DRAGGING DOWN THE TODAY'S SHOW'S RATINGS? Her bias has always been transparent. Is it finally catching up with her?

Posted 2/26/2004 08:09:42 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE CHILDREN OF COMMENTARY: Jonathan Tobin looks at the continuing influence of Norman Podhoretz's long running publication.

Posted 2/26/2004 07:41:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
JUST ADDED A BRIEF LIST of film reviewers to the Links page.

Posted 2/26/2004 03:35:02 PM by Edward Driscoll
ANOTHER DOWDIFIED* QUOTE AT THE NEW YORK TIMES: As caught by the JustOneMinute Blog. Here's the article it originally appeared in. (Via Mickey Kaus, who really needs some decent permalinks.)

Posted 2/26/2004 02:48:58 PM by Edward Driscoll
PICKING UP THE PIECES OF THE GO-GO '90s: Glenn Reynolds looks at where the money was spent at the now-defunct MP3.com--"Check out the massage table and the Hummer!"--but it wasn't just high-flyers like MP3.com that spent on crazy stuff like that. Back in June of 2002, I wrote about an auction where the assets of a failed Silicon Valley dot.com start-up were sold off. My wife bid on and won a couple of PCs and some furniture for her law practice, but there was also this:

a multi-person Jacuzzi, 20 ab-rollers (the kind sold on late-night TV infommercials), a ping pong table, a BMX mountain bike(??!!), multiple sets of steak knives, numerous high-end pieces of Herman Miller furniture and God-knows what else.

As I said at the time:

I always thought a business was lean and mean and hungry until it went public, or at least was self-sufficient. No wonder so many dot.coms tanked in the '90s: you don't start living large until you've had some success. (Pick up the DVD of Startup.com to see this kind of fuzzy-headed business thinking in action. Of course, those guys were at least smart enough to get a fairly successful documentary out of their tanked business.)

I would think that most of the companies that have survived the dot.com crash eschewed this sort of thinking. Or else have been very, very lucky. The 1980s was supposed to be the decade of greed. At the beginning of the 1990s, magazines like Time said we'd spend the 1990s atoning for our sins and excesses. So much for that bit of prediction.

Posted 2/26/2004 01:50:28 PM by Edward Driscoll
HUGH HEWITT INTERVIEWED CONDI RICE TODAY: Here's a transcript.

Posted 2/26/2004 12:03:18 PM by Edward Driscoll
OH, THAT LIBERAL MEDIA:

"I'm not going to spend $9 just for a few laughs" -- CBS's Andy Rooney to Don Imus on why he won't see The Passion of Christ.

Rush Limbaugh was forced to resign from ESPN for remarks that many found racist. I hope I'm wrong, but watch Andy Rooney get a pass or a slap on the wrist (from the network that brought you Janet Jackson's boob and Dan Rather's slanted coverage of the 2000 presidential election) for this. (Via Drudge.)

Posted 2/26/2004 11:50:10 AM by Edward Driscoll
DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? 1971 style. (Via The Corner.)

Posted 2/26/2004 11:43:57 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE DECLINE OF BOXING: Fascinating article by Paul Beston on why this sport, once among the most popular in America, has gone into decline:

For many Americans nourished at the counter of political correctness and baptized by the Church of Tolerance, boxing is simply barbarism. Americans love violence, but only if it retains a synthetic quality, a stylized irony perfected by Quentin Tarantino. In boxing, violence lies beyond the consolations of irony. As Joe Louis once said, "You can run, but you can't hide." So we seek ways to laugh it off. Pro wrestling, which retains the symbolism of combat while making a mockery of physical pain, is the perfect substitute. It has long since eclipsed boxing in popularity. No wonder then, that boxing increasingly resembles wrestling in its sleazy promotions and the tasteless posturing of the fighters -- a far cry from the stoics of an earlier age. In a sense, the growing isolation of boxing within popular culture is akin to the estrangement between the volunteer army and the civilian population. Both boxers and soldiers engage in occupations where the code of the warrior is absolute; in a postmodern popular culture, such a code is deeply alien. But in an earlier time, when the material conditions of life were difficult and death lurked as near as a walk around the corner, fighting for one's nation -- or for money -- was not viewed as morally questionable. On the contrary, it was admired. Now it is seen, at least by our elites, as a sign of psychological or moral imbalance. Those who believe that the human impulse for violence can be coached out of the race are also the ones who assume soldiers kill for bloodlust, or that fighters fight because they enjoy hurting people. But most of the time, the soldier's answer is different: "I killed because I had to." The fighter's, too, is more mundane: "I fight to make a living. I fight because I'm good at it."

