Not surprisingly, James Lileks has a great take on the Times disclosing details about the CIA's terrorist-transporting airline:

I admit I am confused about the reasons for running the story; it would seem an odd thing to reveal in wartime, unless of course you didn’t believe this was wartime. Stories like this come not from the Vietnam template but the 80s template, which is much more vivid to the mind of a modern reporter. This is the sort of story you’d do when you discovered new American perfidy in Central America, a detail from a dirty distant war whose purpose and rationale was held in contempt by all - at least the right-thinking people you had drinks with after work. (I speak as someone who did four years duty in DC happy hours, thank you. It's not so much that all DC journalists are rabid Democrats - it's that they're addicted to cynicism and bemusedly contemptous of anyone who isn't in the press. Except for thier sources, of course. And their spouses who have government jobs. Everyone else is an object of pity or contempt. You think DC journalists are doctrinaire liberals? Get them talking about DC city government, and stand back lest ye be singed.) No, the CIA airllne story plugs into the general idea that the role of the press is to reveal government secrets, regardless of their nature. That the Republic is served not by men and women in offices figuring out crafty ways to confound headchoppers, but by men in parking garages who tell reporters that funds earmarked for vending machine repair are actually going to airlift terrorists out of foreign capitals without proper extradition documents. Boy! Stop the presses!

Would you have trusted these reporters to keep quiet about the fake build-up of troops that made it appear the Allies would invade Calais instead of Normandy? You can imagine a reporter pitching that story to a Perry White c. 1944 – boss, it’s a cover-up, a huge deception. Public money is at stake as well, and the people have a right to know how the war’s being conducted.

GEDDOUDDA HEAH! the editor would shout. AND I NEVER WANNA SEE YOUR JERRY-LOVIN’ ASS IN MY PAPER AGAIN!

Like I keep saying, it’s not their war. It's a war, to be observed dispassionately. And many don’t believe it’s a war at all. I can’t tell you how many emails I get accusing me of mad foamy paranoia for thinking that Iran and / or North Korea would want to slip a teeny nuke to some Islamicist cell so they could drive it up Broadway.

Well, if it occurs to me, who loves this country, I imagine it occurs to those who hate it.

That line says it all: "it’s not their war. It's a war, to be observed dispassionately".

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"Generalissimo" Duane Patterson, Hugh Hewitt's Sancho Panza, wrote on Sunday about the "non" French EU positional vote, "Somehow, I know to liberals this is Bush's fault".

Today, Jayson of PoliPundit writes:

So, the Associated Depressed came out of its drunken stupor this morning and decided that La Francais’ vote against the EUro Constitution was bad news for . . . drum roll . . . President Bush.

Mmm, hmm.

Okaaaaay, then.

In other news, the Yankees’ slow start is bad news for President Bush.

And Dale Earnhardt, Jr.’s latest foibles are bad news for President Bush.

And the cancellation of “Joan of Arcadia” has been deemed by experts to be awful news for President Bush too.

Sacre bleu.

Heh.

In what feels (at least to me) like the greatest anti-climax to a mystery since Geraldo Rivera found bupkis in Al Capone's vault, the Washington Post has confirmed the identity of the infamous Deep Throat of Watergate fame:

The Washington Post today confirmed that W. Mark Felt, a former number-two official at the FBI, was "Deep Throat," the secretive source who provided information that helped unravel the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s and contributed to the resignation of president Richard M. Nixon.

The confirmation came from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, and their former top editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee. The three spoke after Felt's family and Vanity Fair magazine identified the 91-year-old Felt, now a retiree in California, as the long-anonymous source who provided crucial guidance for some of the newspaper's groundbreaking Watergate stories.

* * *

In a statement today, Woodward and Bernstein said, "W. Mark Felt was 'Deep Throat' and helped us immeasurably in our Watergate coverage. However, as the record shows, many other sources and officials assisted us and other reporters for the hundreds of stories that were written in The Washington Post about Watergate."

Ed Morrissey writes:

The accompanying article has people describing Felt as a "hero", while some of the commenters here are more inclined to see him as a traitor. I don't think either applies. Felt worked with the Post for his own personal motivations of revenge and frustration at being passed over. If Nixon had made him Director of the FBI, he never would have lefted a finger for Woodward or Bernstein.

