Ed Driscoll.com: January 2005 Archives

Nostalgie De La Left

By Ed Driscoll · January 28, 2005 04:08 PM · Radical Chic

"Nostalgie de la boue" is a French phrase for "nostalgia for the mud". As this site explains:

"Nostalgie de la boue" means ascribing higher spiritual values to people and cultures considered "lower" than oneself, the romanticization of the faraway primitive which is also the equivalent of the lower class close to home. I have been submerged in such ideas since I was born and am just getting my head out of the waters. My parents romanticized Hungarian folk culture — my father photographed and published peasant architecture, my mother wore folk dresses, my uncle and father promoted native handicrafts in the weaving workshops they organized in the 1930's. I went much further in romanticizing the seemingly most unromantic Aztecs, leaping across an ocean, a continent and five centuries in revalidation.

* * *

But in fact it is more global and cuts more deeply than the recent history of the West. As Freud noted in Civilization and its Discontents, the civilized have always longed to be uncivilized and attributed great virtues to them. Tacitus admired the Germanic tribes, Herodotus the barbarian Scythians, Ibn Khaldun the nomadic Beduin, and the Chinese the Mongols. Bruce Chatwin's admiration of nomads in recent popular books is nothing new. Even the sixteenth-century Aztecs considered their primitive and nomadic ancestors to be superior to themselves. The nostalgia for the mud of origins seems to begin as soon as one foot is out of the mud, and history has probably seen many Lady Chatterleys in love with a hard-to-understand blue collar accent. Note that "civilization" is often imagined as feminine, searching for that lost, primitive, masculine lover.

Many of us are dissatisfied or bored with our own civilization, whether by that we mean New York City or the village of Walpi at Hopi. It is not surprising that until Utopias and Marx most peoples put the Golden Age into the past, or into far-away lands where men and women have more integrity despite, or because of, the paucity of their possessions. It may be said for us that massive technological change since the eighteenth century may be responsible for an equally massive ideology of primitivism, but primitivism as an idea is not new, it is only more widespread and institutionalized. The Hollywood movie in which the poor hero strikes it rich, or the homeless man teaches the rich how to live is simply a modern version of the folk tale in which the youngest (i.e. weakest and poorest) son defeats the dragon and marries the princess. Princesses always like these folk heroes.

By now, you've probably read about Colorado professor Ward Churchill, who described the 3000 victims of the terrorist attack on 9/11 as "the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers". And you've seen the photos of Churchill that Glenn Reynolds and Jonah Goldberg have linked to. As Glenn writes:

Isn't he exactly what you imagined? Shoulder-length hair, grimly self-righteous expression, black turtleneck, Abbie Hoffman sunglasses. A man whose look, like his rhetoric, is frozen in the amber of 1969.

The same kind of guys, looking the same way, were saying the same kinds of things when I was younger than my daughter is now. When will Left catch up with the times?

Back in August, I wrote about the flipover that occurred in politics amongst the right and the left: the right have become the party of the working man, the average, everyday person, and the left increasingly, the party of wealthy elites. (See: Kerry, John F.)

There's also been a similar crossover in terms of love of nostalgia. Archie and Edith Bunker, Norman Lear's parody of a aging conservative couple coping with their radical chic son, started off each show by warbling, "Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again". (Now, I don't know many conservatives who want Hoover back; I know at least a couple who'd happily take Calvin Coolidge, though.)

Archie and Edith wanted to live in "the good old days" of World War II and Ike, in a TV show that aired originally in the early 1970s, an era when the left was still routinely reminding people not to trust anyone over 30 (as late as 1979, Bruce Springsteen, on his 30th birthday, quipped to his audience, "well, I guess I'm 30--I can't trust myself now!"), and long before liberals made peace with what Tom Brokaw would eventually dub "The Greatest Generation".

But since 9/11, increasingly, it's been the left who've wanted to live in the past. If every war is Vietnam, then every protest is Selma and Chicago in '68. Even down to adopting the clothes of the '60s and the peace symbol and its accompanying two-fingers hand gesture, which was for almost 30 years was seen as an ossified remnant of the late 1960s.

Jonah Goldberg once wrote that nostalgia is particularly unhealthy for the left:

Nostalgia is common to all ideologies (even among libertarians and their unkempt cousins, the anarchists). But conservative nostalgia is almost always geared at recreating communities of the past. Therefore nostalgia is helpful for the right in that it reminds us what should be conserved. Left-nostalgia, however, is invariably aimed at recreating movements, not communities, of the past. This makes Left-nostalgia particularly pathetic, since all successful progressive movements are forward-looking. Conserving in a progressive movement is like trying to tie your shoelaces while running downhill.

Just this past December, Michael Barone also wrote about nostalgia on the left:

Once upon a time, liberals were the folks who wanted to change society. They thought existing institutions were unjust and that individuals needed protection against the workings of the market. They looked forward to a society that would be different.

To a considerable extent, 20th century liberals achieved many of their goals. Racial segregation was abolished. An economic safety net was constructed. Government issued regulations were set up to protect the environment. Few Americans want to undo these changes. But they may want others.

Looking back on election year 2004, I am struck by how many of the constituencies supporting Democratic candidates oppose, rather than seek, change -- how they are motivated not by ideas about how to change the future, but by something like nostalgia for the past.

As Paul Mirengoff of Power Line notes:

The Democratic party, [Barone] argues, is defined by 1930 era views on social security, 60s views on the state of race relations and the use of military force, and 70s views on feminism. Cosmetically at least, this state of affairs constitutes a reversal of roles from 1996 when the Democrats claimed they couldn't "stop thinking about tomorrow," while Bob Dole promised to be "a bridge to the past."

Actually, using "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow", while it permanently ruined that song for me, if only out of sheer repetition in 1992, was probably a masterstroke by Bill Clinton, James Carville, et al. It helped to subliminally signal that Bill, Al and Hillary were true "New Democrats" (while reminding the rest of us how painful the Carter years were, both economically--and often sonically as well).

But as Orrin Judd noted yesterday in Tech Central Station, the New Democrats are dead--or least in a long period of hibernation. Instead, they've been replaced with the radical chic of the late '60s and early '70s; both in terms of its then funky chic, now hopelessly retro dress, and its ideas.

This is a crucial period for the left: they've lost two consecutive presidential elections, Congress for a decade, and the Senate for almost as long. They've also acted increasingly shabbily in reaction to 9/11, of which Churchill's (what a paradoxical name for the guy) 3000 "little Eichmanns" quote is merely the latest manifestation. Is there room for a comeback? Only if Hillary runs a brilliant campaign (and even then, she'll probably have to deal with a Republican Congress and Senate, unless she has very, very long coattails).

Or leftwing elites could try tacking closer to the center.

To paraphrase something that David Horowitz wrote in Radical Son, in the 1950s, Bill Buckley was able to create a new conservatism by casting out the John Birchers and their anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories. Now it's the left's turn to try to do much the same.

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We're Back

By Ed Driscoll · January 28, 2005 03:26 PM ·

Problems--apparently with my ISP--prevented me from updating the Weblog for much of the day. The post below says it was posted at 10:32 AM. That's when I wrote it, but it didn't uploaded until just a moment ago.

Not sure what happened; but hopefully we're back in business.

Burn, Baby, Burn; Run Arnold Run

By Ed Driscoll · January 28, 2005 10:32 AM · Hollywood, Interrupted

Katherine Mangu-Ward has a lot of fun reviewing The Discovery Channel's Pompeii: The Last Day, which airs this Sunday.

Also airing this Sunday is See Arnold Run, which A&E has been advertising on National Review, InstaPundit, and other conservative, or conservative-friendly sites.

Cathy Seipp says that "It goes down easy, just like a lollipop", and its content has just as much nutrional value. "If you spent the recall sitting slack-jawed in front of some computer game instead of reading about the adventures of Arnold and company, you'll probably learn something from the movie.":

But you wouldn't have any notion that the recall involved issues other than possible groping and some vague glitches in the California dream. For the record, I'm pleased that Arnold won; or at least, pleased that Gray Davis is out. But I voted for Tom McClintock, who (unlike Arianna) was a serious candidate, got a respectable number of votes, and (also unlike Arianna) concerned himself during a state campaign with state issues, not foreign policy.

You wouldn't have any idea from See Arnold Run that McClintock was even in the race, though. He doesn't appear in the film, although someone playing Gary Coleman does. Gray Davis himself is only here for a moment, when Prochnow-as-Scharzenegger sees him on TV and mutters, "I'm bigger, stronger, greater!" Perfectly true, as it turned out. But there was more to the recall than that.

So the fall of Pompeii or the rise of the Terminator.

Either way, it's something to watch while waiting for next Sunday...

Update: This also sounds like quality Sunday viewing.

Crawford Versus Trenton

By Ed Driscoll · January 27, 2005 08:49 PM · The Making of the President

Christie Whitman believes that the core of the GOP should move back to its centrist mid-20th century Rockefeller roots. Patrick Ruffini compares and contrasts her re-election performance to another, more conservative Republican. (Who hopefully won't try to replicate this gesture by Whitman, incidentally.)

(Via PoliPundit.)

This Wouldn't Have Happened Under President Kerry

By Ed Driscoll · January 27, 2005 08:16 PM · Muggeridge's Law

"Lawmakers Look to Tax Cosmetic Surgery"

Hey, they're looking at tax shopping bags--why should plastic surgery be all that surprising?

And politicians on the other side of the pond aren't afraid to imitate the odd Monty Python sketch as well when it comes to raising additional funds.

The Bubble Bowl

By Ed Driscoll · January 27, 2005 01:06 PM · Run To Daylight

Five years ago, the Internet bubble peaked, and the lights would soon go out on hundreds, if not thousands, of ill-conceived Internet-based business ventures. But not before more than a dozen of them spent an average of $2.2 million for 30-second spots during Super Bowl XXXIV, which featured the St. Louis Rams and the Tennessee Titans.

Forbes has an amusing slide show of the ads that ran on that halcyon day--and where the companies that paid for them are today.

Welcome To Academic Disneyland

By Ed Driscoll · January 27, 2005 12:45 AM · Bobos In Paradise · God And Man At Dupont University

Almost exactly one year ago, Washington Post journalist Anne Applebaum wrote a terrific lead to a column about 2004's feminist kerfuffle of the century in academia:

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

As George Will notes, the long bitter argument again turned into farce earlier this month.

Update: For more academic farce, Roger Kimball has some thoughts on Catharine MacKinnon, tenured professor at the University of Michigan Law School, and founder of what has been dubbed "feminist fundamentalism", including the banning of all pornography, First Ammendment be damned:

it is worth remembering that virtually all advanced societies produce pornography; its partisans call it--or the forms of it they approve of--"erotica." This does not, I hasten to add, mean that the ubiquity of pornography is a reason that its production and circulation should not be restricted in various ways. In most societies, it is: often by indirect social pressure as much as by law. The point is that in a free society, people are legally "allowed" to do many things that we hope they will forbear doing. The limits of permissible behavior are not the same as the limits of desirable behavior. We count on upbringing, education, and socialization to nudge us closer to the latter. Because we value freedom, we grant the latitude to err.
It is this that MacKinnon cannot abide. Thus she advocates a sweeping program of censorship that would restrict not only pornography but also "materials that promote inequality." This brings us to what is most radical in MacKinnon's thought. Although pornography is her chief subject, her goal is not simply the eradication of smut. For her, pornography is a metaphor, a crystallization, of social and sexual inequality. Banishing pornography is only one element in a campaign to revolutionize the law and, with it, all of society. MacKinnon calls for "a new model for freedom of expression in which the free speech position no longer supports social dominance, as it does now." What she opposes even more than pornography is what she calls "the stupid theory of equality"--the theory, that is, according to which everyone is equal under the law. Because some people are disadvantaged, she argues, they deserve unequal (i.e., preferential) treatment in order to establish "true" equality. Hence she wishes to replace the "abstract rights" guaranteed by the Constitution with a menu of "substantive rights."

What would this mean? The short answer is a new feminist tyranny. MacKinnon tells us that she looks forward to the imposition of a "nondominant authority." This marvelous Orwellian oxymoron--even she admits that it is currently "unthinkable"--perfectly epitomizes her approach to social policy. Tyranny is necessary to establish freedom, while the rule of law must be broken to make room for a "higher" law. To Catharine MacKinnon, it looks like the promised land. In fact, as our ravaged times have shown repeatedly, it is a recipe for disaster.

Nice to see tuition dollars being spent so wisely.

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"One Paycheck Away"

By Ed Driscoll · January 27, 2005 12:25 AM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

Back in the late 1980s, when homelessness first began to appear on the media's radar, a cliche amongst leftwing politicians was that "we're all just one paycheck away" from being homeless ourselves.