On the other hand, NBC has announced that it will resume primetime coverage of prize fights, so maybe there's a little hope left, after all.

Posted 2/26/2004 11:34:37 AM by Edward Driscoll
DECOMMUNISATION: THE MISSING END TO THE COLD WAR: In Tech Central Station, Sidney Goldberg (a.k.a. Jonah's dad) makes a point that we've made here a few times:

Germany underwent denazification after World War II, a lustration that went down to the lowest party levels, making it virtually impossible for a Nazi party member to hold office in the new Germany, so that the relatively unblemished mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, became Chancellor. The collapse of the Soviet Union, on the other hand, did not result in a decommunisation. There was no equivalent of the Nuremberg trials, and indeed most high offices to this day are occupied by Communists or former Communists, tens of thousands of them with blood on their hands. The supreme insult is that the president of this vast political enterprise is Vladimir Putin, a former high-ranking Communist in the Soviet Secret Police. The equivalent of this would have been the inheritance of the government of Nazi Germany after World War II by the Nazi gauleiter of Poland. * * * There are very few books on Americans who long for Hitler, mainly because there never was a significant segment of Nazis in America, but unfortunately there is a significant number of Americans who still think that Joe Stalin was an idealistic reformer, and some of these Americans are in control of history departments of important universities -- and virtually no books are available that document and explain this peculiar situation. [In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr] fills this gap.

Read the whole thing. UPDATE: Decommunisation also would have likely prevented unrepentant Stalinists from being honored by the US government and Hollywood as well.

Posted 2/26/2004 11:16:01 AM by Edward Driscoll
SHODDY COVERAGE OF A SIMPLE STORY: "Group Captain Mandrake", who knows a thing or two about ships, Fisks a routine CNN story about the USS New Jersey. As one of his commenters wrote, "People trust the media when it reports about stuff they don't know about, conveniently forgetting that every time the media reports about something they DO know about the media gets it wrong."

Posted 2/25/2004 09:25:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
RACISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM FROM THE LEFT: John Hawkins has two examples of the left's racism in action. There are plenty more. Meanwhile, George Will writes about "The Left's Anti-Semitic Chic", which is prominently on display in this blantantly anti-Semitic article from Adbusters magazine, complete with little ticks next to the names of prominent Jewish conservatives. UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts as well.

Posted 2/25/2004 07:22:18 PM by Edward Driscoll
CRYING WOLF: OK, so let me see if I have this straight. 20 years after the event--and four years after she consulted for the would be successor to the president who never met an intern he didn't like--feminist icon Naomi Wolf accuses literary scholar Harold Bloom of having put his hand on her thigh at Yale University 20 years ago. As Anne Applebaum writes, "Sometimes in the course of a great American debate there comes a moment when the big battle guns fall silent, the pundits run out of breath, and -- unexpectedly -- the long, bitter argument suddenly turns into farce":

What is most extraordinary about Wolf is the way in which she has voluntarily stripped herself of her achievements and her status, and reduced herself to a victim, nothing more. The implication here is that women are psychologically weak: One hand on the thigh, and they never get over it. The implication is also that women are naive, and powerless as well: Even Yale undergraduates are not savvy enough to avoid late-night encounters with male professors whose romantic intentions don't interest them. The larger implications are for the movement that used to be called "feminism." Twenty years of fame, money, success, happy marriage and the children she has described in her books -- and Naomi Wolf, one of my generation's leading feminists, is still obsessed with her own exaggerated victimhood? It's not an ideology I'd want younger women to follow.

