EdDriscoll.com

Posted 3/20/2004 08:46:45 PM by Edward Driscoll
JIU-JITSU: Orrin Judd notes that "Mr. Bush is doing something unique in American politics here: he's making the Senator a target of open ridicule. The campaign's message leap-frogged over negative and went straight to dismissive. Even more daring, it's the President himself taking the lead. The key to this will be to stay relatively light-handed and to avoid outright contempt. If they can do that and treat Mr. Kerry as an object of fun, it will be just devastating". Because the press has to cover the president, no matter how much they dislike him, it also forces them to put into print at least some of Kerry's innumerable gaffes and flip-flops, something they've been astonishingly reluctant to do.

Posted 3/20/2004 08:16:05 PM by Edward Driscoll
MEET THE PRESS: How will wide receiver Terrell Owens and the press in Philadelphia get on together? Larry Beil of Yahoo Sports has an article called, "Notes Before The Storm":

Owens often complained that the reporters in San Francisco were too harsh and tried to run him out of town. This guy has no idea about the media buzz saw he's about to encounter in Philly. It'll only take a couple of dropped balls – IN PRESEASON – to get the bubbles of discontent rising. Owens is such an avid basketball fan, you'd think he would have observed Allen Iverson's tumultuous relationship with Philly's media and opted to stick with Baltimore.

Beil is right--this could be brutal to watch, unless Owens truly delivers a spectacular season. Less than a month after his father died, the Philadelphia media trashed Brett Favre--and his late father. And then there are the boo birds...

Posted 3/20/2004 04:41:48 PM by Edward Driscoll
HOPE FOR THE OLD GUYS YET: Warren Sapp signs a seven-year contract with the Oakland Raiders. The Raiders still have major problems--not the least of which is an abundance of gray hair on their players' heads. But if he stays healthy, Sapp should help stabilize their defense this year, leaving Norv Turner to focus on what he does best, coaching the offense. While Sapp departs the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, they're at least getting a new wide receiver this year, as the Cowboys and Bucs have completed their swap of wide receivers Keyshawn Johnson and Joey Galloway. Don Banks of Sports Illustrated wrote that deal took so long to complete (a good month, it seems), "I believe Tom Landry and John McKay initiated the trade talks". UPDATE: Skip Bayless writes that acquiring Sapp is another coup for Al Davis, and payback for getting creamed by the Bucs in the Super Bowl last year. Who's next for the Raiders? Bayless writes, "Don't be surprised if Davis eventually trades for Bengals running back Corey Dillon at Davis' price. Dillon wants to be a Raider."

Posted 3/20/2004 02:41:39 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHY NO OUTRAGE OVER KELLY? Yesterday, we had some thoughts on Jack Kelly, who was discovered making stuff up at USA Today. Nick Gillespie of Reason wonders why there isn't the same level of outrage over Kelly as there was over Jayson Blair. Leftwing Blogger Atrios believes it's because of racism, but as one of Gillespie's commenters notes, "USA Today isn't the Times, and hasn't been (as far as I know) under scrutiny for editorial office shenanigans". It's worth remembering that Blair's firing came after three years of Howell Raines reworking the Times from a fairly staid, if left-leaning publication, to an activist one, all the while claiming:

Our greatest accomplishment as a profession is the development since World War II of a news reporting craft that is truly non-partisan, and non-ideological, and that strives to be independent of undue commercial or governmental influence....But we don't wear the political collar of our owners or the government or any political party. It is that legacy we must protect with our diligent stewardship. To do so means we must be aware of the energetic effort that is now underway to convince our readers that we are ideologues. It is an exercise of, in disinformation, of alarming proportions, this attempt to convince the audience of the world's most ideology-free newspapers that they're being subjected to agenda-driven news reflecting a liberal bias.

And as Bernard Goldberg made clear in Arrogance, stories that the rest of the media picks up on usually begin in the Times--and rarely, if ever, in USA Today. UPDATE: I just checked Memorandum and Technorati, and found that over 25 blogs, many of whom could safely be classified as conservative, or at least, right-leaning, have linked to the AP story on Kelly. ANOTHER UPDATE: Welcome OxBlog readers!

Posted 3/20/2004 02:29:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE ARTIST FORMERLY KNOWN AS MACHIAVELLI: Samizdata.net looks at The Prince. (I really liked 1999 and Purple Rain myself. But he began to lose me with Around The World in a Day and that whole symbol business. Oh wait, wrong fellow--nevermind.)