Naturally, the media picked up and ran with that idea as far as they could, and any claim to the contrary--that homelessness was often as a result of mental illness, substance abuse, or both--was samizdat.

To read this detailed, link-filled, and nuanced (to borrow from Senator Kerry's vocabulary for a moment) post on Instapundit is to understand just what a quantum leap the new media is over the old. Click on over already, if you haven't yet read it yourself.

Welcome to Soviet Disneyland

By Ed Driscoll · January 27, 2005 12:02 AM · The Future and its Enemies · The Gulag Archipelago

Matthew Davis of Flak Magazine looks at a 578-acre park in northwest Moscow known by its Russian initials, VDNKh:

It houses more than 80 pavilions and monuments originally designed to showcase the achievements of the USSR. Each one is devoted to a specific aspect of the Soviet Union: agriculture, economics, science, industry and hunting, to name a few. And of course, there's the cosmonaut pavilion.

The place is a theme park of ideology, a carnival of communism. VDNKh was designed solely to boost the glory of the State. Welcome to Soviet Disneyland.

VDNKh is lined with once-grand boulevards, fountains and statues, all adorned with the icons of communism. When Stalin had it built in 1939, it was open to all Russians as a kind of state-approved Soviet world's fair. Visitors would flock to the site for a day and be duly dazzled by the all-providing power of the State. Then they'd go line up for bread.

The years following the Empire's collapse saw a knee-jerk purge of all things Soviet [that's knee-jerk liberalism of the very best kind--Ed] from public spaces: streets were renamed, commemorative plaques were defaced, and hundreds of statues were torn down. Indeed, VNDKh is one of the few bastions of the Soviet State left that generations too young to remember the Empire can visit.

Omniously, Davis writes that with its economy sputtering, there's a growing nostalgia in Russia for its Soviet past:

According to French journalist Jean-Marie Chauvier, Russians are jaded by the fact that most are worse off now then they were under communism, as the country is now run by a core of private oligarchs. Neo-Communist political parties have repeatedly tried to pounce on this. Glossing over the gulags, censorship and bread lines of the old system, they call for a return to the guaranteed security of Communist days. More and more people are listening.

They should pretty happy with Vladimir Putin then--under his leadership, Russia is now considered "Not Free" by the American-based Freedom House institute. It appears a growing number of Russians would like him to finish the job.

The Man Who Made Mies

By Ed Driscoll · January 26, 2005 08:42 PM · From Bauhaus To Our House · The Substance of Style

I just read on the New Criterion's Weblog that Philip Johnson died yesterday at age 98. Johnson was a pretty good architect, but an astonishing impresario of architecture--he helped establish the Museum of Modern Art's architectural section, which he also ran for many years.

More importantly, Johnson (at left and in the background in this photo from my first National Review Online article in 2001) helped Mies van der Rohe escape the Nazis in the 1930s and emigrate to Chicago; and Mies would, for better or worse, make modernism--and specifically, his version of it--the dominant form of urban architecture in America from the end of World War II until the late 1970s.

Roger Kimball has a long, detailed and well-measured memoriam to Johnson--which showcases the highs, and the lows (and the lows were staggeringly low), of his long and checkered life and career.

The Duality of Miles Davis

By Ed Driscoll · January 26, 2005 05:05 PM · All You Need Is Ears

I'm doing a review of Miles Electric, which is a new DVD highlighting Miles Davis' jazz/rock fusion performance at England's Isle of Wight, a Woodstock-style festival that held a half-million people.

Needless to say, I'll let you know when it's online. But while I was polishing the piece and inserting hyperlinks last night, I came across this quote in Wikipedia:

In 1987 Davis attended a reception in honor of Ray Charles at Ronald Reagan's White House. A Washington society lady, seated next to him, asked him what he had done to be invited. "Well," Davis replied, "I've changed music four or five times. What have you done of any importance other than be white?"

I tend to forget that while Miles was a staggeringly talented artist, that talent was wrapped up with an awful, misogynist streak.

"Tender & Flaky"

By Ed Driscoll · January 26, 2005 05:05 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The Memory Hole

Tim Graham and Brent Bozell note that references to LBJ's attorney general, Ramsey Clark's latest gig (defending Saddam Hussein) seem to have gone down the memory holes at the New York Times and Washington Post.

Go figure.

The Electric Kool-Aid SOTU Test

By Ed Driscoll · January 26, 2005 04:54 PM · Democracy In America

Viking Pundit has a good test coming up early next month to see if how serious the Democrats are about moving forward, or remaining mired in reactionism.

(Via Lorie Byrd.)

"More Peyton Place than Galt's Gulch"

By Ed Driscoll · January 26, 2005 12:34 PM · Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal

Andrew Stuttaford has a nice, balanced memoriam in the The New York Sun to Ayn Rand; 2005 is the centennial of her birth:

Rand's nonfiction may have a greater claim to intellectual respectability, but it was the lurid, occasionally harsh, simplicities of her novels that would deliver her message to the mass audience she believed was out there. She was right. Her key insight was to realize that there was an appetite among Americans for a moral case for capitalism. In a restless age that believed in the Big Answer, neither historical tradition nor utilitarian notions of efficiency would suffice. Ayn Rand gave Americans that case, perhaps not the best case, but a case, and she knew how to sell it.

The establishment always disapproved. Critics sneered. Academics jeered. The publishers Macmillan turned down "Anthem" (1938), saying that Rand, a refugee from the Soviet Union, "did not understand socialism." Oh, but she did, and so did those millions of Americans who bought her books, books that played their part in ensuring that the dull orthodoxies of collectivism never prevailed here.

The last image in Mr. Britting's biography is of an exultant Rand speaking at a conference in New Orleans in 1981, the final public appearance of this magnificent, brilliant oddball. Her hosts tried to lure her there with the promise of payment in gold coins and travel in a private rail car.

Needless to say, she accepted.

Read the whole thing.

From Toast of the Town to Simply Toast

By Ed Driscoll · January 25, 2005 03:53 PM · Hollywood, Interrupted · Radical Chic

Back in June, Michael Moore was the toast of not just one, but two towns: Hollywood and the left side of the Senate in Washington, DC. But today, since Fahrenheit 9/11 failed to accomplish its mission, he's simply toast. Moore's film is thoroughly ignored by the Academy Awards, and the left is completely silent about the snub. Jim Geraghty has some thoughts why; as does Roger L. Simon.

"Paper Was Added So As Not To Discriminate"

By Ed Driscoll · January 25, 2005 03:29 PM · Muggeridge's Law · The Return of the Primitive

Just when you think San Francisco can't get any further into the loony thickets of political correctness and environmental madness run amok...it does.

15 Yard Penalty; Intentional Godwin's Law Violation!

By Ed Driscoll · January 25, 2005 01:18 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The Reich Stuff

George Bush, at least for today, is no longer Hitler in the left's eyes. Because today, according to Ted Turner, it's Fox News' turn to play Hitler:

Ted Turner called FOX an arm of the Bush administration and compared FOXNEWS's popularity to Adolph Hitler's popular election to run Germany before WWII.

Turner made the controversial comments before a standing-room-only crowd at the National Association for Television Programming Executives's opening session Tuesday.

His no-nonsense, humorous approach during the one-hour Q&A generated frequent loud applause and laughter, BROADCASTING & CABLE reports.

While FOX may be the largest news network [and has overtaken Turner's CNN], it's not the best, Turner said.

He followed up by pointing out that Adolph Hitler got the most votes when he was elected to run Germany prior to WWII. He said the network is the propaganda tool for the Bush Administration.

"There's nothing wrong with that. It's certainly legal. But it does pose problems for our democracy. Particularly when the news is dumbed down," leaving voters without critical information on politics and world events and overloaded with fluff," he said.

As Dennis Miller said in 2003:

The Left is so busy saying John Ashcroft is Hitler, and President Bush is Hitler, and Rudy Giuliani is Hitler that the only guy they wouldn’t call Hitler was the foreign guy with the mustache who was throwing people who disagreed with him into the wood-chipper.

Of course, I guess for Ted, comparing Fox News to a hairy-faced strong man is a compliment--he's certainly always been eager to whitewash or make deals with them.

What a Difference a Couple of Years Makes...

By Ed Driscoll · January 25, 2005 10:31 AM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

Over the weekend, Glenn Reynolds wrote:

The press did its best to ignore the Afghan elections. I suspect that, since that's not an option with the Iraqi vote, they'll be doing their best to portray it as a failure somehow. I also suspect that it won't work. One of the things that made press coverage so damaging in Vietnam was that it was the first time anyone remembered American reporters saying bad things about an American war effort. By now, hardly anyone is alive who remembers anything else.

Meanwhile, the Media Research Center has an amusing reminder of how enthusiastically the press covered election night in Iraq just two years ago. What's changed to sour them on the whole process since then??

More Carson

By Ed Driscoll · January 25, 2005 09:28 AM · Hollywood, Interrupted

Raymond Siller, who was Johnny Carson's head writer for 14 years until 1988, has a warm, yet honest memoriam in The Wall Street Journal.

And James Lileks wrote yesterday, "you didn’t want to live in an era where Johnny Carson wasn’t cool. And I hope we never do."

I'll second that.

Hugh Hewitt's 95 Theses

By Ed Driscoll · January 24, 2005 08:33 PM · The New, New Journalism

I'm safely back in San Jose after a day spent in airplanes and airports, and my interview with Hugh Hewitt about Blog is online at Tech Central Station.

Tomorrow's Guitars Today

By Ed Driscoll · January 23, 2005 05:09 PM · All You Need Is Ears

Interesting thread at the Les Paul Forum: is there a Pete Townshend-signature Les Paul electric guitar in the works from Gibson?

In the mid-1970s, Townshend began using (and frequently destroying) a series of specially modified Gibson Les Paul Deluxes as his main stage instrument.

I've written several times about what an influence Townshend was when I first began to play guitar and record music; and having seen this model guitar in action in the Who's classic midnight movie, The Kids Are Alright, I'll be very curious to see if this axe comes to fruition.

EdDriscoll.com: bringing you tomorrow's guitars based on yesterday's superstar axes today.

Or something like that.

Speaking of the Nixon Era

By Ed Driscoll · January 23, 2005 04:00 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

To paraphrase "Thomas the Wraith's" comments, Woodward and Bernstein must be laughing their Faber Eberhards off over the Washington Post's breathtaking wartime coverage--of Iraqi men, their stroke material, and their moms.

Meanwhile, Iowahawk is in the field with his own exclusive battlefield coverage:

Today Hassan, reborn as "Mohammed al-Vader," has formed his own splinter cell to violently resist American occupation, and offers an apocryphal warning.

"Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed, occupiers," he says darkly. "The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force."

He's got video as well...

Another Famous Death

By Ed Driscoll · January 23, 2005 03:46 PM · The Making of the President

While she's much more of a footnote in history, especially when compared with Johnny Carson, it's worth nothing that Rose Mary Woods died, at age 87.

Orrin Judd has a few wry thoughts about President Nixon's secretary and her infamous right foot.

Johnny Carson Died

By Ed Driscoll · January 23, 2005 01:37 PM · Hollywood, Interrupted

Just got to my hotel near the Philadelphia Airport and turned on the set to watch the Eagles/Falcons game, and heard that Johnny Carson passed away at age 79, of emphysema. USA Today has details, as does The Wall Street Journal, if you're a subscriber.

As a kid, it was always a treat when I could stay up to catch Carson; he always seemed cool and sophisticated, even if his sketch comedy could frequently be banal. He hosted the Tonight Show for three decades, an astonishing run for anyone in show business.

Scott Johnson of Power Line has some additional thoughts and links.

Update: For a less sentimental look, there's much truth in this brutally honest memorium by Terry Teachout.

And this paragraph by Jeff Jarvis about the era that Carson represented is certainly spot-on:

Carson also represented the golden age of America's shared experience in media. That era lasted about three decades, from the late '50s to the late '80s, when the three networks turned most cities into one-newspaper towns and we all watched the same thing. I don't regret that era dying; it means we now have more choice and choice equals control. But it was a unique time in our culture, when popular culture became a common platform, a common touchstone for Americans. We all got Johnny's jokes.

I have fond memories of that era as well--I think I was genetically conditioned to consume mass culture. But while it's a shame that what's left in pop culture has coarsened since Carson's peak, like Jarvis, I'm not sorry that era of mass-media dominance is over, either.

The Emotional Power of Vintage Sounds

By Ed Driscoll · January 23, 2005 07:59 AM · All You Need Is Ears

Interesting post on (the very appropriately titled, in this case) Legacy Matters blog about the emotional power of vintage sounds. Because we don't hear such sounds these days as flashbulb pops and the click-clacking of manual typewriters, they instantly conjure up nostalgic memories.

It sort of reminds me of the review I wrote in 2003 on film editor Walter Murch's book, where he discussed how important sound--and carefully choosing the right sounds--is for creating atmosphere in movies.