Don't worry, Anne. I'd say Naomi just put the proverbial fork in it. UPDATE: Earlier this week, in a post about TV's Sex in the City, Jonah linked to one of his articles from 1998, which really captures those hazy days of pre-9/11 innocence and silliness:

Something remarkable has happened to the cultural Left in the 1990s. Sex is everything. Sexuality has become the linchpin of human identity, replacing race as the chief source of activism and passion in discussions of civil rights, politics, and public morality. In a calculated maneuver, the Left has decided to brand Clinton's sexual behavior with Monica Lewinsky private-despite all of the evidence that Clinton dragooned the country into the most public illicit affair in modern history and then compounded his misdeed with other crimes. Yes, the affair was metaphysically tacky and bordered on the deviant, but the more unconventional the expression of sexuality, the more comfortable the Left is in defending it. Obviously, this represents a tectonic shift in feminist dogma. It is a shift that was occurring well before the Lewinsky scandal. Today, the most provocative academic feminist isn't a sex hater. She is Jane Gallop, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin. When asked about her sexual preference-at a conference entitled "Flaunting It"-she responded, "Graduate students." On talk shows and on the op-ed pages, the sex-is-rape school is in full retreat while the sex-is-a-passport-to-a-cushy-job school is attracting adherents in droves. Katie Roiphe in the New York Times says of Lewinsky, "There is nothing inherently wrong . . . with her attempt to translate her personal relationship with the President into professional advancement."

The Slate article from 1999 about Wolf that I linked to above has this pretzel-logic quote from her:

The Lewinsky affair was a tricky issue for most liberal feminists, who were caught between protesting sexual harassment and supporting the president they had elected. Wolf did both, by turning the issue into an object lesson on women's professional success. "The people who should be looking into these allegations is not a partisan prosecutor but the EEOC," she opined on the talk-show circuit.

But today, Wolf has blown a gasket because Yale won't investigate charges about an incident that occurred 20 years ago. Farce, indeed.

Posted 2/25/2004 06:22:05 PM by Edward Driscoll
LIFE IN THE POST-NIPPLEGATE ERA: Howard Stern Show taken off Clear Channel stations "until we are assured that his show will conform to acceptable standards of responsible broadcasting". Maybe Nipplegate really was a tipping point of sorts. UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis agrees, and is none too happy about the situation. ANOTHER UPDATE: As usual, James Lileks puts things into proper perspective, by using language that's more appropriate for well, Howard Stern. ONE MORE UPDATE: While we're on the subject, this is as good a place as any to note that as a result of Nipplegate, Janet Jackson was dropped from the title role of a made for TV biography of Lena Horne--at Horne's request. (And we tip our fedora to the ever-elegant Ms. Horne.)

Posted 2/25/2004 04:44:58 PM by Edward Driscoll
YOU'RE SOAKING IN IT: Jan Miner, star of Palmolive's long-running "Madge" commercials died Sunday at 86.

Posted 2/25/2004 04:40:57 PM by Edward Driscoll
KEYSHAWN FOR GALLOWAY? Are the Tampa Bay Bucs and Dallas Cowboys about to swap wide receivers?

Posted 2/25/2004 04:33:08 PM by Edward Driscoll
FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE FOIE GRAS: Thomas Lifson picks up on a topic we originally posted about here.

Posted 2/25/2004 04:25:09 PM by Edward Driscoll
SAMIZDATA IS USUALLY A SOBER, SERIOUS Blog, which looks at The Big Issues Of The Day from a reserved, carefully controlled point of view. Which makes their rare attempts at humor all the more enjoyable. Such as this post, which states that "dozens of speed cameras [in England] are to be replaced with electronic signs that display a frowning face when a driver is speeding but do not result in fines or penalty points". Oh wait, they're not kidding? England is actually doing that? Smiley or frowny faces depending upon your speed limit. Really?! Getoutahere!

Posted 2/25/2004 03:48:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
PROBABLY BEATS BOXED WINE: Canned wine debuts in Australia.