On the other hand, having decided to pursue wrongdoing by the White House, Felt's complicity in similar activity against terrorist groups like the Weather Underground would have made it difficult, if not impossible, for him to have any chance of success. Becoming a whistleblower probably made it possible for the truth to get out, even if that did provide a measure of personal satisfaction (short-lived as it was) for Felt.

Like the scandal he helped expose, Felt and his role were much more complicated than a simple hero-or-traitor binary choice allows.

I agree--and in a post amusingly titled "Deep Epstein", Power Line reprints a very smart piece from 1974 by Edward Jay Epstein on Watergate, and the competing roles of the media and government organizations jockeying for power:

Perhaps the most perplexing mystery in Bernstein and Woodward's book is why they fail to understand the role of the institutions and investigators who were supplying them and other reporters with leaks. This blind spot, endemic to journalists, proceeds from an unwillingness to see the complexity of bureaucratic in-fighting and of politics within the government itself. If the government is considered monolithic, journalists can report its activities, in simply comprehended and coherent terms, as an adversary out of touch with popular sentiments. On the other hand, if governmental activity is viewed as the product of diverse and competing agencies, all with different bases of power and interests, journalism becomes a much more difficult affair.

In any event, the fact remains that it was not the press, which exposed Watergate; it was agencies of government itself. So long as journalists maintain their blind spot toward the inner conflicts and workings of the institution, of government, they will no doubt continue to speak of Watergate in terms of the David and Goliath myth, with Bernstein and Woodward as David and the government as Goliath.

You could make the case that unlike Richard Nixon (who as Chris Matthews once said, spent the rest of his life rebuilding his image and reworking it into that of an elder statesman in anticipation of his death, with arguable degrees of success), and the Republicans (who spent four years in the wilderness only to reemerge triumphantly with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980), the press has never recovered from Watergate. The same impulses that drove Woodward and Bernstein and the Post to bring down the hated Nixon and cause America to abandon Vietnam have been amped-up exponentially in their war against President Bush and America's war on terror--but with disastrous results for the media: circulation has fallen dramatically in recent years, the Blogosphere is running rings around them, and any shred of the appearance of neutrality or objectivity ended by the time the presidential election was over in November.

That's obviously not the lesson that the media takes from Watergate of course, but it's worth noting that critics such as Epstein were trying to point out the media's hubris even as early as 30 years ago.

Update: Of course, Deep Throat was apparently only chosen as a nom de snitch by Woodward and Berstein's book editor after careful consideration. Jeff Goldstein has somehow gotten a list of the nine rejected names.

Another Update: Welcome AOL News Blog Zone readers! Put your feet up, stay awhile and look around, there's lots of material on the site that may be of interest.

Bill Roggio asks a very good question:

If you are al Qaeda, and you are interested in interdicting or attacking CIA air services that transport captured high value targets, how would you go about finding out how the CIA is moving these prisoners around? Would you:

a) Attempt to penetrate the CIA and dig into the inner workings of these operations.
b) Invest heavily in paying off workers at local airports and in charter airlines across the Middle East and Asia to provide intelligence on suspicious flight activities.
c) Read the New York Times.

And yes, not surprisingly, "C" is the correct answer. Perhaps the Times is jealous of Newsweek's success in the sedition department, and is looking to up the ante a notch or two.

Or maybe they're just nostalgic for the halcyon days of Vietnam.

Update: Just staggering. I missed the one over the holiday weekend, but Duane Patterson, Hugh Hewitt's Generalissimo, links to an astonishingly cynical and dismissive piece in--you guessed it--the New York Times titled, "Ground Zero Is So Over" by Frank Rich:

But there is another, national narrative here, too. Bothered as New Yorkers may be by what Charles Schumer has termed the "culture of inertia" surrounding ground zero, that stagnation may accurately reflect most of America's view about the war on terror that began with the slaughter of more than 2,700 at the World Trade Center almost four years ago. Though the vacant site is a poor memorial for those who died there, it's an all too apt symbol for a war on which the country is turning its back.