Inauguration Impromtus

By Ed Driscoll · January 22, 2005 09:10 PM · The Making of the President

I haven't mentioned anything about President Bush's second inaugural, because (a) I've been traveling and (b) thousands of other blogs and news sources already have. But Jay Nordlinger has his usual pithy collection of Impromtus, with a timely inaugural theme.

Update: Patrick Ruffini also has lots of thoughts--and links--on the inauguration. Just keep scrolling.

The Ultimate Neocon?

By Ed Driscoll · January 22, 2005 08:06 PM · The Future and its Enemies

Michael Rosen writes that Harvard's Lawrence Summers has won unlikely plaudits from conservatives by willing to upset the sacred cows of academia.

Power Line and Ruth Marcus also have some thoughts.

Fisking Friedman

By Ed Driscoll · January 22, 2005 05:40 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

New Sisyphus fisks the New York Times' Thomas Friedman within an inch of his newsprint.

(Via Hugh Hewitt.)

Resilience Vs. Anticipation

By Ed Driscoll · January 22, 2005 05:01 PM · Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal · The Perfect Storm

Watching South Jersey get dumped with 10-inches of snow, I can't help but think of this classic piece by Virginia Postrel on how the weather creates very different mindsets in Silicon Valley and the East Coast.

National News Should Take A Cue From Local TV

By Ed Driscoll · January 22, 2005 12:55 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

I'm in a south Jersey hotel room watching snow--and lots and lots and lots of it--falling. The Philadelphia TV news shows are telling everyone, in case they couldn't figure it out for themselves, that snow--and lots and lots and lots of it--is falling. But they're also busy explaining what role it will play in Philadelphia Eagles' NFC Championship playoff game tomorrow against the Atlanta Falcons, happily interviewing local Eagles fans in green jerseys, and TV newscasters are frequently cheerfully yelling, "Go Eagles!" as they sign-off.

In other words, they're happily rooting for the hometown team.

Cats And Dogs Living Together

By Ed Driscoll · January 21, 2005 10:09 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

I'm not really blogging at the moment, but I couldn't help noticing this: National Review is praising a PBS documentary--on Fidel Castro!

That's got to be some kind of progress for PBS; I hope it happens more often.

Sorry For The Lack Of Posts

By Ed Driscoll · January 21, 2005 09:37 PM ·

Sorry for the lack posts these past few days--I've been in New Jersey visiting my parents--and dodging what looks like it could be a tremendous blizzard. More on Monday--if not sooner.

Fusionism In The Blogosphere

By Ed Driscoll · January 19, 2005 01:21 AM · The New, New Journalism

Back in August, Kenneth Silber explained the definition and origin of the word "Fusionism" in Tech Central Station:

Like the man who's surprised to learn he's been speaking prose all his life, the fusionist is a political category whose members may operate without much awareness of their label. Fusionism is the idea, named and developed decades ago by Frank Meyer of National Review, that conservatism and libertarianism share a common agenda. Thus, the fusionist believes that conservatives and libertarians ought to be allies -- and indeed that their respective philosophies are largely or essentially combinable into a coherent body of thought.

Fusionism, whether going by that name or not, has long had both adherents and detractors on the rightward side of the American political spectrum.

Pejman Yousefzadeh says it's working surprisingly well in the Blogosphere.

(Via the man who fuses Weblogs, crushed ice, vodka, vermouth and olives.)

Europe As Bosnia

By Ed Driscoll · January 18, 2005 10:33 PM · War And Anti-War

Steve Green has some thoughts on postmodern warfare.

Blame The Readers

By Ed Driscoll · January 18, 2005 10:14 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

Why is newspaper circulation tanking? Evan Cornog, publisher of The Columbia Journalism Review, writes, "Perhaps we should, to an extent, blame the readers".

Writing in Tech Central Station, Jay Currie begs to differ.

Musicblogging

By Ed Driscoll · January 18, 2005 07:10 PM · All You Need Is Ears

The Professor has a long post with lots of links about his home recording efforts, and that of others in the Blogosphere, including myself.

He links to my Blogcritics post on Cakewalk's Sonar; and I need to write an update for Blogcritics on this EH newsletter about TC-Helicon's PowerCore effects processor. The EH newsletters are limited to 500-600 words, and I'd like to write a bit more about what it can do, especially in terms of processing vocals.

I wrote on Sunday night that this is a golden age for football junkies. It's also a golden for home recording, especially if you're someone like me who remembers the "stone knives and bearskins" era in the 1980s.

Springtime For Harry

By Ed Driscoll · January 17, 2005 08:28 PM · Radical Chic · The Reich Stuff

Mark Steyn puts Prince Harry's Nazi dress-up moment in context:

Personally, I found the sight of the Prince of Wales climbing into the full Highgrove hejab for dinner with that bin Laden brother a week after the 9/11 slaughter far more disquieting: it seemed a rather more conscious act of identification than his son's party get-up. But a good indication of societal decadence is when it prefers to obsess over fictional offences rather than real ones.

I suppose it's possible that, should fate bring Harry to the throne, he'd turn into a Victor Emmanuel or King Carol of Romania and lend a constitutional figleaf to some Fascist regime. But worrying about a minor Royal schoolboy's alleged Nazi bent seems something of an indulgence at a time when the neo-Nazis get as many votes in Saxony's elections as Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party; when from Marseilles to Paris, Jews are being attacked and their homes, schools, kosher butchers, synagogues and cemeteries burnt and desecrated in a low-level intifada that's been going on so long the political establishment now accepts it as a normal feature of French life; and when the Berlin police advise Jews not to go out in public wearing any identifying marks of their faith. It's not just Nazi insignia you don't see in Germany these days; Nazi wise, the uniforms are the least of it.

Read the whole thing.

Update: James Lileks (in a pretty brave column for a blue state newspaper) wonders what sort of reaction Harry would have received if he had been photographed "wearing a hammer and sickle or a Che shirt".

Welcome To The Future

By Ed Driscoll · January 17, 2005 04:54 PM · The Substance of Style

Two words. Just two simple words, and it's easy to see how far mankind has come.

Customized M&Ms.

Customized freakin' M&Ms!

The future is now--and I can only wonder if Van Halen's lawyers have begun to update their contracts to reflect this.

What MLK Erased

By Ed Driscoll · January 17, 2005 02:50 PM ·

Back in April, I linked to these photos from Virginia Postrel's Website. On Martin Luther King Day, it's worth revisiting them.

Conventional Wisdom, Blue State Style

By Ed Driscoll · January 17, 2005 02:19 PM · Bobos In Paradise

John Leo explores the conventional wisdom of those in the blue state state-of-mind.

Life Imitates Lileks

By Ed Driscoll · January 17, 2005 01:38 PM · Muggeridge's Law

If James Lileks ever wants to update The Gallery of Regrettable Food, Hostess has given him a leg up on the project with--The Twinkie Cookbook!

Swagland

By Ed Driscoll · January 17, 2005 02:19 AM ·

The LA Times has an amusing, if over-the-top look at the temptations of swag that journalists face. (About which, Matt Welch has a great rebuttal.)

Astonishingly, Jeff of Beautiful Atrocities has somehow discovered one of my secret stashes of swagdom...

NFL Films: Visual Poetry

By Ed Driscoll · January 17, 2005 01:53 AM · Run To Daylight

I'm watching the NFL Channel's Game of the Week, last week's Chargers/Jets game from the first round of the playoffs. I didn't deliberately program it; it just happened to be on the TiVo box because how I initially set it up.

But that's OK: watching this NFL Films presentation is a reminder that when they're clicking on eight cylinders, they're capable of producing visual poetry. Even forgetting what they're doing--showing highlights from a football game--it's dazzling filmmaking: perfectly matched cuts, rhythmically edited montages, great overlays of multiple sound sources (the announcers from the AM radio broadcast of the game, the mic'ed up players, the background score, crowd sounds, etc.) and on and on. The fact that they can get this stuff on the air in less than a week, as opposed to the weeks and weeks and weeks that many Hollywood films take for editing is also amazing. (I profiled NFL Films last year at Tech Central Station, incidentally.)

And that the NFL basically created their own cable channel to run these shows is the icing on the cake.

There's been a lot about pro football that's been frustrating these past couple of years, very little of which has anything to do with the games themselves (including, but not limited to Rush Limbaugh's controversies; NippleGate; the T.O./Nicolette Sheridan towel incident; the endless Levitra ads; Randy Moss's simulated mooning and butt wiping, etc.). But in terms of the quantity--and at its best, the quality of the content that's available, it's really a golden age for NFL fans.

"Don't Just Do Something: Stand There!"

By Ed Driscoll · January 17, 2005 12:47 AM · The Future and its Enemies

Roger Kimball has a well-reasoned defense of leisure at its platonic best, over at "Armavirumque", The New Criterion's Weblog.

The Kids Aren't Alright

By Ed Driscoll · January 16, 2005 11:36 PM · Bobos In Paradise

Steve Green looks at this week's Socioeconomic Trend of the Century, as discovered by Time magazine. Time has dubbed it the "Twixters", which sounds at first glance like a hideous experiment at the Frito-Lay laboratories gone wrong and only gets worse when you discover its actual description:

Everybody knows a few of them—full-grown men and women who still live with their parents, who dress and talk and party as they did in their teens, hopping from job to job and date to date, having fun but seemingly going nowhere. Ten years ago, we might have called them Generation X, or slackers [or "Steve" –Ed.], but those labels don't quite fit anymore.

Steve writes about a big problem today's kids face:

The problem with young people these days... is old people. Specifically, their parents. Why, back in my day (really, I'm suffering a bad case of [Premature Old Fogey Mode] tonight) growing up was A Good Thing. By that I mean: being a kid was fine and all, but the really cool stuff was either reserved for adults or considered a special treat.

Steve has numerous examples, all of which I'm in complete agreement with, perhaps because of how I grew up.

My parents had me at a relatively late stage in their lives. They grew up during the Depression, and my father had left the Big Apple for South Jersey suburbia, after a few years' detour for World War II at Fort Dix. The life they led and the music they listened to seemed very much like a holdover from the Eisenhower '50s and the JFK, Rat Pack, pre-hippy '60s. They had what seemed like fairly sophisticated cocktail parties to my young eyes in their sealed basement with a bar at one end, and my dad's custom-built proto-media room hi-fi rig on the other end. Sinatra, Crosby, Fred Astaire, and Count Basie were daily listening for my dad--and still are to this day.

Ever read Thomas Hine's classic Populuxe? That was my life, right down to the knotty pine in the basement and my bedroom--my parents unknowingly kept the Populuxe embers burning long after Madison Avenue told them to dump it all for this.

For several birthdays as a kid, my parents took me via the Metroliner to Mies and Philip Johnson's late '50s cathedral of modernism, the Four Seasons in Manhattan, which is still a treat for me whenever I'm on the east coast.

When I was in my teens, I was more of a Beatles/Who/Stones/Zeppelin and Hendrix kind of guy rather than the Der Bingle and Francis Albert (my jazz phase came later--and was more cool jazz than swing, but these days, my dad and I have a fair amount of common interest in music--at least more so than when I was 15), but I vividly remember several daydreams in class about when I'd be old enough to either live in Manhattan or take the Metroliner in myself to catch Broadway Shows, jazz clubs and swanky restaurants.

In other words, I couldn't wait to be a grown-up, and partake in grown-up culture.

But that's not a carrot that dangles as brightly for today's kids. As Steve writes:

And we wonder why some kids today don't want to grow up? We've taken all the incentives out of the process. We're subsidizing childhood, then scratching our heads at why it lasts so much longer.

Well, not all of us.

Steve writes that one of the trends that slows down the rate that kids grow into adults is our obsession with safety:

I'm completely convinced that I'm a good driver today because, as a kid, I wasn't required to wear my weight in safety equipment when riding my bike. Kids today aren't learning those lessons – so it's really no wonder that they're spending their money suping up their Honda Civics (or Honda Piper Cubs, as I like to call the ones with those massive, wing-like rear spoilers) instead of putting their cash away to make the down payment on a house. I suffered enough skinned knees (and just once, a skinned face) to teach me that getting there safely is at least half the thrill. To support my point, I remember reading in Reason a few years back that people who drive safer cars tend to cause more accidents than people driving non-Volvos.

In other words: We do our kids a disservice by keeping them in cocoons.

In David Frum's brilliant How We Got Here he does a thorough job of analyzing the disparate trends of the 1970s, which, as he notes, far more than the 1960s, shaped how we live today. The obsession with safety was just beginning in that decade. But Frum writes that for most people, it wasn't that prevelent an obsession back then:

They lit rockets in their backyards on the Fourth of July. They bought their steak marbled with fat. They smoked. They bought cars without seatbelts. They gave boys .22-caliber rifles for their eleventh birthdays. How they would gape and stare at a contemporary playground, with its rubber matting underneath the swings, safety belts on the teetertotters, and three-year-olds strapped into crash helmets before they can mount their tricycles. How they would snicker at grown men girding themselves like test pilots to pedal through the park, at a Post Office that airbrushes the cigarette out of Humphrey Bogart’s hand lest some impressionable stamp-collector get the wrong idea about smoking, at the massive Range Rovers we buy so that we can commute to the office without fear. Back then, one did not show so much concern for one’s carcass.