Posted 3/20/2004 01:44:57 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE AP/REUTERS' STYLEBOOK: Steven Plaut takes a satiric flip through "The Mass Media Guide on How to Become an 'Activist'".

Posted 3/20/2004 01:28:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
BUCHANAN'S WHITE WHALE: Lawrence Auster of Front Page writes of Pat Buchanan's obsession with Israel, "along with Israel's purported agents in America, the neoconservatives.":

As a sign of his obsession, at the very moment when America and its Coalition partners were launching the war against Iraq last year, and most Americans were focused on how to win this tremendous battle, Buchanan published a long diatribe in The American Conservative called "Whose War?", in which he charged that President Bush was in thrall to "the neoconservatives' agenda of endless wars on the Islamic world that serve only [emphasis added] the interests of a country other than the one he was elected to preserve and protect."

David Cohen of The Brothers Judd has some thoughts on Buchanan:

for about five minutes he thought that he was going to be president, [Buchanan] was captured by the demogoguery he thought he could use and then set aside, and he started his long, strange trip to his current position just the smallest bit to the right of the far left.

Cohen notes that "even in his heyday, [Buchanan] never met a Nazi war criminal he didn't like".

Posted 3/20/2004 10:51:45 AM by Edward Driscoll
FALLING DOWN: Robert Moran notes that "Not all spills are equal at the Washington Post". UPDATE: Powerline Blog looks at Kerry's shopping trip the day before his fall.

Posted 3/20/2004 10:48:47 AM by Edward Driscoll
IF AP APPLIED THE SAME SPIN TO PROTESTORS as they do to bloggers, this headline would read, "Few people Protest on Iraq War Anniversary". Charles Johnson notes that yesterday, "Even in the dark heart of idiotarianism, San Francisco, mere "hundreds" turned out for today's feeble-minded protests against the Iraq War". I always thought Scott Ott did a great job of putting the protestors at their peak into perfect perspective in January of 2003. (Sorry about that last sentence. Alliteration? You're soaking in it!) UPDATE: Power Line notes that the protestors aren't protesting against the war--which of course was over shortly after it began. Instead, in San Francisco, they're chaining themselves together and blocking theentrancee to Bechtel, one of the chief contractors involved in rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure. "I can understand how well-meaning people can be opposed to war, one of the greatest evils known to mankind, even in circumstances where their opposition is misguided. But it is a measure of the moral bankruptcy of the left that its protesters now march against reconstruction." Great point. UPDATE (4:20 PM): Roger L. Simon writes, "the real story , the relative failure of the demonstrations, is not addressed at all by CNN and only barely by MSNBC. What's up with that? (Well, it couldn't be more obvious.)" And Power Line (who's done a superb job on these protests, doing the analysis the traditional media used to do) notes who was sponsoring them: "International Action Center and International A.N.S.W.E.R., both Communist front groups run by the Workers World Party, whose leaders openly support Saddam Hussein and Kim il-Jong. Today's protests were led, for the most part, by these Communist front groups. Watch for that to be reported in your local newspaper." Riiiiiight....

Posted 3/19/2004 04:51:42 PM by Edward Driscoll
JFK JR. JR.: It's very difficult for me to imagine the original JFK cursing out a secret service man assigned to protect him during a photo op. On the other hand, it's not at all surprising to read John F'ing Kerry, while snow boarding in front of the press, called his agent a "son of a b*itch". After all, the man drops F-words in magazine interviews, reams out potential voters, and his wife calls a sitting president and his staff, "Asses of Evil". Earlier this week, we linked to an article on "The Perpetual Adolescent". Today, Steven Hayward asks, what sort of 60-year old man snowboards? (I'm waiting for Kerry to show up for a photo op at the skateboard park in the Great Mall of Milpitas in pads, shorts and a helmet, toting his board.) For all his faults, the original JFK, along with his wife, knew how to comport himself in public. The Kerrys could take a lesson from them.