Posted 2/25/2004 03:29:53 PM by Edward Driscoll
MIDNIGHT MADNESS: Writing in Tech Central Station, Ben Lieberman says:

Remember all those "midnight regulations" finalized by outgoing Clinton administration officials during their final two months in power? The Bush administration would prefer you forget, as its efforts to deal with them have proven to be failures. To its credit, the incoming Bush officials, faced with a wave of these politically correct but substantively problematic environmental regulations, sought to double check their merits before allowing them to take effect. As a result, they were hit with nasty attacks from journalists and environmental activists. The furor over these so-called "environmental rollbacks" frequently dominated the news in 2001 prior to 9/11.

Read the whole thing.

Posted 2/25/2004 03:13:58 PM by Edward Driscoll
PUTTING THE BS IN PBS--but not for much longer: Bill "Cash and Carry" Moyers is leaving PBS in November.

Posted 2/25/2004 01:16:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
CAN YOU SEE THE REAL ME? Charles Johnson looks at John Kerry's flip-flopping position on Israel's security fence. UPDATE: Meanwhile, CNS News reports:

Teamsters union chief Jimmy Hoffa has confused both environmentalists and free-market advocates after saying that Democratic front-runner John Kerry, if elected president, would "drill like never before" across the United States.

On the other hand, given the last Democratic president's proclivities, I'm glad Kerry's apparently planning to keep his drilling confined to oil, if you know what I mean...

Posted 2/25/2004 12:12:08 PM by Edward Driscoll
SHOULD GODWIN'S LAW BE UPDATED? Julian Sanchez writes, "Since 2001, the rhetorical trump-card role once played by Hitler seems to have been taken over by terrorists". If we don't update Godwin's Law, the terrorists will have won! (Or something like that.)

Posted 2/25/2004 11:56:28 AM by Edward Driscoll
THIS ISN'T ANTI-SEMITIC (I don't think), it's just disgusting: The Royal Scottish Academy's student exhibition in Edinburgh includes a piece of "art" called, "Mickey's Taliban Adventures" For our reaction to a vaguely similar piece of "art" from a couple of years go, click here. UPDATE: James Lileks has some amusing thoughts on the arts, post-9/11.

Posted 2/25/2004 11:23:12 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE PASSION: It opens today; the last film to generate this kind of controversy was probably Oliver Stone's JFK (I was going to say The Last Temptation of Christ, until I remembered the angry debates on shows like Nightline that Stone's film generated at the time of its release about its historical accuracy.) Speaking of controversy, how's this for mixed reviews? Roger Ebert gives the film four stars. Simultaneously, my friend Jami Bernard, of the New York Daily News, not only gives it one star, but writes, "Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II." Wow. It's difficult--very difficult--for me to imagine Mel Gibson deliberately making an anti-Semitic film, considering the industry that he works in, and one would imagine, plans to continue working in for several more decades. Jeff Jacoby writes:

Is "The Passion" antisemitic? That depends on whether it is antisemitic to re-enact the story told by the Christian Bible. To be sure, there is a good deal in Gibson's movie that is not in the New Testament. In one scene, for example, Judas is driven to commit suicide by a gang of demonic Jewish children. In another, Pontius Pilate, beholding a shackled Jesus who has already been beaten bloody by Jewish guards, chastises the High Priest: "Do you always punish your prisoners before they are judged?" But there is no getting around the fact that the parts of "The Passion" that are the most unflattering to Jews -- the bloody-minded and hateful Temple priests, the Judean mob howling for Jesus's death -- come straight out of the Gospels. I shudder at those depictions and reject them as historically false, but I cannot call a Christian antisemitic for believing in the truth of his Bible. I will not smear Gibson as a Jew-hater. But neither will I pretend that he is unaware of the long and horrid history of Passion plays, or of the millions of Jews who have died at the hands of killers demonizing them as "Christ-killers." It is not unreasonable to worry about the effect of a movie like "The Passion" at a time of surging antisemitism.