The safety obsession, and so many of the other trends that have created the Twixters began in that awful decade. And the parents who are creating the Twixters grew up then as well.

Where am I going with this? Nowhere, except that looking back, I'm very glad that I had parents who kept one foot in grown-up culture, even as that culture was fading away.

Update: Welcome imbibers of VodkaPundit !

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Reliving The End of the Beginning

By Ed Driscoll · January 16, 2005 09:42 PM · The Final Frontier

I have a piece on Spacecraft Films' encyclopedic DVDs of the Apollo program over at Tech Central Station.

Red Staters In The Mist

By Ed Driscoll · January 16, 2005 03:21 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

Remember "Dieter", the fellow who spoke to Tom Wolfe in November about the red states of America like they were on another planet?

I had thought he was a resident of San Francisco. Actually, he appears to be a columnist for the Washington Post, as Tim Blair and Patrick Ruffini note.

For an earlier fisking of this out-of-touch "gorillas in the mist" style of journalism, check out James Lileks' classic "Notes From The Olive Garden" from 2002.

Update: Speaking of Lileks, he has a perfect summation of the WaPo article and the collective personality of the Blue State media it reflects:

Once upon a time the major media at least pretended that the heart & soul of the country was a porch in Kansas with an American flag. Now it’s the outlands, the Strange Beyond. They vote for Bush, they believe in God, they’d have to drive 2 hours for decent Thai. Who are these people?

Maybe what often bothers the Blue staters isn't the ire of the Maroonies; in the end, it's the relative indifference. We think of you, all right - just not as much as you think about yourselves. And probably more than you think about us. Take care; love, Red.

Islamist Murder In Jersey City?

By Ed Driscoll · January 16, 2005 01:03 PM · War And Anti-War

Power Line and Little Green Footballs have the details and some thoughts. They each link to this New York Post story.

The Post of course, is the chief conservative paper in Manhattan. It should be interesting to see if this story generates any traction at say, the New York Times or the rest of the legacy media it helps to drive.

Eight Notes For Hugh Hewitt

By Ed Driscoll · January 16, 2005 10:44 AM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

Frank Martin speaks truth to power; no Hummels are harmed in the process.

Here's a highlight:

2. Mary Mapes did not get fired, She got a promotion. This is not the end of her career but the start of her ‘sainted victimhood’, where she will publish endless piles of books on the subject of the right wing cabal and appear breathless at fundraisers, while appearing thrice daily on Air America and NPR to opine on the latest great offence from the 'scabknucked bohunks' that inhabit the White House in the Bush Administration.

3. CBS news is toast. They would be better off selling the airtime back to the affiliates or to Ron Popeil. With it will go soon ABC and NBC Nightly News. They simply do not make enough money to justify their grotesque cost. When they do finally go away, not one of them will understand that when they started to sell opinion as actual news, that they lost all credibility in the eyes and ears of the viewers and they began to look elsewhere. What has totally surprised CBS is not that they went looking, but that they’ve found it. They've found it in the blogosphere.

4. People who look pretty and read from Teleprompters are not “reporters”. When people who read from telepromters refer to themselves as being a "reporter" our natural reaction should be to violently laugh and buckle over horizontally at the hips. "Reporters" are men like Sam Fuller, Ernie Pyle and William Shirer. There are no men like this today, the media's legal staff would simply not permit it.

Read the rest.

That's Gotta Sting

By Ed Driscoll · January 16, 2005 10:33 AM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

Power Line compares Ra^therGate to Watergate, and says that Dan Rather's role wasn't comprable to Richard Nixon's--but to Ron Ziegler's!:

One of the eerie echoes of Watergate in the Rathergate affair is the four terminations -- of CBS News Senior Vice President Betsy West; 60 Minutes Executive Producer Josh Howard; Howard's deputy, Mary Murphy; and 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes -- with which CBS has now sought to end the scandal. Dan Rather is not pulling the strings here; perhaps Rather himself is only a bit player like Ron Ziegler. Could it be that Moonves or Heyward, and not Rather, is playing the role of Richard Nixon in the Rathergate scandal?

Rather really does continue to make Ted Baxter look better and better...

I Am Charlotte Von Mises

By Ed Driscoll · January 15, 2005 03:10 PM · Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal · God And Man At Dupont University

Donald Luskin says there's "signs of life amidst the leftist graveyard known as academia", and posts an email that highlights a debate between a small-l libertarian economics major at a California university and his "very liberal" professor who "shares an office with an econ professor who is an avowed Socialist".

Meanwhile James Taranto writes:

If you're a college student fed up with heavy-handed leftism from the faculty, here's a chance to do something about it, and possibly end up on the silver screen...Evan Coyne Maloney, a young New York-based documentarian, is looking for students to help the full-length version of his film "Brainwashing 101."

Taranto suggests that if you have kids who're in college, you might want to forward his column to them.

Update: On the flip side, Jim Lindgren looks at two Nobel Prize-winning free market economists who were driven out of the University of Virginia during the 1960s for "being on the wrong side of history" back in those Galbraith-dominated central planning days.

WMD=Words of Mass Discussion

By Ed Driscoll · January 15, 2005 11:47 AM · War And Anti-War

Long, detailed post on Instapundit.com including comments by the Professor's readers from across the spectrum, on the implications of the shutdown of the Iraq Survey Group's search for WMD stockpiles.

This email helps to put the last ten years into perspective:

Was it the UN weapons inspectors or the US military that ascertained no weapons were in Iraq? It seems to me that many of the Bush administration's detractors are not only ignoring the fact that most people believed the weapons were there but that most people would still believe it if we had not invaded.

We discovered the true state of our intelligence failures because of this. And it seems obvious as well that if the weapons are not there now then they might not have been there in 1998 when Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox and bombed Iraq.

So, does that make him a war criminal? I do not pretend to know where the weapon stock piles ended up. They could be destroyed or buried in Syria for all I know, but I do know that if Clinton had answered these questions and dealt with these issues effectively a decade ago we would not be having this discussion now.

After all if Bush were really as dishonest as some of the Bush haters say he is he could have planted the damn things, now couldn't he?

As Glenn notes, "And if he'd found the real thing, a lot of his critics would have said they were plants."

Read the rest.

Radical Chic And Its Aftermath

By Ed Driscoll · January 14, 2005 09:00 PM · Radical Chic

Today marks the 35th anniversary of the infamous party that Leonard and Felicia Bernstein held in their Park Ave. duplex to raise money for the Black Panthers. Also attending was Tom Wolfe, who wrote the event up for an article originally published in New York magazine, called "Radical Chic". Later that year, it would be published in book form, along with his "Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers", another article about similar (if more low-rent) shenanigans on the West Coast.

You could make a pretty good argument (as I'm about to attempt) that "Radical Chic" was the most influential, or at least most significant, magazine article of the past forty years--and that it foreshadowed the next 34 years of American politics.

It helped that the timing of Wolfe's article and book was exquisite. 1970 was the apex between two key presidential election years: two years after far left anti-war protestors attempted to disrupt the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and two years before its 1972 equivalent, where, as Ben Wattenberg said back then, "there won't be any riots in Miami because the people who tried to riot in Chicago are on the Platform Committee."

As Wolfe tells the story, he was visiting his wife-to-be while she was working at Vanity Fair, and noticed an invitation on journalist David Halberstam's desk to a cocktail party and fundraiser to be put on by the Bernsteins to raise money for the Panthers. Wolfe was intrigued, and called the number on the invitation to RSVP. A voice on the other end took down his name and told him he was added to the list. He arrived, the Bernsteins had some idea of who he was from his New York and Esquire articles, and in plain sight, he pulled out his reporter's notepad and ballpoint pen, and began to jot down the evening's events.

"I was openly taking notes", he recently said, "but they just assumed that if I was there for New York magazine it was because I must have approved of what they were doing.":

I just thought it was a scream, because it was so illogical by all ordinary thinking. To think that somebody living in an absolutely stunning duplex on Park Avenue could be having in all these guys who were saying, 'We will take everything away from you if we get the chance,' which is what their program spelled out, was the funniest thing I had ever witnessed.

By the time of the 1972 presidential campaign, the ultra far-left anti-American politics that Wolfe observed in miniature in the Bernstein's duplex would come to dominate the Democratic Party--to varying degrees, right up to the present day. As I wrote last month, that was the year where the wheels really came off the Democratic Party:

Radical chic and punitive liberalism became the norm, to the point where McGovern compared Ho Chi Minh to George Washington in a Playboy interview, and his aides took to wearing upside down flag pins on their lapels.

This was a very different Democratic party from the New Frontier of JFK and LBJ's Great Society which, while was a little too big government for me (particularly as it ballooned under LBJ), had lots of redeeming qualities: they were patriotic; believed in strong defense at home; trying to spread democracy abroad; had a vigorous space program; and at least with JFK, willing to cut taxes.

The election this past November may have been a watershed--the year that radical chic finally began to die. President Bush defeated a man who made first made his mark on the American stage in 1971 with a radical chic gesture of his own: as a Navy reserve officer excoriating US troops serving abroad, in front of the US Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations.

This is an extraordinary moment for the Democratic Party.

As Rich Lowry observes today in National Review, it was accurately forecast by Zell Miller in his 2003 book, A National Party No More:

Many of the things that Miller said in his book have now become nearly conventional wisdom among Democratic loyalists. All the Democrats who now say that the party has foolishly given up on the South, that it is unable to connect with religious voters, that it is too beholden to liberal orthodoxy on social issues, that Americans don't trust it on national defense, and that it doesn't speak the language of most Americans should take a deep breath and repeat after me: "Zell Miller was right."

This turnabout is extraordinary given the kind of criticisms that were lodged at Miller last year, especially after he amplified the arguments in his book in a humdinger of a speech at the Republican National Convention. An AFL-CIO official said Miller had "lost his damn mind." James Carville said Miller was being "cynically manipulated by people who are greedy to hold on to power at any cost." Well, Miller appears, in light of events, to have been the shrewdest cynically manipulated lunatic in all of human history.

"In the eyes of Middle America," Miller wrote of the Democratic party, "it has become a value-neutral party." That is almost mild compared with what other Democrats are now saying. Even Miller's battering of the party for being too extreme on abortion has gained a measure of acceptance. Howard Dean of all people — another candidate to lead the DNC — now says, "I have long believed that we ought to make a home for pro-life Democrats."

It's not just practical politicians who are sounding Zell-like. On national security, Miller worried how Democrats were getting tarred by their association with the most fervent anti-war elements of their party. The editor of the liberal New Republic has argued since the election for a "purge" — yes, a purge — of those antiwar zealots. Miller complained in his book about the influence of ham-handed consultants on the party. The liberal Washington Monthly just ran an article excoriating "a clique of Washington consultants who, through their insider ties, continue to get rewarded with business after losing continually." Miller defended gun rights and explained how gun-controllers were out of step with the American public. Liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently declared, "Nothing kills Democratic candidates' prospects more than guns."

"What I was telling them was right and correct, if only they had listened to it," says Miller, who recently retired from the Senate. Democrats are essentially saying these days that they want a party in which someone like Zell Miller can feel comfortable. Alas, they used to have one. But, as someone once put it, today's Democrats are a national party no more.

Has radical chic run its course? Gestures such as this, this, and this don't lend credence to that theory. Certainly Teddy Kennedy doesn't sound like he's learned much from November's aftermath.

But the next four years will be interesting to watch, indeed. The wheels came off in '72. This might be their last chance to put them back on.

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Absolut Geekapolooza

By Ed Driscoll · January 14, 2005 07:00 PM · Hollywood, Interrupted

Will Collier of Vodkapundit and his readers are enjoying the new remake of Battlestar Galactica.

The old series still emits enough of an enormous cheesy odor for me to want to stay as far away from the remake as possible. But then, I haven't been tuning into too many recent series anyhow.

One exception is CSI: Miami. I'm not a regular viewer, but unlike what Law & Order and its umpteen sequels have morped into, I haven't felt too many compulsive PC cringes while watching it--and the Miami Vice-style cinematography is excellent.