Posted 3/19/2004 01:55:14 PM by Edward Driscoll
OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM, ONE YEAR LATER: A year ago, we liberated a country from a man who thought nothing of throwing his people, feet first, into plastic shredding machines. Or cutting out their tongues. Or having his female citizens raped by an officially appointed "violator of women's honor". Or having his sons torture his country's Olympic athletes. All the while controlling what was reported by no less a news organization than CNN, who had the gall to dub themselves the "Most Trusted Name in News". For a flashback to how events occurred last year, click here and then start scrolling up. There are numerous dead links and fog of war fuzziness, but I think it's still quite an interesting as-it-happens chronology. By American standards, I had no life last year: I blogged incessantly about the war, because I was living in a hotel room while my home was being remodeled, and the plumbing was off and the front entrance consisted of sheets of plywood nailed in to keep the elements out. In other words, compared to the people who lived in Iraq, I was living a life of unimaginable wealth, not to mention unimaginable personal freedom. (Not the least of which is the ability to say anything I want via this Weblog and my magazine articles, and not fear my new front door being kicked in.) How are things today? Be sure to check out Michael Graham's post on "The Year That Wasn't". The Wall Street Journal notes that "the natives must not be reading Reuters". And Stephen Green notes that "Germans are less optimistic about their future than Iraqis are." The media as a whole won't put the pieces together--won't remind people how despicable Saddam Hussein was. Or the now-unarguable proof that Saddam and Al Qaida worked together. Or the million or more people Saddam killed. Given the speed at which we liberated Iraq, and the astonishingly low number of soldiers killed, this should be a day we remember just as we remember V-E and V-J day. Or the day the Berlin Wall fell. In time, maybe it will be.

Posted 3/19/2004 11:49:10 AM by Edward Driscoll
COOKING THE BOOKS CERTAINLY DIDN'T BEGIN WITH JAYSON BLAIR: Jack Kelly, 43, had a 21 year career with USA Today and was five times nominated for a Pulitzer Prize before resigning in January "after admitting he conspired with a translator to mislead editors looking into the veracity of his reporting", according to AP. Their article adds, "USA Today said Friday that an examination of the work of journalist Jack Kelley found strong evidence that the newspaper's former star foreign correspondent had fabricated substantial portions of at least eight major stories".

Posted 3/18/2004 11:41:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
SEND THE BA'ATH A TUB FULL OF EMAIL! H.D. Miller has the email address for the Ba'ath party of Syria. "Give the Ba'ath a piece of your mind", he writes, "regarding the on-going crackdown against Kurdish pro-democracy demonstrators in Syria." Miller adds, "I probably won't help, but it certainly can't hurt to let these thugs and hoodlums know that the world is watching them."

Posted 3/18/2004 11:31:43 PM by Edward Driscoll
SPANISH TOURISM: One thing I haven't seen addressed by the Blogosphere in the back-to-back action of the Madrid train bombing and the replacement of Spain's government with Bush-hating, terrorist-appeasing Socialists is, will Spain's tourism from America take a nosedive? France's certainly did, and curiously, from what I've read, Chirac and company were genuinely surprised. It sort of reminds me of Gray Davis during California's dreadful rolling blackout period of a few years ago. Davis railed on about how he'd tear a new one to any power company who refused to supply him with electricity at rates he deemed appropriate. But when a utility said, "You know what? We think we're going to pass on building a generating station here. California doesn't seem too business-friendly right now. Have a nice life, Governor!", Davis seemed genuinely astonished that a business took his words seriously. (This is a huge paraphrase on my part. I remember the story, but I can't seem to input the right parameters to bring up a Webpage with the details via Google.) I wonder if Spain's new government will be equally surprised when revenue from tourism goes south. They'll draw exactly the wrong conclusion from it: tourists today know that a horrific terrorist attack can--and will--occur somewhere. What they care about is, what are you doing about it? (That's sheer speculation on my part, but it seems like common sense.)Spain's appeasement of terrorism doesn't seem like a message that cries out, "Come visit us! Come back to Spain!" when the subtext is, "We're now two-thirds softer on terrorism!" And that's a shame. I visited Spain for a weekend in the middle of a ten day trip to England back in 2000. At first, it was purely to satisfy my modern architecture Jones, and visit Mies van der Rohe's 1929 Barcelona Pavilion, generally considered to be one of the jewels of modern architecture, even by people who doesn't like much else in the genre. I spent many hours at the Pavilion, taking God knows how many shots of it (I think I went through three or four rolls of film on it alone. And yes, we finally bought a digital camera a year or so later.) But what I discovered beyond Mies's building was Barcelona itself, a marvelous city. I had interviewed Franz Schulze, the Chicago-based architecture critic, journalist and professor, for an article on Mies's furniture for Modernism magazine. He introduced me to the firm that arranges architecture tours for the Illinois Institute of Technology, where Mies taught architecture from the late 1930s (after fleeing Nazi Germany) until the late '50s, designing its campus in the interim. Our tour guide drove my wife and I around Barcelona in a private car with another woman driving, so our guide could concentrate on explaining the city to us. It's a beautiful, beautiful city. (you may very well be reading this and thinking, "no kidding, Sherlock". But sometimes I have to see these things for myself.) Up until 9/11, I wouldn't have hesitated to go back. After that terrible day, I'd probably think about it, and then bite the bullet and say, "what the hell". With an appeasing government in power, that's all changed. And I'll bet I'm not alone.