In January of 2004, Andrew Sullivan wrote that "For the Clintonites, 9/11 didn't really happen". Now Rich seems to believe that the War on Terror is also a mirage--or, like the pit that awaits a new WTC, some sort of holding pattern largely ignored by the rest of the country (even here in blue state California, that would be news to the many motorists I see every day with "Support Our Troops" yellow ribbons on their cars).

Not surprisingly Duane has numerous examples that prove Rich is deeply in error in his assumptions.

Nice to see California's legislature is being silly again, in an effort to reduce all of those hernias that high school kids report every year. Ed Morrissey writes:

California has provided yet another Great Moment In Education with the Assembly mandating the length of textbooks for use in its public schools. According to the just-approved AB 756, no textbook used in California public schools can exceed 200 pages.

* * *

Educated people already know that one cannot judge a book by its cover. We thought that the obvious corrolary of notjudging it by its page count would be understood implicitly. I'm sure we're correct, for most places. The intellect-challenged state capitol in Sacramento appears to be an exception to that rule.

Not surprisingly, Joanne Jacobs and her readers have some thoughts on this.

And hopefully Gov. Schwarzenegger has his veto pen ready.

Mickey Kaus believes that John McCain is gonna party like it's 1991:

McCain doesn't have to run as a Republican. He can run as a third-party candidate, Perot-style. Isn't it, in fact, intuitively obvious that that's what McCain will do, once he's sufficiently infuriated by his rejection by GOP conservatives? ... And he might win. Polls show voters are dissatisfied with both parties, no? Ross Perot got 19 percent of the vote despite being labeled (unfairly or not) as wacky. That's a good base to start with. ... McCain would steal both moderate GOPS and moderate Dems. Suddenly the Republicans would too have to worry about the center, in a way they maybe wouldn't if they were just running against a Democrat.

So McCain plays the role of Perot. But who'll play the role of Clinton, hmmmm....?

(Via InstaPundit.)

So how do you spell AC/DC, anyhow....?

Sometime on Saturday or Sunday, TiVo hoovered up Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo off of Turner Classic Movies, one of several WWII films they've been showing over Memorial Day weekend. I watched it last night, fastforwarding through some of the scenes of domestic melodrama between Van Johnson and his onscreen wife to concentrate on the main thrust of the plot: America's first aerial raid on Japan, just five months after Pearl Harbor, in April of 1942.

The film version was released in 1944, when World War II was very much in full force--and while victory appeared to be in sight in Europe, we had no idea how long it would take. We really had no idea when victory would be obtained in the Pacific--or how many of our soldiers would die there, especially if a full-scale invasion of Japan was required. As I was watching it, and having my usual thought when watching a WWII-era movie--why can't Hollywood make films like this about the War on Terror--I remembered a phrase that Arthur Chrenkoff used at the start of a recent post:

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I don't know how Mark Steyn does it: he just constantly cranks out fantastically written topical columns. Here's his latest for England's Telegraph on France's EU vote:

On balance, Jean-Claude Juncker, the "president" of "Europe", seems closer to the mark in his now famous dismissal of the will of the people: "If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue'."

And if it's a Neither of the Above, he will say "we move forward". You get the idea. Confronted by the voice of the people, "President" Juncker covers his ears and says: "Nya, nya, nya, can't hear you!" There are several lessons worth learning from the French vote. The first is that the Junckers are a big part of the problem.

Steyn's just getting started though. His conclusion is marvelous:

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Roger Kimball asks, "Where is Hercules when you need him", to clean up the Augean Stables that modern academia has descended into. The latest example of academic excess that Kimball highlights perfectly fits his metaphor, by the way.

Orrin Hatch's abortive run for the White House was the first (or at least first modern) Mormon candidate for the White House. The next could be Mitt Romney, the Republican governor of Massachusetts. Would America accept a Mormon president?

Jonathan Last has high praise indeed for Deep Blue, coming soon to a theater in your area:

If you find yourself yearning for a bit of real magic after sitting through Revenge of the Sith, George Lucas's computer-generated confection, you should keep an eye on your local theater for Deep Blue.