Graner Guilty

By Ed Driscoll · January 14, 2005 03:14 PM · War And Anti-War

The Wall Street Journal writes, "A military jury has found Army Spc. Charles Graner Jr. guilty of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib". Subscription may be required to read the article, but here's the gist of it:

Postmodern Journalism

By Ed Driscoll · January 14, 2005 02:47 PM ·

David Cohen writes a scathing rejoinder to a Slate piece that's critical of Michael Jordan almost entirely because Jordan's personality on the court wasn't flashy enough for the writer:

A couple of decades back, academia killed that great American art form, the short story. Plot, in the sense of something actually happening, went from a requirement of a good short story to taboo. Characters were to be limned, and the essential banality of modern American life, particularly in middle-class suburbs, must be illustrated, but nothing was to happen on penalty of scorn. As a result, the only good short stories today are genre stories, mostly science fiction or mysteries, and they aren't what they once were, either.

Now, apparently, the same aesthetic that killed the short story is oozing into Journalism. In fact, this piece is all aesthetic, which might be ok if it weren't a winding, mish-mash aesthetic that, in interior decorating, would be called "eclectic" if one were being polite.

As for the man who tried--successfully for a time--to cajole journalists into breathing new life into their genre, he's interviewed this week in The American Spectator.

Hollywood Blues

By Ed Driscoll · January 14, 2005 11:05 AM · Hollywood, Interrupted

If you've noticed the "Hollywood, Interrupted" category we created for our posts about, you know, modern Hollywood, it comes from the title of the book written co-written by Andrew Breitbart, whom Kathryn Jean Lopez has a great interview with today:

<MAP NAME="boxmap-p8"><AREA SHAPE="RECT" COORDS="14, 200, 103, 207" HREF="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm/privacy-policy.html?o=1" ><AREA COORDS="0,0,10000,10000" HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/eddriscollcom-20" ></MAP><img src="http://rcm-images.amazon.com/images/G/01/rcm/120x240.gif" width="120" height="240" border="0" usemap="#boxmap-p8" alt="Shop at Amazon.com"> NRO: We all know about Alec Baldwin's false promises to move and the Canada-exile talk and the like from your coast — people wanting to flee rather than live in a land with George W. Bush as president. How much of that is real? Do they really hate Bush, or is it just one of the things the cool kids do?
Breitbart: They truly hate Bush, and, for the most part, few can draw a distinction between that which they politically hate about him and the policies that enamored them with Clinton.

It is a very emotional situation from a very emotional group of people. These are not the type of people you would want next to you in a bunker during war. That said: These are the people more than some of us don't mind watching partially nude on pay cable. So we must somehow learn to live with one another again.

NRO: So, how many non-Bush haters are there? Is it your feeling that there are more conservative types (maybe not NR subscribers, but people who basically want what we want, etc., voted for Bush) than we'll ever know in Hollywood?

Breitbart: To my surprise I am finding that there are a lot more non-liberals in Hollywood than I had once suspected. It's just that they live in the closet. Until things change I still can't recommend they come out either.

Conservatives exist in the closet in Hollywood because they know the nature of hiring out here. People hire people they are comfortable with. And most liberals in Hollywood detest conservatives.

Hollywood produces at least two blacklist-era inspired films a year, and it is a staple on serial television. My father-in-law, who was, in fact blacklisted in the '50s, was just on the Jerry Bruckheimer series, "Cold Case", playing, what else?, a blacklisted writer.

Yet the lesson of not punishing those with whom you hold political differences is lost on the very people who insist it is the most important message of our time.

Read the rest.

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Fisking Howard Kurtz

By Ed Driscoll · January 14, 2005 10:52 AM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

Hugh Hewitt has an interesting analysis of media critic Howard Kurtz's latest column--which itself was based on Howard Fineman's piece from earlier this week.

An Ivins Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand!

By Ed Driscoll · January 13, 2005 06:34 PM · Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal

Power Line has an amusing post contrasting the two worlds of Molly Ivins.

She has a column this week where she tut-tuts President Bush for stating that Social Security could go broke by 2019 and that "the crisis is now".

I guess that's because for Ivans, the crisis was back in September:

As we march bravely toward oceans of red ink (leaving behind no problem for future presidents or future generations), we also face a looming crisis in Social Security.

Frankly, we owe it to ourselves to discover which opinion is correct. Because if Everything's Fine Ivins walks through this door, she will kill Crisis Ivins. An Ivins divided against itself cannot stand!

Quote of the Day

By Ed Driscoll · January 13, 2005 01:38 PM · Muggeridge's Law

OK, I know a few people have linked to it already, but this is another unintentional classic from Tina Brown:

When Peter Jennings is anchoring a breaking news story for ABC, he's a human hyperlink to the world, seemingly able to absorb and process information through the cheeks of his behind.

I think what she means is that Peter favors a more metrosexual approach to covering the news...

CYA? A Is For Anchor

By Ed Driscoll · January 13, 2005 01:20 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

James Lileks has some thoughts on the Ra^therGate report.

Meanwhile, add Van Gordon Sauter, the former of president of CBS News, to the ever-growing list of journalists willing to go on the record that the media is biased.

The Completion Backwards Principle

By Ed Driscoll · January 13, 2005 11:54 AM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

In a long post titled, "Goodbye Times", Stanley Kurtz looks at the downward cycle--in terms of both business and journalism--that the New York Times has gotten itself in.

It feels as though it expands on a post I've wrote last year; it's another marker on the road to 2014.

La Opción De El Salvador

By Ed Driscoll · January 13, 2005 11:40 AM · War And Anti-War

Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on "the El Savador option":

What united opponents of American policy in Central America was a vague sense that we were on the wrong side. They tittered at Reagan's declaration that the Contras were freedom fighters. They made movies that turned the leftists into the good guys in El Salvador. John Kerry, Pat Leahy, Tom Harkin, and other titans of international statesmanship actively worked against American foreign policy. "I see an enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell them what to do," Kerry said about American relations with the Soviet client Sandanista regime. He lent his name to support groups aiding the Communist-controlled regions of El Salvador.

I have no doubt that opposition to the "death squads" was also based on revulsion at some of their excesses. But there can be no doubt that they were also vexed that we were fighting Communists at all. Moreover, our special forces were not sent to El Salvador to train anybody to murder people. They were sent to help stop the widespread civil chaos and murder being perpetrated by others. They largely succeeded.

So I have to ask, would the Left oppose the "El Salvador Option" in Iraq if they didn't have a similar ideological hang-up about our efforts there? We're told that opponents of Iraq are part of the bipartisan consensus on fighting the war on terror, from which they claim Iraq is a distraction. Okay, maybe. But why then do opponents of the Iraq effort seem determined to ignore the fact that the most prominent leader of the "insurgency" has been hired as al Qaeda's man in Iraq?

Read the rest; watch out for the giant spear in the middle of it.

"More Depressions Like This, Please"

By Ed Driscoll · January 12, 2005 06:33 PM · Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal

Noel Sheppard of Tech Central Station examines the economy's robust performance in 2004.

Meanwhile, Reuters notes another under-reported statistic: The U.S. government posted a one billion dollar budget surplus in December, along with a 16.7% reduction in the deficit last year.

Spring Fascism Preview

By Ed Driscoll · January 12, 2005 04:56 PM · The Reich Stuff

In England, the BBC writes that "Prince Harry has apologised for wearing a swastika armband to a friend's fancy dress party".

Meanwhile, an Italian soccer star (whom Power Line notes, "had good things to say about Mussolini in his autobiography") gave the fascist straight-arm salute to a packed stadium in Rome.

And Reuters reports that French "far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen [said] the Nazi occupation of France during World War Two had not been 'particularly inhumane'."

And we're worried about passing the global test?

(Incidentally, this post is probably as good a place as any to hang Theodore Dalrymple's sage essay at how modern Germans are still impacted--hamstrung actually--by their ancestors' actions sixty years ago.)

Citizen Hugh

By Ed Driscoll · January 12, 2005 02:35 PM · The New, New Journalism

Just had a great 20-minute telephone interview with Hugh Hewitt about Blog, for an upcoming Tech Central Station piece. Watch this space (or TCS itself) for publication date.

Now if I could just get a 20-minute interview with Dan Rather for his take on Weblogs...

Advantage: Hardees!

By Ed Driscoll · January 12, 2005 01:00 PM · The New Puritans

A month ago, I noticed that McDonald's had buckled under to the criticism of the Michael Moore-like Super-Size Me propagandamentary and eliminated its Super-Size menu.

But anytime there's political correctness, there's an opening to exploit the wussiness and puritanism of those involved, which Hardee's chief executive Andrew Puzder is more than willing to do with his 2/3rds of a pound Monster Thickburger:

In an interview on CNBC, Hardee's chief executive Andrew Puzder was unapologetic, saying the company's latest sandwich is "not a burger for tree-huggers."

"This is a burger for young hungry guys who want a really big, delicious, juicy, decadent burger," he said. "I hope our competitors keep promoting those healthy products, and we will keep promoting our big, juicy delicious burgers."

As CBS writes:

But despite the bad press, or may be because of it, it's also produced an 8 percent growth in sales for Hardees. Blue-state critics, meet red-state consumers.

Daniel Drezner adds:

There's a complex observation to be made here about what "Red America" wants -- Many lefty commentators believe that Red Staters are getting hoodwinked into buying deceptive political propaganda about "moral values" hook, line, and sinker. The appeal of the Monster Thickburger suggests that Red State denizens know exactly what they want, and appreciate it when it's sold to them without any deception whatsoever.

Not too surprising, to be honest.

I wouldn't eat one (frankly, 2,500 calories in one shot from a hamburger, fries and a drink is too crazy for me, and this is closer to my idea of delicious food porn), but if I see a Hardees I'd definitely go out of my way to order something there to support a CEO who knows his audience--and is willing to have some fun with his humorless critics.

Advantage Ed!

By Ed Driscoll · January 12, 2005 12:55 AM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

Back in December of 2001, in a piece about Bernard Goldberg's Bias, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

If [the media would] admit they have a problem and move on, lots of conservatives would just give up on the topic. It's the infuriating denial that bugs many of us. It's like the friend who swears he didn't drink your last beer. You don't care about the beer, but you just can't stand him not admitting it. (You took my beer! Say it!! Say it!!!) By denying the obvious, so many pompous elite journalists drive us batty by acting as if we're imagining things.

Almost a year ago, I put together a list of the growing number of liberal journalists who were willing to go on the record that media bias was no myth. A few months later, I interviewed Goldberg--Bernard that is--who said (correctly, I think) that his book, Bias helped break the logjam and made it easier for other journalists to openly discuss the concept of bias. And certainly, the Blogosphere sped up the process as well, by making communications a two-way street.

A couple of nights after the election, I wrote:

the real loser of the election wasn't the Democratic party. America is built on a two party system. Republicans reconstituted themselves into a more conservative party after Barry Goldwater took one for the team after JFK's assassination made LBJ's election all but inevitable in '64. There's no reason why the Democrats can't go through a bit--well, hopefully a lot--of analysis and see why they've lost the House and Senate for a decade (except during Jumpin' Jim Jeffords' 15 minutes of fame), and will be out of the White House for at least virtually all of this decade.

No, the real losers are the legacy media: the TV networks and newspapers.

In a piece titled, "The 'Media Party' is over", Newsweek's Howard Fineman agrees. In fact, the gist of his opening paragraph is nearly identical to what I wrote two months ago:

A political party is dying before our eyes — and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the "mainstream media," which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards.

Read the rest, and add Fineman to the growing list of big media figures increasingly willing to explain the bias of their profession.

And remember, you heard it here (and via InstaPundit, PoliPundit (where I found the Fineman piece), Power Line, Little Green Footballs, VodkaPundit--in other words, via the Blogosphere), first.

Update: Betsy Newmark observes:

Fineman traces their downfall to Walter Cronkite taking a stand on the Vietnam War and then with the meida going hammer and tongs after Nixon. He thinks that was all great stuff, but perhaps gave away the illusion of objectivity. Ya think?

What really sticks in his craw is Bush's seeming indifference to the mightiness of the press. By circumventing the media to gather money and support, Bush has shown that the Emperor, while not totally naked, is at least running around in some pretty funky skivvies.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds writes:

I heard an NPR story on the Washington State recount. Nothing at all on the allegations of fraud in King County, but a lot on Democrat Christine Gregoire's admirable qualities. She was the first in her family to go to college!

Boola Boola!

The Buttondown Mind Comes To DVD

By Ed Driscoll · January 11, 2005 06:45 PM ·

20th Century Fox is releasing the first season of The Bob Newhart Show (his 1970s series co-starring Suzanne Pleshette, Bill Daily, and Peter Bonerz) on DVD, on April 12th.

Truman Keeps On Defeating Dewey

By Ed Driscoll · January 11, 2005 06:16 PM · The Making of the President

"Three dozen voters challenging the presidential election results in the Ohio Supreme Court asked to drop their lawsuit Tuesday", AP reports.

(Via The Corner.)