Posted 3/18/2004 04:33:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT DIGITAL DIVIDE? 200 million Americans, three-fourths of the US population, is online. But only a small minority have Weblogs, of course.

Posted 3/18/2004 03:55:18 PM by Edward Driscoll
KERRY'S FOREIGN ENDORSEMENTS: No link yet, but Drudge has an item on his home page that says:

KERRY: NO FOREIGN ENDORSEMENTS, PLEASE... Kerry Foreign Policy Advisor Rand Beers issued the following statement today: '...It is simply not appropriate for any foreign leader to endorse a candidate in America's presidential election. John Kerry does not seek, and will not accept, any such endorsements'...

Meanwhile, as it turns out, Kerry's already got one--from former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, complete with an anti-Semitic slur in it. Mohamad, you'll remember, was the fellow who told a summit of Islamic leaders last October that "Jews rule the world by proxy" and the world's 1.3 billion Muslims should unite, using nonviolent means for a "final victory." (President Bush issued Mohamad a stern rebuke shortly thereafter.) Given some of the places where Teresa Heinz has been spending her money, and her generally lackadaisical views on evil in the world, such an endorsement from Mohamad doesn't seem all that surprising. UPDATE: Here's another! Neville Chamberlain will no doubt be endorsing Sen. Kerry posthumously.

Posted 3/18/2004 01:04:39 PM by Edward Driscoll
FOURTEEN MINUTES, AND FIFTY NINE SECONDS: Time's almost up on Courtney Love's 15 minutes of fame. UPDATE: Speaking of 14:59, Jayson Blair's book sales aren't exactly shooting through the roof.

Posted 3/18/2004 12:46:06 PM by Edward Driscoll
FOLKS, THIS IS WHAT THEY INVENTED WEBLOGS FOR: A Georgia couple was arrested after a heated argument over The Passion turned violent. According to AP, "The two left the movie theater debating whether God the Father in the Holy Trinity was human or symbolic, and the argument heated up when they got home. "According to a police report, Melissa Davidson suffered injuries on her arm and face, while her husband had a scissors stab wound on his hand and his shirt was ripped off. He also allegedly punched a hole in a wall." My wife and I argued and debated the merits of the film for hours after we got home from seeing it on the Friday after it opened. We decided to write his and hers reviews and post them online rather than punching walls and stabbing each other. But hey, that's us!

Posted 3/18/2004 12:20:26 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE GLOBAL NEWSPAPER: Roger L. Simon has some thoughts on having the world's newspapers available online.

Posted 3/17/2004 10:24:12 PM by Edward Driscoll
SHADES OF TAWANA BRAWLEY: AP reports that a Claremont College (30 miles east of downtown Los Angeles) professor "who claimed she was targeted in a hate crime that stirred student protests at the Claremont colleges is suspected of staging the vandalism herself, police said Wednesday".

Posted 3/17/2004 05:28:07 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE QUOTE GENERATOR IS BROKEN AT REUTERS. Charles Johnson spotted it in the shop when it came to a couple of a photo captions featuring Spain's incoming socialists. UPDATE: Johnson spots more madness at Reuters. Better switch from Guinness to Shamrock Shakes next St. Patrick's day, fellows.

Posted 3/17/2004 05:17:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
GREAT LINE BY VIRGINIA POSTREL: "True liberation makes the personal apolitical".

Posted 3/17/2004 03:32:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
DICK CHENEY opened up a can of whoop-ass on John Kerry today. It's quite a speech. UPDATE: Scott Lindlaw of AP says, "White House political chief Karl Rove said Wednesday that President Bush had just begun to demonstrate the kind of targeted, multi-front campaign he plans against Democratic rival John Kerry." (On the other hand, Lindlaw was the fellow who has inserted blatant bias into his AP copy, so take it all with a grain of salt.)

Posted 3/17/2004 02:21:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
THERE'S NO BIAS AT THE NEW YORK TIMES. And when I say there's none, I do mean that there is a certain amount. Just check out the sea of "D's" in the list of campaign donations that San Francisco blogger Michael Petrelis has discovered.

Posted 3/17/2004 02:03:22 PM by Edward Driscoll
BOMB DESTROYS BAGHDAD HOTEL, "killing 27 people and leaving a jagged, 20-foot-wide crater just days before the anniversary of the start of the Iraq war", AP notes. And less than a week after the terrorist attack and its appeasement in Spain.