A documentary directed by Andy Byatt and the wonderfully named Alastair Fothergill for the BBC, Deep Blue is only now seeping out into release in the United States. Showings begin in major cities in the coming weeks and, if the movie proves successful, Miramax will no doubt book it out into the hinterlands. If you should be lucky enough to have Deep Blue showing in your neck of the woods, you'd be a fool to miss it.

Deep Blue is a return to the great oceanographic documentaries of yesteryear, but Byatt and Fothergill avoid all hints of Steve Zissou-ism. No humans appear on camera and the narration is sparse (the U.S. release is voiced by Pierce Brosnan), giving us only the barest outlines of context. In Deep Blue, the camera speaks for itself.

What results are some of the most astonishing images you will ever see onscreen. From the first moments of the film as dolphins body-surf and then hurdle big waves to the ghostly scene of a jellyfish swarm to the haunting and terrifying shot of hundreds of hammerhead sharks congregating under the moonlight, Deep Blue outclasses any spectacle you'll see at the movies this summer.

He also links to the film's trailer, adding, "As Byatt and Fothergill demonstrate, the most special effects are real".

Patrick Ruffini has been mapping the French referendum results with a map that's more detailed than the version seen earlier today on Power Line. He's also got some additional thoughts, and a link to a provocative William Kristol piece on the referendum.

Temple Stark.com has a list of "Blogcritics Editors' Picks" for the week, one of which was my review of the latest versions of Cakewalk's Project5 and Propellerhead's Reason:

There was a time when I hated synth-pop. It still grinds my teeth on occasion but I've giving up caring because I discovered if I continued I would have no teeth. This is an insight into the instrument that drives most music today. The author plays and knows from whence he speaks on the quality of "Propellerhead's Reason, and its upstart competitor, Cakewalk's Project5."

Thanks Temple.

It's purely intuitive, but I've liked synthesizers probably since the early 1970s, when I first heard Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein" and all those great Stevie Wonder songs. Still, I've always thought guitar was the most important instrument in rock (which is why I chose to learn how to play it at age 17), but keyboards have given rock much more color and shading than the guitar alone allows. And has created all sorts of unique genres separate from rock--such as the synth-pop that risks wreaking all that destruction on Temple's dental work!

Chris Muir has a great topical cartoon for Memorial Day:

Meanwhile, Don Surber lists the names of the dead that Doonesbury won't list.

Found via an item on PoliPundit, where the first few comments are also well worth reading.

Update: These men are also worth remembering.

Another Update: Orrin Kerr of The Volokh Conspiracy is spot-on:

Memorial Day is about honoring the sacrifice of those who gave up their lives fighting in the name of the United States. It is about the living honoring the dead, recognizing their passing and reaffirming our memory and appreciation for what they did. It is about the troops, the grunts, the front-line soliders who left home and did not return. Memorial Day is not a time to separate out which of the dead served and died for good reasons or bad; to second-guess which decisions to declare war, launch a campaign or charge a hill were justified or not; or to test your ability to invent a populist voice to make cheap shots against an Administration you despise. I'm sure there are good times for that, but Memorial Day isn't one of them.

Interesting take on the whole EU project by Peter Burnet from April of this year:

Mark Steyn once wrote that the European Achilles heel is the “big idea”, meaning abstract, ideological goals that come to grip the intellectual and political elites and are pursued singlemindedly without any reference to the popular will, local culture, human nature or even decency. Most of these have promised the Holy Grail of European unity, and while the modern secular statism embodied in the EU is obviously to be preferred over the brutalities of a Hitler or Napoleon, they have more in common that one might think. Here is an excerpt from the diaries of a Canadian diplomat in London during the Blitz that recorded his thoughts after a meeting with a liberal, anti-Nazi Hungarian diplomat:

I can see that despite his hatred of the Nazis Tony is half-fascinated by the idea of a united European bloc by whatever means achieved. Some Europeans may be tempted to think that if the small sovereign state entities can be broken down and Europe united it is worth the price of temporary Hitler domination, because Hitler will not last forever, and after he is gone it will be as impossible to reconstruct the Europe of small states as it was to reconstruct feudal Europe after the fall of Napoleon.