Joke 'Em If They Can't Take A Book

By Ed Driscoll · January 11, 2005 12:42 AM · Reviews

Frank Martin reviews Michael Crichton's new book, State of Fear:

Somewhere in a bar in West Hollywood sits a “Big Time Media Agent” drunkenly explaining to his bartender how screwed he is. It seems that he’s Michael Crichton’s Agent, and he didn’t vet his clients most recent book before publishing, assuming as any of us would, that its automatically “Hollywood gold” because of course, “Michael Crichton wrote it”.

Then someone drops the bomb and tells him the book has two evil protagonists First, an Environmentalist Lawyer and second and far worse, A bloviating actor who “plays the president on a weekly TV show” and drives with great pride, an electric car! Worse still, most of what is made out as laughable by the author is the idiocy that makes up the sanctimonious liberal ‘for a cause’ culture that makes up much of the free time of the Hollywood elite.

Read the rest.

Christmas In Cambodia With Dan Rather And Mary Mapes

By Ed Driscoll · January 10, 2005 11:37 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

Lorie Byrd compares how the legacy media have handled Ra^thGate to how they covered (or didn't, to be more precise) the Swift Boat Vets.

A Fighter For The Ages

By Ed Driscoll · January 10, 2005 10:46 PM ·

In late 2003, I wrote about the album that pioneering boxer Jack Johnson inspired.

In a new essay at the Wall Street Journal, Gordon Marino looks at the real man.

ArmstrongGate

By Ed Driscoll · January 10, 2005 08:51 PM · The New, New Journalism

La Shawn Barber and Jon Henke have detailed posts on the Armstrong Williams debacle, and Glenn Reynolds notes the US government's history of paying off public opinion makers when necessary dating back to at least the FDR days.

I'm not sure what else I can add--other than seeing Williams interviewed once by Brian Lamb on C-Span and knowing that his column is (still) listed with other conservative opinion makers at Townhall.com, I never really followed his career.

Update: Betsy Newmark posts that on Saturday the New York Times was all over ArmstrongGate, but couldn't be bothered to mention that Hillary Clinton's former campaign finance director was indicted for illegal fundraising in her 2000 campaign. As Betsy writes, "Er, excuse me, but isn't Clinton the senator from....er...New York? Wouldn't that be a story of interest to the Times' readers?"

Nothing like keeping the readers in the cocoon.

Best of the Web Today

By Ed Driscoll · January 10, 2005 01:47 PM · The New, New Journalism

James Taranto's "Best of the Web Today" is online, and has lots of items on Ra^therGate, ArmstrongGate, and is chock-full of link-filled goodness.

Ra^therGate Report Out

By Ed Driscoll · January 10, 2005 11:22 AM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

Glenn Reynolds has lots of links and thoughts. I'm glad that a few heads rolled, but it certainly sounds like many punches were pulled.

This quote by Jeff Jarvis certainly seems appropriate:

I see that the report is calling for more commissions and committees and all that -- which is just the wrong thing to do: It puts yet more distance between the journalists and the public they are supposed to serve. They should be doing just the opposite: tearing down the walls, making journalists responsible for interacting with the public.

This is bigger than Dan Rather. This is bigger than CBS News. This is about the news and the new relationship -- the conversation -- journalism must learn to have with the public, or the public will go have it without them.

Or as Matt Drudge's associate was quoted as saying:

“Because you ignored us,” [Andrew Breitbart] says, “because you ignored Rush and Drudge and God knows who else, we decided to go out and create our media. And I think that what we’re doing is building up something that may be bigger and better.”

Better wouldn't be difficult (at least as far as TV news goes); bigger remains to be seen, but it is about the public having a conversation about the news that's unfettered by big media.

Update: Lorie Byrd of PoliPundit has lots of additional links.

Update: Power Line has a post called "The Thornburgh Report: What It Says, and What It Doesn't Say", that's long but well worth reading. Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt is calling it "White Wash Report".

In a post called "99 Percent Baloney", Tim Graham of the Media Research Center writes:

Just before I went on MSNBC around 2:45, they showed a clip of Moonves saying "99 percent of the people, and 99 percent of the stories we have are accurate, true, straight down the middle." NO. This and the panel on p. 28 are mistaken to assume that this fiasco is one small deviation from a record of meticulous political balance and utter lack of calculation! This is the must-see--rebut this, Dick and Lou! They shouldn't be pretending to be judges of the entire oeuvre of CBS News content....they only look like lackeys for insisting on CBS's everyday excellence.

Meanwhile, by a strange, strange coincidence, Dan Rather has the night off tonight.

Go figure.

Update: Power Line dissects Mary Mapes' statement about her role in Ra^therGate.

Update: John Hinderaker sums up the RatherGate debacle brilliantly:

Because virtually everyone in the CBS News organization shared Mary Mapes's politics and objective (i.e., the election of John Kerry), skeptical questions were not asked. If there is a single overriding explanation for how a fake story, intended to influence a Presidential election through the use of forged documents, could have been promulgated by 60 Minutes, it is the lack of diversity at CBS News.

For some years now, the party line of the mainstream media has been: of course we're pretty much all Democrats, but that doesn't influence our news coverage. If nothing else, Rathergate should put that defense to rest once and for all.

In a couple of weeks, I will be participating in a conference at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, sponsored by the Kennedy School along with the Harvard Law School and the Shorenstein Center on Press and Politics. The subject will be journalism, blogging, credibility and ethics. Judging from the list of participants, I suspect that most of the discussion may be about how bloggers can become more credible by adopting the standards of mainstream journalists. My own perspective will be a bit different. So far, the blogosphere has a far better record of honesty and accuracy than mainstream organs like the New York Times and CBS. This isn't entirely a matter of personality; it is also a function of the checks and balances of the blogosphere, which are far stronger and more effective than the alleged "checks and balances" of the mainstream media, which, in the absence of political and intellectual diversity, may not operate at all.

I agree.

The Worst On The Road

By Ed Driscoll · January 9, 2005 10:04 PM ·

What are the worst cars on the road in 2005? Forbes has an interesting online slide show.

Don't Mention The Navy

By Ed Driscoll · January 9, 2005 09:18 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The Perfect Storm

Power Line says that the BBC is avoiding coverage of the superb US and Australian naval efforts in relieving the effects of the tsunami to keep the spotlight on the EU and (especially) the UN.

The BBC slanting the news--who'da thunk it!

Well, It Has To Happen Sooner Or Later

By Ed Driscoll · January 9, 2005 09:10 PM · Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal

Hans H.J. Labohm of Tech Central Station wonders if Japan's stagnant economy is due for a comeback soon.

Sudden Logic Fatigue Syndrome

By Ed Driscoll · January 9, 2005 08:53 PM · Muggeridge's Law

John Leo looks at some folks who took "playing the old blame game" to absurd new heights last year.

(Via PoliPundit.)

"The Art of the Start"

By Ed Driscoll · January 9, 2005 08:21 PM · Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal

I have a short review of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki's new book over at Blogcritics.

"Hi, I'm John Kerry, and I Approve of These Terrorists"

By Ed Driscoll · January 9, 2005 12:51 PM · War And Anti-War

Charles Johnson is having a "Kerry Kaption Kontest", while the ol' Winter Soldier beats the Washington cold by spending his winter in the Middle East chatting up terrorists and their sponsors.

Jimmy Carter's there as well, of course. Sadly, so is "moderate" Republican Christie Whitman.

The NFL Channel Meets C-Span

By Ed Driscoll · January 9, 2005 12:04 PM ·

I watched the exciting St. Louis/Seattle playoff game yesterday, but PoliPundit.com, merging C-Span and the NFL Channel, "describes" some unusual action that went on after the game...

Pushing At Your Door-Hinge

By Ed Driscoll · January 9, 2005 10:38 AM · Bobos In Paradise

Mark Steyn is absolutely on fire in his latest Chicago Sun-Times column--of course, it helps that Congressional Democrats have given him lots to work with this week.

As Scott Johnson of Power Line writes, "Steyn puts all of his strengths as a columnist on display in this hilarious piece". I can't figure out what not to quote, so, as the acronym says--RTWT.

Music By Herbie Hancock And Bernard Herrmann

By Ed Driscoll · January 8, 2005 03:18 PM · Radical Chic

The Brothers Judd and their readers look at liberal nostalgia for Manhattan during its Death Wish/Taxi Driver period in the 1970s.

You Know You're From South Jersey When...

By Ed Driscoll · January 8, 2005 02:54 AM ·

Lists like this bring back endless amount of nostalgia from lines such as:

You've made a meal out of Tastycakes, Herr's BBQ potato chips, and Pennsylvania Dutch Birch Beer.

Yes sir!

(Found via Villainous Company)

Say, anybody know if "the home of happy auto parts where saving money starts--Jimmy's Used Auto-Parts" is still in business? That commercial jingle and "take the wheel of your automobile and swing on down to Ideal" were seared--seared!--into my brain by Philadelphia UHF TV stations.)

Chasing The Tail Again

By Ed Driscoll · January 7, 2005 11:50 PM ·

Technorati, the blog search engine, appears to be functionally normally again, so I just restored it to the sidebar. (Last week, it was causing pages to load very...very...slowly.)

As to what the above title means (well, I can think of a few things it means)--err, as to what this title means in reference to blogs, click here.

Coming This Month

By Ed Driscoll · January 7, 2005 11:25 PM ·

January can mean only one thing...National Popcorn Day!

(Well for postmodernists, nothing can mean only one thing. But this is one of the many things that January can mean, if your having more than one. Oh wait, that slogan's reserved for National Beer Day.)

Pictures You Will Never See on 60 Minutes

By Ed Driscoll · January 7, 2005 07:15 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

I especially like the shot of the hospital ship USNS Mercy, but the author of the title is right--Mike and Morley and crew won't be featuring any of these anytime soon.

Found via Little Green Footballs, who also probably won't be on any CBS-related show, anytime soon.

(Why? Well, let's just say that , I'm really surprised that Charles Johnson's entry into Hugh Hewitt's Photoshop contest didn't make the first cut--I thought it was a likely winner, myself. If you've been following Ra^thGate since its beginning, or your read my Top Ten 2004 Blogging Moments piece for Tech Central Station, you should instantly get the joke.)

Update: Michelle Malkin writes:

Greetings, America-haters. Do you think you could stop raving against our "war criminals" and "killing machines" — and you, Teddy Kennedy, could you stop panting over those Abu Ghraib photos — for a moment and join me in praise for our military's compassion and innovation?

Most won't, but hopefully some people will begin to understand (implicitly, since the media will never report it that way) that the ability to conduct a massive relief effort such as this is but one of the benefits of having a powerful military.

The Dead Have Arisen!

By Ed Driscoll · January 7, 2005 02:50 PM ·

And they're still not voting Republican!

(Via InstaPundit.)

Super Bowl Crisis Averted

By Ed Driscoll · January 7, 2005 01:49 PM · Run To Daylight

In a just world, Fox would garner universal praise for nixing this wardrobe malfunction.

Deviation Standard

By Ed Driscoll · January 7, 2005 01:17 PM · Bobos In Paradise

In contrast to his lighter, humorous pieces, Jonah Goldberg has good meaty essay on "the overthrow of the reasonable man". He begins by arguing, unlike what is typically written, the wheels did not begin to come off liberalism in the 1960s or '70s, but much earlier--a generation or two, with the rise of pragmatism. Jonah's concluding paragraphs are particularly interesting:

Today that corrosion takes a predictable form: the overthrow of the reasonable man. Now, I'm not talking about liability or torts or any of that stuff, because I don't know much about it. I'm talking about the larger societal standards that come with the erosion of authority and how they creep into our law and our culture. The reasonable man was a composite, a statistical average of the aggregate human decency necessary to sustain a society. The reasonable man's behavior was the group average of moral conduct in a very moral country. Today, all of our arguments are about how much the society must bend to the behaviors and attitudes of the man of the fringe, the outlier, the arrow that sails farthest from the bulls-eye. Schools are paralyzed by the question of what to do about the atheist, the homosexual, the handicapped, while the average kids--i.e., most of them--are given short shrift. Abortion has stalemated the political system for a generation because the debate must be over what to do in the extreme circumstances; the famously horrible trinity of abortion legalizers everywhere: rape, incest, and the life of the mother. Roughly 90 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas in one way or another, but every year we must haggle about what to do for the thin-skinned atheist who withers from the glare of a nativity scene.
Take free speech. Holmes defended free speech on the grounds that more voices in the marketplace of ideas would be more likely to yield a more concrete answer to the central problems of life (think of a billion monkeys banging on typewriters: the more monkeys you add, the more likely it is they'll write something worthwhile). Hence, the debate used to be about how much regulation and censorship we should allow at the periphery. The logic was simple: the more you protect at the fringe, the safer our core freedoms would be. Like setting-up outposts on the frontier, we would police the barbarians at a distance so they would never make it to our homes and temples. So we would debate how much pornography the society could tolerate, on the assumption that a society that debates the legality of hardcore gay porn won't even think of touching the right to criticize the government. But that's been turned on its head now. Free speech for the deviant (be that in a statistical or moral sense) is total and the only debate now is how much we should regulate political speech during political campaigns. Today Thomas Paine's Common Sense — if published 30 days before an election — would spark infinitely more legal controversy than the showing of Deep Throat on HBO.