Posted 3/17/2004 01:42:15 PM by Edward Driscoll
SPEAKING OF OUTRAGEOUS, this is not something I want to see when I visit a men's room at JFK Airport in New York. I wonder if Virgin will be sued by Mick Jagger--their urinal design looks awfully close to the Rolling Stones' record label. (Wow, there's a sentence I never thought I'd write.)

Posted 3/17/2004 01:38:29 PM by Edward Driscoll
IN 1960, COMEDIAN MORT SAHL made a crack on one his records about the South sending "a couple of exchange students into the 20th century". Overall, the region has made enormous strides, but this is just outrageous.

Posted 3/17/2004 11:31:15 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE DIGITAL PUB: Vicki Smith has an interesting slant on my Tech Central Station article, and blogging in general. Of course, if the idea of a "digital pub" is what you're really shooting for with your Website, I'm not sure why you would choose Blog software as your site's main platform over say, vBulletin, which allows for a very professional-looking message board to go online quickly and (relatively) easily. (And of course, you could always combine the two--having a Blog for hot news and links, and an online forum for discussion.)

Posted 3/17/2004 10:47:40 AM by Edward Driscoll
MEL GIBSON BREAKS HOLLYWOOD'S 10 COMMANDMENTS: I've written about a few of these, in giving my take on The Passion and the incredible and unexpected level of success it's having. But using the "Ten Commandments" theme allows The Hollywood Reporter to lump them together quite nicely. The Blair Witch Project was a terrible film (my equilibrium and thus my stomach have barely recovered from watching two hours of unending handheld camerawork on a 30 foot high screen), but it had a brilliant marketing campaign that really put the Internet on the map in Hollywood's eyes as a marketing tool. It will be interesting to see if Hollywood incorporates any of Mel's unconventional filmmaking and marketing strategies in the future.

Posted 3/17/2004 02:19:13 AM by Edward Driscoll
HOWARD DEAN: Open mouth, insert foot.

Posted 3/16/2004 06:47:23 PM by Edward Driscoll
"ARE YOU A REPUBLICAN?" By now, you may very well have read or heard the browbeating that Kerry gave a potential voter in a townhall meeting in Bethlehem, PA on Sunday:

Kerry: No, wait, wait, wait, wait you asked me if I'd met with any leaders. Yes. I have had conversations with leaders, yes, recently. That's not your business, it's mine. I've met with foreign leaders for any [inaudible] purpose--I never said that. What I said was that I have heard from people who are leaders elsewhere in the world who don't appreciate the Bush administration approach and would love to see a change in the leadership of the United States. I'm talking our allies, I'm talking about people who were our friends nine months ago, I'm talking about people who ought to be at our side in Iraq and aren't because this administration has pushed them away in its arrogance, that's what I'm talking about. Are you a registered Republican? Are you a Republican? You answer the question. That's not an answer. Did you vote for George Bush? Did you vote for George Bush? Thank you.

James Taranto (who set the above lines in bold) has a great slant on this exchange:

Apparently the man said he did indeed vote for Bush. Perhaps it hasn't occurred to Kerry that if he is to win the presidency, he will have to persuade some Bush voters to support him instead. The only thing Kerry seems to stand for so far is hatred of Republicans, and that's not going to be sufficient to win him the White House.

How many people who voted for Ike in '56, or the first President Bush in '88 did Kennedy and Clinton get to switch allegiances during their campaigns? Remember the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s? Kerry doesn't. Of course, neither did Dean.

Posted 3/16/2004 04:37:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
IN ENGLAND, LIFE IMITATES BRAZIL, where David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, "will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than 3000 pounds for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted. The logic is that the innocent man shouldn't have been in prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation grey blankets".

Posted 3/16/2004 03:23:55 PM by Edward Driscoll
"THE WARNING KERRY IGNORED": Paul Sperry of The New York Post writes:

SEN. John Kerry boasts how he "sounded the alarm on terrorism years before 9/ 11," referring to his 1997 book "The New War." Too bad he didn't blast it when it really counted - four months before the hijackings, when he was hand-delivered evidence of serious security breaches at Logan International Airport, with specific warnings that terrorists could exploit them. Former FAA security officials say the Massachusetts senator had the power to prevent at least the Boston hijackings and save the World Trade Center and thousands of lives, yet he failed to take effective action after they gave him a prophetic warning that his state's main airport was vulnerable to multiple hijackings.