The spiritual and cultural sterility of the EU project, and the realization that it can never be democratic or responsive to popular opinion, is gradually dawning on a heretofore inarticulate European public (notably on the left) and awakening both worthy local and national prides and unworthy ancient animosities. Immigration controversies and the recent spate of soccer violence may show what is bubbling just below the surface, but the defection of privileged French farmers threatens a coup de grace. If the constitution fails in France, it is very hard to see how the European political elites, who have bet the farm on an ever-expanding EU for three generations, will have any coherent leadership to offer for many years.

It's deja vu all over again with the map of how various provinces in France voted on the EU constitution that Power Line has uploaded.

Of course, unlike in the US, a lot of those red votes in France really are red votes, as Ed Morrissey writes:

While Americans might take some well-earned schadenfreude at Chirac's plight, given his efforts to turn France into our diplomatic enemy, in fact this shows that France as a whole still deeply believes in its socialist model. That attitude does not spring from its ruling class but from its electorate, which has gladly accepted a stagnant economy and double-digit unemployment because its nanny state still buffers the effects of those conditions from the individual workers.

In fact, the 'Non' may be irrelevant in the end. The society that the French defended in their vote today will disappear soon enough, as the rest of Europe will not long support the French in their self-indulgence. While Germany and France controlled the union, they could get away with breaking the debt ceilings and budgetary expectations set by the existing EU compact. Now that they have thumbed their noses at the new constitution, that control and influence will rapidly dissipate -- and they will find themselves forced to reform or face expulsion and devastating trade disputes with an otherwise united Europe.

The far left and far right in France are celebrating tonight on the streets of Paris, delighted in their rejection of the sensible market-based reforms that the rest of Europe wants. They may have won the battle, but that victory will only be temporary, and will consign them to second-tier status in Europe from this point forward.

On the other hand, David Carr of Samizdata describes the vote as "Wrong reasons, right result".

Update: Patrick Ruffini adds:

Of course, the Non victory on Sunday may be more Episode IV than Episode VI in the rebellion against the European Empire. The Times of London reports on Chiraq's plans to defy his people's Non, principally at the expense of our British ally. That shouldn't surprise us. Whenever a nation gives "the wrong answer" in a referendum on Europe, out-of-touch europhile elites call a mulligan and resubmit a "renegotiated" treaty before a weary public, who usually succumb.

Here's hoping this is not one of those times.

Update: Charles Johnson writes, "in truth this was a victory for those who want the nanny state to keep providing those leisurely six-week vacations". He links to a Telegraph article titled "French business fears ‘heavy consequences’ from upset."

Current polls show that French voters have rejected the European Union constitution. If that's true--and we all remember the hours of fun our own exit polls provided on November 2nd--for some thoughts on what that vote entails, click on this very detailed InstaPost. For some thoughts on what the EU as a whole means, check out this great Mark Steyn piece in England's Spectator, in which he writes:

Permanence is the illusion of every age, but it’s especially powerful in our time, reinforced by electronic media and other marvels that make ours much more of a present-tense culture than that of our grandfathers or great-great-grandfathers. That was the somewhat self-congratulatory message of the VE Day anniversary: 60 years ago, the Germans were operating a vast bureaucracy created to process the mass murder of Jews; the rest of the Continent was at each other’s throats. Now a bare half-century later Europeans live in harmony, spending so much on cradle-to-grave welfare that their decrepit militaries couldn’t invade each other even if they wanted to, which, given that it would cut into their two months’ paid holiday a year, they don’t. True, the Germans are now as obnoxiously pacifist as once they were aggressively militarist, but who can argue that if one has to err in one direction or another, today’s isn’t preferable?

So ‘Europhiles’ say to the moment, ‘Linger awhile! so fair thou art!’ That’s what the European constitution boils down to — an attempt to freeze the moment, to make time stand still in a permanent EUtopia so fair it should be constitutionally required to linger eternally. Virtually the entire European governing class has made no useful contribution to the French and Dutch referendum campaigns except to insist that this moment is for ever — or as the Netherlands’ foreign minister Bernard Bot reprimanded his ingrate electorate, ‘You have to understand the nature of the times in which you live.’

Steyn certainly does; read the whole thing.

Remember all those "it's the end of the world as we know it" essays from Big Media and their allies when Matt Drudge first appeared on the scene?