Books and movies were once very concerned with the plight of normal men — average men, "reasonable men" in abnormal circumstances. I don't simply mean that they were dull men thrown into crazy situations. We've always admired heroes. Rather, the protagonists were men who represented the "external standard" of morality recognizable by the community as the desired norm. Today, the protagonists — at least in the fashionable films — are the victims of that external standard. For example, in 2000, every major Oscar-winning film hinged on variations of this theme. Don't even get me started on Pleasantville. The events since 9/11 have distracted this trend for a while, but who can doubt that the liberal elite's dismay with Bush and the war is in part an effort to restore the cultural status-quo ante.

Now none of this should be interpreted as a stirring defense of conformity or a denunciation of anyone who might be a square peg in my ideal society of round holes. What a decent, prosperous, historically Christian Anglo-Saxon liberal society should do to accommodate gays, atheists, Jews, Muslims, foreigners, the handicapped, et al. are entirely appropriate questions to spend time and resources on. After all, there is no American who perfectly incarnates the external standard of the average American. We are all scattered plot points on the cluster graph. Groups are made richer by their diversity.

But, as liberals are wont to do, they are once again smashing their own accomplishments. The story of liberalism, after all, is the story of intellectuals building castles and then destroying them a generation later because they believe something new — and therefore more exciting and "better" — can be made with the rubble. Today's heirs to the Pragmatists want nothing to do with "reasonable men" and "community norms." For Holmes the norm and the ideal were roughly synonymous. For today's liberal they are antipodes. The deviant are the role models, the outliers the heroes. And we never could have replaced the old morality with this new stuff if we hadn't thought we could do without fatty, flabby morality in the first place.

« Close It

Before And After

By Ed Driscoll · January 7, 2005 01:01 PM · The Perfect Storm

How bad was the damage caused by the tsunami?

Just click on these horrific before and after aerial photos of Sri Lanka's Kalutara Beach.

Taking One For The Team

By Ed Driscoll · January 7, 2005 11:04 AM · Hollywood, Interrupted

Bill Whittle watches Michael Moore so that you don’t have to--and dubs him the left's Schwarzenegger. No, really!

Fish Meets Barrel

By Ed Driscoll · January 7, 2005 02:36 AM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

After a brief respite for Christmas Vacation, Steve Green is back behind the bar at Vodkapundit, happily (well, relatively happily) fisking Paul Krugman.

Tsunami-nomics

By Ed Driscoll · January 7, 2005 12:15 AM · The Future and its Enemies · The Perfect Storm

Jerry Bowyer of Tech Central Station writes about a seemingly bizarre disparity. Last week's tsunami caused an enormous amount of death and distruction (150,000 people killed, and five million more homeless), but it made barely a ripple in the world's financial markets:

Tragically, it's because, economically speaking, the people who were washed away were, for the most part, not connected to the rest of the world. They were born, lived and died isolated from the world economy and largely forgotten by it. Their absence didn't affect world markets, because their presence had never affected world markets. Why is this a tragedy? Because if they had been connected to us, I think many of them would still be alive today. If they had spent the last 30 years trading rice or computer programming services or transcription services for dollars, then they would have been able to trade dollars for modern road-building materials, well built buildings and tsunami warning systems.

And yet, many on the far left in the US and Europe have been increasingly vocal about not providing these underdeveloped nations such modern infrastructures.

This Just In

By Ed Driscoll · January 6, 2005 11:04 PM · The Making of the President

Today, Truman defeated Dewey again.

Duane Patterson has some thoughts on the ruckus that led up to it.

Travis's Town

By Ed Driscoll · January 6, 2005 10:24 PM · The Future and its Enemies

Of the New York that starred in 1975's Taxi Driver, James Lileks once wrote:

The civilization it portrays is a sad and empty place - Weimar Germany without the energy to muster up the brownshirts, Rome that fell because it was grew bored waiting for the Huns.

And yet, as Daniel Henninger writes in The Wall Street Journal, much of today's liberal New York intelligentsia longs for those days.

By Ed Driscoll · January 6, 2005 08:25 PM · Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal

Don't look now, but AOL could be poised for a comeback, says Dominic Basulto in Tech Central Station.

She Don't Lie, She Don't Lie, She Don't Lie

By Ed Driscoll · January 6, 2005 06:54 PM · The Electronic Cottage

Will Collier of VodkaPundit discusses the Nick Coleman kerfuffle by writing that "email is like cocaine"--it brings out the dominant aspects of your personality.

I think he's absolutely right, and it's one of the reasons why I try my damndest to think--and often rewrite--before hitting the [send] button on an email, particularly business correspondence.

But as Will writes, not everybody does...

(Incidentally, I'm very glad to see that Will spells "email" old-school style. I never understood why the new regime at Wired decided to hyphenate it--it seems like a giant leap backwards.)

"He's Over And You're Here"

By Ed Driscoll · January 6, 2005 02:58 PM · The Making of the President

Jay Nordlinger writes:

A lot of people have advice for the Republican party — what they can do, how they can "save" themselves. A lot of the talk has to do with moderating — with moving toward the left, or the center. You might think that the Republican party had a crisis on its hands.

Look, I'm all for advice. But it seems sort of strange. I mean, consider: The Republicans have the White House, and, of course, the executive branch that goes with it. They have an increased majority in the Senate, and an increased majority in the House. They have a majority of the governorships. They have about half of the state legislatures.

I mean, the GOP isn't doing that badly, if you're talking about electoral fortunes. (This is to say nothing about who's right, who's wrong, doctrinally.) If anyone should be a tad worried, it's the Democrats.

It could be that a lot of the advice-givers like the party the way it was before: when that nice Bob Michel was Republican leader in the House, playing golf with Tip — before Gingrich and the "crazies" rose up. You know, when the Republicans were a permanent minority, just the way God meant it.

A great many people have a great many things to worry about it. Whether the Republican party is connecting with the voters is not a worry. Democrats should worry that Republicans are connecting with them rather too well.

Peggy Noonan takes Nordlinger's advice and runs with it, in a column titled, "If I Were a Democrat--Here's what I'd do".

Her advice isn't very surprising--she recommends moving towards the middle. Will it be listened to?

Probably not. Beginning with Humphrey's defeat to Nixon in '68, after every presidential election the Democrats have lost, their policies have moved continually further to the left--even as the only two Democrats who've won (Carter and Clinton) did so by running positioned as middle-of-the-road guys.

In a previous Noonan column, she wrote that Hillary has done a very good job of positioning herself as moderate--for example, she's said the right things about the War on Terror to avoid appearing too dovish. But it means little when the majority of Americans know the rest of her party doesn't feel that way.

Update: Betsy Newmark, linking to Noonan's article writes:

So far, I've seen a few Democrats sound more reasonable on a few issues, but the ones who get the press every day don't sound as if they're changing one iota of their behavior. Witness Harry Reid's unreasoned and unreasonable gratuitous attack on Clarence Thomas. This is what happens to a party out of power. They don't have a national spokesman so there is simply a cacophony of voices. And the most extreme is the one that gets heard.

Where No Man Has Blogged Before

By Ed Driscoll · January 6, 2005 02:13 AM · The New, New Journalism

This one is pretty self-explanatory--although there's a special no-prize for anybody who emails me to tell where I found this photo, and what it was originally promoting.

And this is the last one from me--I think.

(More Hewitt-a-go-go here.)

Hewitt of Arabia

By Ed Driscoll · January 6, 2005 02:03 AM · The New, New Journalism

"Dammit, Lawrence! The Middle East is deuce difficult already without your bloody freelancing. That Yank Hewitt has a new book about these-- watchamacallit--these Weblogs. He mentioned one called Little Green Footballs. You and Col. Brighton had best start reading it before you give away the store to Prince Feisal again!"

(An oasis of additional airbrushing is available here.)

Roseblog...

By Ed Driscoll · January 5, 2005 11:07 PM · The New, New Journalism

Having recently purchased the New York Inquirer, Charles Foster Kane ponders the information revolution that could eventually put his paper out of business. Looking on are Kane's trusted compatriots, Jed Leland and Mr. Bernstein, along with the paper's exasperated editor, Herbert Carter.

(More Photoshoppery here.)

The Dirty Dozen

By Ed Driscoll · January 5, 2005 06:54 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The Perfect Storm

Arthur Chrenkoff looks at the top 12 dumbest tsunami quotes--so far.

I'm surprised that this one from September didn't get an honorable mention as a sneak preview of what was to come 'round Christmastime from the chattering classes.

Update: I had been meaning to link to this recent Frank Martin story where he sternly rebuts a colleague who said, "See, this is why George Bush is so dumb, there's a disaster in the world and he sends an Aircraft Carrier..."

Since Frank explains in detail why that's such an idiotic statement, this post seems like a good place to mention it.

A Long Time Ago In A Blogosphere Far, Far Away...

By Ed Driscoll · January 5, 2005 02:46 PM · The New, New Journalism

One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the droids will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new robotic overlords in the Blogosphere. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted freelance journalist, I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in the spice mines of Kessel.

(More Blog-spotting, here.)

Update: Welcome readers of "Generalissimo" Duane Patterson, Hugh's producer.

Big Sister Is Watching You

By Ed Driscoll · January 5, 2005 01:33 PM · The New, New Journalism

National Review is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year by reprinting some of their classic pieces from the past. One of those was a 1957 review of by Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged by Whittaker Chambers, whose climax is this classic line:

From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber — go!"

I'd be tempted to say that they don't write 'em like that anymore, but last June, James Lileks described a review of Fahrenheit 9/11 by Christopher Hitchens as being the "literary equivalent of someone attacking a hanging side of beef with a chain saw". Chambers' review actually isn't as brutal--but it is in the same industrial neighborhood as Hitchens' meat-packing plant.

Torture and "Torture" In War

By Ed Driscoll · January 5, 2005 12:54 PM · War And Anti-War

Good, meaty post by Glenn Reynolds, along wth several contributions from his readers, including one who makes this crucial point:

Leave it to a bunch of lawyers to get all tangled up in the Theory of Torture without addressing the facts on the ground. The ONLY previously proscribed interrogation techniques that have been sanctioned at the highest levels of our government post 911 are coercive in nature and specifically not intended to do bodily or psychological harm. Sleep deprivation, loud music, kneeling, withholding blankets. THIS is torture? Nowhere in any of your recent posts or links on the issue do you even qualify the many allegations of torture as being simply about these techniques of creating discomfort. Nor do you nor any of the linked legalists cite any case of actual physical torture. Abu Ghraib was an aberration. If anything, the internal memos produced during the Abu Ghraib “exposes” and erroneously cited as existence of a “smoking gun” showed that Rumsfeld et al were intent on keeping the threshold at the discomfort level. And about that Abu Ghraib “torture”, I can only hope that my Jihadi captors subject me to live sex shows while cloaking my head in a woman’s panties. Then if they would only put in solitary for a few minutes I could work out my frustrations about their horribly coercive techniques in private. If you know what I mean. And I think you do. Margaret Hassan was shot in the head, de-limbed, beheaded and disemboweled (not necessarily in that order). I think our non-Geneva captives can sustain a little Barry Manilow.

Read the rest--if you haven't already.

Just Another Day At Dupont University

By Ed Driscoll · January 4, 2005 10:51 PM · God And Man At Dupont University · Radical Chic

Eric Adler and Jack Langer, writing in The Wall Street Journal, describe how the Intifada came to Duke this fall.

I Guess Orbach Would Be Oscar

By Ed Driscoll · January 4, 2005 10:12 PM · Bobos In Paradise

Paul Greenberg, in an essay titled "Two New Yorkers and Two Americas", looks at the ultimate odd couple: Jerry Orbach and Susan Sontag, famous New Yorkers who have little in common, except that both died on the same day. But as Greenberg notes they share something else: "In a way, both were in show business, but only Jerry Orbach knew it".

Read the rest. At the end, Greenberg notes:

[Sontag] seems to have taken both sides of every great question of her times -- as if she wanted to shock those who had agreed with her the first time. Was she the last cry of 1960ish intellectualism? Or the first of 1970ish reaction -- a kind of Joan Baez without the music? And, in the end, did it matter?

What a pity -- like so much she did with her talent.

Remind you of a certain recent candidate for president?

Update: Sontag's doublethink is also the sort of thing that leads an otherwise intelligent journalist and editor to discard logic and write straightfaced:

We don’t know whether the memos were forged, authentic, or some combination thereof. Indeed, they could be fake but accurate, as Killian’s secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told CBS on September 15.