And for immediate, stark, black and white contrast, Joel C. Rosenberg writes about what a blatant 21st century anti-Semitic film looks like. UPDATE: James Bowman is my go-to guy for hardcore conservative film commentary. And he's none-too-impressed with The Passion:

The accusations of anti-Semitism which have done so much to keep this film in the news for nearly a year before its opening stem, I take it, from this tremendous thrashing that precedes the actual crucifixion. They are to some extent a bum rap. Gibson does not seem to me to go out of his way to stress the Jewishness of the Jewish priests and Pharisees such as Annas (Toni Bertorelli) and Caiaphas (Mattia Sbragia), nor of the Jerusalem mob chanting "Crucify him!" My admittedly unpractised eye caught no stereotypes. The Roman soldiers — a brutal and undisciplined rabble motivated by nothing but sadism — come off worse than anybody. At the same time, Mel Gibson must have known that, in taking torture and brutality as his subject in preference to more traditionally spiritual considerations, he ensured that not only those who were implicated in such a crime but also those with a history of being unfairly implicated in it would feel themselves aggrieved. My guess is that he’s not sorry to have stirred up this hornet’s nest. At any rate, it takes our minds off what’s really wrong with the movie. I have the most tremendous admiration for Pope John Paul II, but if he really said on seeing the film as he was at first reported to have said (before an official spokesman denied it) that "It is as it was" then I don’t think much of him as a movie critic. The one thing we can be absolutely sure of is that it is as it wasn’t. For although much publicity has been given to the fact that the screenplay is in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, and Latin, the language of the Roman imperial authorities, much less well known is the fact that it is also in a third language and that is Movieish, the language of the long line of cinematic sufferers that have come before this Jesus and that cannot but distract us from a proper consideration of what is, after all, meant to be a unique event in human history. Nor is it only the scourging and beating which is written in Hollywoodese. Allusions to other movies range from Chuckie-like child sprites out of mainstream horror flicks to a pale Bergmanian devil with a dramatically gratuitous snake to certify his scriptural authenticity. There is even at one point a computer-animated movie demon like something out of The Devil’s Advocate or The Ninth Gate. This kind of thing I found at least as dislocating to the sense of occasion as if, instead of Latin and Aramaic, the movie had been made in Brooklynese. All of which is simply to say that The Passion of the Christ is like every other Mel Gibson picture in being ridiculously overproduced. As the British would say, he has once again over-egged the pudding. The new age music with pan pipes and wordless choruses, the swelling orchestral sounds at moments of significance, the flashbacks cross cut with the main action so as to produce heavy-handed ironies — all these things take us annoyingly out of the period and plonk us down jarringly in the entertainment culture of the present day.

Or as Bowman says in the link to his review, "Mel, we may love you for the enemies you’ve made, but your movie is still a mess." ANOTHER UPDATE: When I wrote above that "It's difficult--very difficult--for me to imagine Mel Gibson deliberately making an anti-Semitic film, considering the industry that he works in". I was unconsciously alluding to a word to most familiar to Hollywood: blacklisting. Bill Sulik (oops, excuse me, "Václav Patrik Šulik"(!)) writes about just that possibility, but then asks:

You mean Hollywood might maintain it's own blacklist? That can't be true.

Nope, not a chance. LAST UPDATE TO THIS POST: I have more here.

Posted 2/25/2004 10:48:51 AM by Edward Driscoll
GREETINGS FROM SILICON VALLEY: I'm back; flew in last night, after visiting friends and family. While I didn't go down to the site of the WTC, New York seems to be fully recovered from its unfortunately way-too-brief fling with patriotism--much fewer American flags present these days. But on the other hand, other than seeing a couple of "STOP BUSH" signs crudely painted onto mailboxes, it didn't seem to be complete anarchy, either. And, as Andrew Sullivan wrote, if for the left, 9/11 didn't happen, it's much, much harder to toss the events down the memory hole in one of the two actual cities it took place in. I was very surprised, and quite happily so, to see a serviceman in camouflage, a beret, and carrying an M-16 standing with regular NYPD men at Penn Station. I'm not sure if that's a daily event, or if something unusual was going on this past weekend. More to come.

Posted 2/22/2004 07:00:55 PM by Edward Driscoll
GREETINGS FROM NEW JERSEY! Not Asbury Park (that's Bruce Springsteen's old stomping grounds), but not all that far from it, either. Having posted an "I'm traveling" message on Thursday, I did want to add to it that I'm fine, albeit with limited broadband (and hence blogging) access. Watch for regular blogging to resume later this week.