For a guy who views the War on Terrorism as a defensive battle to be fought largely via law enforcement, this is damning stuff. Jeff Goldstein asks:

So, will this story receive as much mainstream media play as, say, Turkeygate? Yeah, I know. Just kidding.

Nah--the beer's too watered down for that to happen.

Posted 3/16/2004 01:50:01 PM by Edward Driscoll
KERRY'S IMAGINARY FRIENDS: "for an experienced politician with a reputation for caution, Kerry comes out with a remarkable number of off-the-cuff blunders". It's starting to impact him in the polls.

Posted 3/16/2004 01:36:20 PM by Edward Driscoll
DOES DOLBY EX DESERVE A PLACE IN YOUR DEN? My latest Electronic House newsletter is now online.

Posted 3/16/2004 01:32:57 PM by Edward Driscoll
IRAN ERUPTS? Very interesting post on "The Corner". Glenn Reynolds also has some thoughts and links.

Posted 3/16/2004 01:14:24 PM by Edward Driscoll
OK, MAYBE M*A*S*H WAS WRONG: Sometimes, suicide isn't painless, especially when you try to crucify yourself(!), and then discover you're unable to nail your other hand to the board...

Posted 3/16/2004 12:24:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
SPREADS OUT THE TARGETS: Mike Wiliams explains why cars are safer than trains when it comes to protecting yourself from terrorism. I'm inclined to agree with him.

Posted 3/16/2004 12:20:14 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT DID THE BLOGOSPHERE THINK OF MY ARTICLE ABOUT IT IN TCS? Thanks to sites like Technorati and Memeorandum, there's a good roundup of coverage available by reading the blogs that both sites include in their searches.

Posted 3/16/2004 11:47:11 AM by Edward Driscoll
SPEAKING OF PERPETUAL ADOLESCENTS, "Like a three-year old throwing a tantrum at the toy store", John Tuvey, senior editor of Fanball.com writes, "Terrell Owens finally got his way", and is now a Philadelphia Eagle. UPDATE: Peter King of Sports Illustrated writes:

Though I hate the way it went down -- Baltimore was absolutely screwed for listening to the NFL Management Council tell it that San Francisco had a valid contract with Owens and was able to trade him anywhere it wished, meaning the Ravens lost out on every talented receiver in this year's free-agent market -- Owens probably has gone to the team that, with the possible exception of Dallas, could best handle him. [Philadelphis head coach Andy Reid], a mild-mannered, no-crisis guy, is the perfect coach to turn a cancerous player into a team player.

King says, "How Reid handles Owens will go a long way toward determining whether the Eagles will make it to their fourth straight NFC Championship Game this year. Or further".

Posted 3/16/2004 11:36:28 AM by Edward Driscoll
I COULD HAVE WRITTEN THIS ARTICLE ON "The Perpetual Adolescent", and really wish I had. Be sure to read Stanly Kurtz's thoughts on it, as well. UPDATE: Meanwhile in England, Theodore Dalrymple writes that "Mass drunkenness has turned us into a nation of barbarians":

There is something peculiar about modern British drunkenness, when you observe it close up. There is a quality of desperation, or hysteria, about it. The women shriek and scream in public, and no one laughs except at the top of his or her voice: it is as if everyone is trying to persuade everyone else what a good time they are having, the better to deceive themselves. A feeling of sadness overcomes the observer: these are people who do not know how to enjoy themselves and must therefore pretend. The drunkenness has an ideological component as well. To lack social or personal inhibitions is to distinguish oneself from those poor, misguided older generations who believed that self-restraint, at least in public, was a virtue. What terrible harm all those inhibitions and ideas of self-respect did! Everyone knows that you have to let your hair down at frequent intervals, and that if you do not, you will harm your health and emotional well-being most terribly. The young drunks in the centre of our towns and cities are not just drunk, they are triumphantly, ostentatiously drunk. They are celebrating the triumph of the egotistical lowest common denominator that has so thoroughly vanquished any idea that there is a higher and a lower, a better and a worse, in our culture. The impotent police, who would once have arrested people behaving in like fashion, wander through scenes of drunken debauchery that all too often turn to violence, but do absolutely nothing about them. If by some miracle they did, there would be hundreds of thousands of arrests each night. The drunkenness of the masses in effect taunts them, and represents the liberation of modern man from the social inhibitions that make him a civilised being. The drunkenness in our streets is the victory of brute impulse over all refinement, of stupidity over intelligence; and those who drink in this fashion challenge the rest of us insolently to do something about it.