Hugh's Book Is Everywhere

By Ed Driscoll · January 4, 2005 07:18 PM · The New, New Journalism

I read Hugh Hewitt's book on blogging last night (I took lots of notes, and I'll go back and reread sections of it a few more times at least), but I'm far from the only one: men and women alike agree that it's well worth reading!

Sharp Dressed Dan

By Ed Driscoll · January 4, 2005 06:01 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

Like a Hasbro GI Joe action figure, Dan Rather comes equipped with a variety of outfits for overseas duty. Here's a classic from 2002. Here's his latest.

I realize that all men--even anchormen--are innocent until proven guilty, but doesn't CBS have somebody else they could send while we're breathlessly awaiting the results of their "weeks not months" report on Ra^thGate?

Of course, there's another biproduct of Dan's choice of togs, as Jim Geraghty writes:

If the goal was to achieve maximum irony by placing one of Bush's most high-profile critics in the garb and location that his critics found most objectionable... "Mission Accomplished!"

Heh.

Update: I'm only about a month late on this Matt Welch piece on Diamond Dan the Newsman, but this post seems like a good place to hang it off of.

Media Bias In Airstrip One

By Ed Driscoll · January 4, 2005 05:35 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist who looks at the natural consequences of bias and poor reporting in the war on terror:

At a recording of the BBC radio panel show Any Questions, in the solid Conservative heartland of Wokingham in Berkshire, an overwhelmingly conservative audience applauded and cheered the veteran far left activist Tariq Ali when he said that that America was the fount of world terror, that George Bush was more of a danger to the world than Saddam Hussein, and that if any country was a menace to world peace through its weapons of mass destruction it was not Iraq but Israel.

How has Middle Britain come to applaud the view – hitherto confined to the most extreme left-wing circles -- that the President of the United States is more of a danger than an unbalanced dictator with a terrorist history? How have such solid citizens come to view a democracy – Israel – that has been under attack since its foundation as the greatest threat to world peace? And how has the ancient libel of sinister global Jewish power been allowed to rear its head so openly once again?

Britain is gripped by an unprecedented degree of irrationality, prejudice and hysteria over the issues of Iraq, the terrorist jihad and Israel. All three are intimately linked; all three, however, are thought by public opinion to be linked in precisely the wrong way. This is because all three have been systematically misreported, distorted and misrepresented through a lethal combination of profound ignorance, political malice and ancient prejudices.

This systematic abuse by the media is having a devastating impact in weakening the ability of the west to defend itself against the unprecedented mortal threat that it faces from the Islamic jihad. People cannot and will not fight if they don’t understand the nature or gravity of the threat that they face, so much so that they vilify their own leaders while sanitising those who would harm them.

Yet that is what is happening. Public debate in Britain is now marked by a collapse of objectivity, truth, fairness and balance. Logic and morality have been stood on their heads. Victims are portrayed as oppressors, while mass murderers have to be understood and sympathised with. The outcome is an ugly and dangerous climate in which prejudice and lies have achieved the status of unchallengeable fact; a climate which is now being eagerly manipulated by terrorists who know that if they ratchet up their barbarism and distribute the video the result will merely be an ever greater public clamour for Tony Blair to split away from President Bush and shatter the coalition in defence of the free world.

The public has been grossly misled by the British media, and falsehoods have become accepted as fact, so much so that any statement of actual facts which undermine this mindset are excised from the debate altogether.

Much more here, in PDF format.

(Via Power Line.)

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New EH Newsletter Online

By Ed Driscoll · January 4, 2005 04:02 PM · The Electronic Cottage

In which I pay kudos to my father's love of hi-fi--and make the case that he may have designed the very first custom-built media room, back in 1969.

(Or, maybe it wasn't. But it's still a fun story.)

Video Blogging Breaks Out With Tsunami Scenes

By Ed Driscoll · January 4, 2005 12:50 AM · The New, New Journalism · The Perfect Storm

The Wall Street Journal looks at what could possibly be the Next Big Thing for the Blogosphere: video blogging. It's gotten quite a jump start in popularity as a result of the Indian Ocean disaster.

As I wrote last month:

By 2008, expect lots of one or two-man online TV stations--or at least bloggers with lots of multimedia content. And when they start to catch on as personalities, I'd be very, very scared if I was a TV producer.

(Of course, the smart producers will try to co-opt the best of them--and their audience.)

Five For '05

By Ed Driscoll · January 4, 2005 12:22 AM ·

Duncan Currie of The Weekly Standard lists a quintet of dynamic politicians to keep an eye on this year.

The New York Times Meets Manhattan

By Ed Driscoll · January 3, 2005 10:39 PM · Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal · Oh, That Liberal Media! · The Future and its Enemies

While we've all been celebrating the growth of the Blogosphere, it couldn't have happened without the simultaneous decline of the mainstream media, which has been frequently and unceremoniously dubbed "the legacy media" by its successor (I know I've used that phrase more than a few times last year). While CBS fell the most spectacularly with Ra^therGate this past year, its collapse in credibility was foreshadowed in 2003 by Howell Raines, Jayson Blair and their disastrous impact on the ol' Grey Lady herself, The New York Times.

Forbes has a well-written review of a new book called Hard News, Seth Mnookin's look back at those (pardon the pun) grey days:

Although Mnookin's relentless attacks on Raines sometimes seem repetitive, he marshals an impressive amount of evidence to make his point that Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger's decision to appoint Raines executive editor was disastrous. Raines, who previously served as editorial page editor, was known at the Times for his arrogance and autocratic management style. Yet he started out in his new job brilliantly. Six days after taking over, Raines was leading the Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath, and although he drove his staff hard, no one would deny that the results were worth it.
The troubles started not long after Raines turned to making changes in the paper's personnel and content. He drove out talented editors and national correspondents while shamelessly playing favorites with reporters he considered stars, some of whom were his friends.

Raines also extended his authoritarian rule to the traditionally independent-minded Washington, D.C., bureau, and in effect made himself bureau chief. He disenfranchised the assignment editors who dealt directly with the reporters and transferred power to the masthead editors--then alienated the latter as well. Mnookin depicts him as an abrasive megalomaniac obsessed with the legacy he would leave as executive editor. He wouldn't listen to legitimate criticism, intimidated his editors so much that they were afraid to bring up newsroom problems and saw himself as the embodiment of all that is great about the Times.

Equally devastating, in Mnookin's view, is that Raines' demands led to seriously flawed journalism that sullied the newspaper's reputation. Stories were ordered up to create "buzz" and to advance Raines' own agendas, such as a crusade against the Augusta National golf club, which hosts the annual Masters Tournament and doesn't allow women to join the club. Mnookin also cites what he sees as the Times' faulty coverage of the buildup to the Iraq war and the search for weapons of mass destruction.

Hard News thus becomes a case study in newsroom dysfunction brought about by gross mismanagement. As a consequence, Raines and Blair were put on what the author calls "a collision course." Blair got away with extensive fabrication and plagiarism in three-dozen stories over six months. Incredibly, he was moved from the metro desk to the national news department to help cover a major breaking story about sniper attacks in the Washington, D.C., area. Raines and his deputy, Gerald Boyd, thought Blair had potential despite his history of reporting errors and severe personal problems that included drug and alcohol abuse. It was just one of the mistakes that would cost the two top editors their careers at the paper.

After chronicling Blair's transgressions in depth, the book shifts focus yet again, this time to the Times' investigative team and its herculean efforts to uncover the full range of Blair's fraud. They courageously did so despite the risk that the results could implicate their bosses and damage the Times' standing as, in Mnookin's words, the nation's most important newspaper. Following the disturbing portraits of Raines and Blair, this is an inspiring portrayal of skilled professionals hard at work. Some thought their 13,500-word, four-page report was overkill. But for Mnookin it demonstrated the incomparable resources and talent the Times can unleash on any story, including an in-house scandal.

And yet, the next year, partially because they couldn't unleash those same resources to document the excesses and past history of the presidential candidate that many felt the Times was explicitly backing, they were doomed to be run over by "the pajamahadeen". (Even if they wouldn't earn their sobriquet--and their jammies--until Ra^therGate).

Not surprisingly, you can find similar stories of dissipation and overreach in a variety of industries just before they too experienced a tectonic plate shift. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls documents the near collapse of the film industry twice within a single ten year period: first by the out-of-touch old fogies who ran the studio system in the 1960s, and then by the coke-addled youngsters who replaced them, only to be replaced as industry leaders in the late 1970s by two clean and sober hotshots named Lucas and Spielberg. Look in your library for a good business history of the Penn Central railroad, whose mismanagement and unrestraint in the late 1960s lead first to its bankruptcy, and then to not one, but two interventions by the federal government in the 1970s: first the creation of Amtrak in 1971 (and its eventual ownership of the ex-PC Northeast Corridor), and then the creation of Conrail five years later. And I'm sure Detroit has some interesting tales of greed, excess and corruption, just before Pacific automakers emerged as serious competition.

In Manhattan, Woody Allen's character said that he wanted to write a book about people "who are constantly creating these real unnecessary neurotic problems for themselves--because it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable terrifying problems" such as their own mortality. Perhaps industries have a similarly neurotic need for huge scandals to distract them when forces they can't control are threatening to radically reshape the landscape.

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Blogger-Creep

By Ed Driscoll · January 3, 2005 03:17 PM · The New, New Journalism

Glenn Reynolds explains that Democratic Underground is not a Weblog to the "Paper of Record", and asks, "Is the NYT going out of its way to try to make blogs look bad, or are their reporters just that clueless?"

I suppose it works in reverse, too. Last month, when I did my top ten Blogosphere moments for Tech Central Station I was careful to credit Free Republic for launching Ra^therGate, before devoting most of my copy to the Blogs who advanced the story, since my piece was about, you know, Weblogs.

Some of the Freepers however, were miffed that I didn't give them more coverage. But as I said, my piece was about Weblogs, specifically, not the 'Net in general. (I wonder if they saw my post about election night, where I went out of my way to praise them.)

Thanks to Ra^therGate and Time magazine dubbing Power Line "Blog of the Year", the Blogosphere is the Internet's Flavor of the Month. I wonder if there will be additional examples of "Blogger-Creep" either to ride that wave, or to discredit the Boys in the 'Sphere.

(Say, now there's a name for a group Blog...)

D.I.Y.

By Ed Driscoll · January 3, 2005 02:32 PM · The New, New Journalism

"When things get so big, I don't trust them at all; you want some control, you've got to keep it small", sang Peter Gabriel in his 1978 song, "DIY".

DIY of course, stands for 'do it yourself'. In the mail today were review copies of two books about just that:

Hugh Hewitt's Blog, which you probably don't need me to tell you about, if you've been reading the Blogosphere for the past few weeks.

And Guerrilla Home Recording by Karl Coryat, which is a subject near and dear to my heart: its subhead reads, "how to get a great sound from any studio, no matter weird or cheap your gear is".

These days, recording on my PC, with a gig of ram, 300-odd gigs of HD space, 2.6 GHz of processor, Sonar 4, and a ton of plug-in processors, it's not too hard to get a great sound. But back in the old days (the mid-1980s, for you youngins), home recording meant using a cassette four-track recorder, a couple of outboard processors, a stand-alone drum machine and synth, and whole lot of luck. Forget getting a great sound: getting any completed song felt like a major accomplishment, because all that gear had to work its guts out, and the fellow operating it (me) had to have his mojo working double-overtime.

But my early efforts in that medium made me want to try other DIY projects--eventually including writing and blogging. The fact that the Professor, Eric Olsen, James Lileks and several other prominent members of the Blogosphere are also technologically adept musicians is no coincidence.

Look for reviews of both books in the not too distant future.

Pushing Back Against Pop Culture's Excesses

By Ed Driscoll · January 3, 2005 12:39 PM · Radical Chic

Stanley Crouch of The New York Daily News writes that "At last, women lash out at hip hop's abuses."

Meanwhile, Jay Nordlinger looks at continuing--and often successful--efforts that fight back against the glorification of "Che chic".

The 40 Most Obnoxious Quotes Of 2004

By Ed Driscoll · January 2, 2005 10:35 PM · Oh, That Liberal Media!

John Hawkins explores the nadir of journalism and speech in 2004.

Update: William Raspberry of The Washington Post gets the jump on next year's list by invoking the Copperhead Conjunction to tell us what a wonderfully "functioning country" Saddam had before we upset the apple cart:

We can argue all day that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant whose defeat and humiliation should evoke no sympathy from us. But he did have a functioning country. There was a government in place. People went to work and to the market and to school in relative safety. Can anyone really believe that the U.S.-spawned anarchy has left the Iraqi people better off? We broke it. Do we have the moral right to walk away with the shards scattered across the floor?

As Jim Geraghty writes:

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