"To foreigners", Dalrymple writes, "we are a nation that has lost all self-respect, that is charmless, brutal and stupid. They are right: we are barbarians, savages. If you think I exaggerate, visit the centre of any British town or city on a Saturday night". Thanks to my parents, I got just a taste of grown-up culture. How I long forlornly for its return.

Posted 3/16/2004 10:47:37 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE TIM ROBBINS/LYNDON LAROUCHE CONNECTION, revealed. For more on Robbins' play, click here, follow the links. By the way, it looks like Robbins has learned his lesson: he took a lot of flak for voting for Nader's Green Party in 2000. I guess his use of LaRouche-based material signals his return to the Democratic party... UPDATE: Tim Graham looks at the New York Times' carefully nuanced review of the play. ANOTHER UPDATE: Powerline Blog has some thoughts on Strauss, and a marvelous quote by him, as well.

Posted 3/16/2004 10:34:49 AM by Edward Driscoll
SHE BULLDOZED HER WAY INTO OUR HEARTS, one year ago today: Rachel Currie, that is. Charles Johnson writes:

This means that practically every media outlet in America will now run stories on her, tediously repeating all the lies that have long since been debunked. I was going to find a particularly bad one and link to it, but why bother? We all know the drill. They’re going to say she was “run over” by the bulldozer. She wasn’t. They’re going to say she was protecting the “home of a doctor.” She wasn’t. They’re going to say she was clearly visible to the bulldozer driver. She wasn’t. Some of them will even call her death “murder,” though it’s better described as suicide through sheer stupidity. The effort to make propaganda hay out of Rachel Corrie started before her body hit the ground, and has never stopped.

His photos of her are damning, proving Johnson's point that "Saint Rachel didn’t just hate Israel, she hated America too". Funny how those two hates often go together. And I don't have any urge to revise my initial thoughts from last year.

Posted 3/15/2004 11:39:42 PM by Edward Driscoll
SPEAKING OF THE MEDIA, yesterday I posted about Jayson Blair, and the lingering effects of the Clinton '90s, where "crime pays--if it's a big enough offense, and you're already very successful at the time you commit it". Clarence Page has some thoughts about Blair, along similar lines.

Posted 3/15/2004 09:40:06 PM by Edward Driscoll
MARK STEYN ON THE MEDIA and how they've covered Susan Lindauer, the journalist and Democratic staffer charged with working for Saddam's intelligence agency:

It's one thing for the press to be antiwar and feel Saddam should be given another decade or two to come into compliance with Security Council resolutions. It's quite another to be so smitten with the old butcher that your copy editors internally absorb Ba'ath Party tribal politics and assume that mere second cousinship with members of the Bush clan automatically puts you in the inner circle.

Steyn writes it's no wonder why "the media are held in such low regard by the public--in polls of the most respected professions we usually come somewhere between Nigerian e-mail scammers and serial pedophiles". That's brutal. Brutally honest, that is. It also explains why the media have been losing its audience--and simultaneously losing its employees--at a rapid clip from the 1990s to today. But there's more from Steyn:

Anyone who took the war seriously can certainly find fault with the administration. But not if you stand there like a 5-year-old boy and never get beyond pointing your fingers and sticking your tongue out: "Ooh, Bush lied. And Ashcroft's a big bully. And Cheney's stealing it all for his oil buddies. And you shouldn't mention the war in your campaign ads, because it's not fair. Nyaa-nyaa." Two hundred people died in Madrid because of a war Democrats refuse to admit exists. But hey, you never know, maybe the guy who did it will be a third cousin twice removed of Karl Rove.

Read the whole thing. Will the media learn? This recent "admission" by Boston Globe reporter Patrick Healy that he flubbed a key quote by John Kerry--despite the fact that Kerry has defended that very quote--sounds more like taking one for the team (and Kerry, its de facto leader) than any sort of responsible journalism.

Posted 3/15/2004 12:42:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
IS CNN HALF-FULL OR HALF-EMPTY? For CNN, what does 60 people protesting the Iraq war mean? Big news. How do they title an article that reports that the number of people with Weblogs is now in the seven digit range? "Study: Very few bloggers on Net". Thank you, thank you, thank you, CNN: you just made the point of my Tech Central Station article in a nutshell.

Posted 3/15/2004 12:29:54 PM by Edward Driscoll
"GOZER DOES NOT DWELL IN MY REFRIGERATOR": A friend sent this to my wife; it's a list of "The 213 Things Skippy is No Longer Allowed to Do in the U.S. Army". While some may view service in the military as requiring unnecessary discipline in order to maintain ranks, numbers 72, 80, and 116 seem especially sound to me.

Posted 3/15/2004 11:11:51 AM by Edward Driscoll
LAST APRIL, Jonah Goldberg wrote, "If I was the commanding officer in charge of sifting through these Iraqi files, I would be barking out orders to find the 'R' file -- for [Scott] Ritter." In The Journal today, Robert L. Pollock looks at "Saddam's Useful Idiots", and asks, "Did any Iraqi money filter back to American war critics?" Ritter is prominently mentioned, along with Democratic congressman David Bonior as having ties with Shakir al-Khafaji, a Detroit-area businessman whose name was included in a recently published list of individuals receiving oil money from Saddam Hussein.

Posted 3/15/2004 10:58:02 AM by Edward Driscoll
TUBULAR BUNNIES: Ever wandered what The Exorcist would look like if it featured animated bunnies? No? Me neither, to be honest. But these fellows did, and have produced "The Exorcist in 30 Seconds (and Re-Enacted By Bunnies)". Hey, no worse than "Lord of the Peeps"...

Posted 3/15/2004 10:48:46 AM by Edward Driscoll
HILTER YOUTH AND NATIONAL BOCIALISM: Joanne Jacobs notes a teachers' union official's attempt to equate charter schools with Nazis, and quotes from a newsletter which has this unintentionally hilarious line written by the president of the Federal Way Education Association, Michael Comstock:

To paraphrase what Joseph Gerbles, the Nazi propaganda minister said, 'Repeat anything enough times loudly enough, no matter how untrue it is, and people will begin to believe it.'

Neither Gerbles, Ron Vibbentrop nor Heimlich Bimmler could be reached for comment.

Posted 3/15/2004 10:30:39 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE SPANISH DEBACLE: Remember all the "If ___, then the terrorists will have won" cliches shortly after 9/11? After committing Spain's equivalent of 9/11 last week, guess what? They won--at the ballot box. InstaPundit has lots of thoughts and links. UPDATE: Virginia Postrel writes:

Warning to terrorists: Americans do not draw the same conclusions from massacres that the Spanish did. Americans tend to rally around the president and direct our anger outward.

At the risk of jettisoning any Kerry-like nuance, damn straight.

Posted 3/15/2004 10:20:22 AM by Edward Driscoll
A MODEST PROPOSAL: David Hogberg has some interesting suggestions for Kerry's vice-presidential nominees.

Posted 3/15/2004 01:59:37 AM by Edward Driscoll
IS THE DEER HUNTER ANTI-ASIAN? Interesting slant in The New Partisan about a film that captured five Academy Awards in 1979.

Posted 3/14/2004 11:26:09 PM by Edward Driscoll
"HANNAH ARENDT HAD IT RIGHT", Patrick Moynihan once told an interviewer. "She said one of the great advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive." Which is exactly what the critics of Bjorn Lomborg, the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist have tried to do, time and again. Only this time, as Dean Esmay writes, they've "been publicly upbraided and spanked by the Danish Ministry of Science and Technology".

Posted 3/14/2004 11:19:32 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE MUSIC MUST CHANGE: Dean Esmay says that rock is dead. Sadly, I'm inclined to believe him.

Posted 3/14/2004 10:59:04 PM by Edward Driscoll
WANT THE BLAIR FACTS? CRIME PAYS. One of the lessons of Bill Clinton and the 1990s was that if you cocked up on a spectacular enough scale, it wasn't necessarily the end of your career, because there's a thin enough line between fame and infamy to survive. So Bill buggers interns and subverts the law, but because he was the president, he'll always have lucrative new speeches to give, new articles and new books to sell, and new talk shows to appear on. While few men living have had the power that Clinton did, numerous celebrities have committed similar crimes and misdemeanors and have managed to maintain whatever level of power or fame they've achieved quite nicely afterwards Speaking of "Crimes and Misdemeanors", 50-something Woody Allen rogered his decade-long partner's adopted teenage daughter, but sells enough tickets in Europe and DVDs around the world, and is enough of a Hollywood icon that a studio will always give him a director's contract. Janet Jackson may have exposed herself to a worldwide primetime audience of parents and their kids and violated the decency standards of the television network which carried it, but so what? She's now probably guaranteed a minimum level of CDs she'll sell, concert halls she'll fill, and TV shows to appear on. And likewise with Jayson Blair. Sure, he cooked the books at The Times, but in his eyes, it's all OK, because the man was trying to keep him down. So let's give him a book deal and book him on all the talk shows! The lesson in all of this? Crime pays--if it's a big enough offense, and you're already very successful at the time you commit it. And morals? They're strictly for suckers.