You could almost do a "find and replace" of the names (didn't 1972-era IBM typewriters have that feature?) and replace Drudge's name with those of today's bloggers, as a big media that decades ago loved nothing more than to bust up trusts and monopolies gets increasingly uncomfortable watching their own lock on information dissolve. (Or as James Lileks put it last Monday on Hugh Hewitt's show, the same journalists who said "question authority" and "don't trust anyone over 30" in the late '60s and early '70s are now saying "don't trust anyone but us".)

For example, Ed Morrissey, of the great Captain's Quarters Weblog just had such an essay written about him in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by a professor of journalism at the University of Georgia.

As Ed writes:

Professor Fink claims in his conclusion that he holds no brief for the newspaper industry, but then states that the broadsheets have stood watch over this nation's interests like no other medium has or ever will. That's the cri de coeur of the dinosaur, and it will be the echo of the paper medium as it disappears into history. It reveals his essay as nothing more than a self-serving rant, trying desperately to discredit bloggers and anyone else who dares to report and comment on current events without a diploma from dear old Georgia or a similar member of academia.

The difference between Morrissey and Professor Fink, and the Blogosphere and Big Media really highlights Virginia Postrel's Dynamists and Stasists model from The Future and its Enemies, doesn't it?

2014's getting closer every day.

Update: Victor Davis Hanson answers Professor Fink's essay even before it's written:

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On his Website, Mark Steyn reprints his essay on Memorial Day that first ran in The Chicago Sun-Times last year. Here's a big chunk of it, but read the whole thing, as they say:

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In his "Backfence" column, James Lileks discovers a new genre of pop music currently on its 15 minutes--or maybe seconds--of fame: crunk.

Come again?

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Lots of Bloggers (including Ed Morrissey, where we found the story first) have already linked to this great piece by Thomas Lipscomb in Editor & Publisher. The title of Lipscomb's piece comes from this section of his essay:

Sherlock Holmes’s key clue to who stole the racehorse in “Silver Blaze” was a dog in the stall that didn’t bark. And something equally odd happened on the way to the Foley firestorm: To date, not a single pundit, editorial writer, or newspaper ran anything, with the exception of the Chicago Sun-Times story I wrote, a St. Paul Pioneer Press column by Mark Yost, and a Washington Times column item.

Clearly Foley was correct in assuming the Right was the only danger to her repetition of the statement that got Eason Jordan canned. The Mainstream Media couldn’t be bothered to cover “Easongate: The Sequel.” And positioning Foley as the gallant defender of the lives of journalists targeted by the U.S. military was inspired PR. After all, Sherlock Holmes’s dog didn’t bark because he was good friends with the thief.

* * *

If the most basic tenets of Journalism 101 are now no longer important enough for the media itself to honor and defend against their own members who violate them, where is the professionalism and the authority that is our main claim to writing the indispensable “first draft of history” – much less its value for sale? And if we lose sight of that irretrievably, who needs us? There are bloggers out there today with more credibility than Dan Rather, Mary Mapes, Eason Jordan, and Linda Foley combined, and their audiences are growing.

Via Galley Slaves, Orson Scott Card also some thoughts on the current state of the media:

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Charles Johnson writes that the Saudi Arabian government "is maintaining an iron grasp on news in the kingdom, as always, but reports are now coming from so many sources that it’s likely to be true" that King Fahd is dead.

Eddie Albert, the beloved star of TV's Green Acres died Thursday at the age of 99. A World War II hero, he'll probably best be remembered for his performances on TV, and as the heavy in the original (and no doubt still best) version of The Longest Yard.

A more controversial aspect of his life is his role as a proto-environmentalist:

"Green Acres" made Albert a rich man and allowed him to pursue his causes. He established Plaza de la Raza, a foundation in East Los Angeles that teaches arts to poor Hispanics.

He helped Dr. Albert Schweitzer combat famine in Africa. He traveled the world for UNICEF. Concerned about seeing fewer pelicans on beaches where he was jogging, he went with ecologists and his son on a trip to Anacapa Island.

"We discovered that in every nest all the eggs were crushed, and nobody knew why," the younger Albert said. "They took samples and tested them, and found DDT in all the eggs. ... An entire generation of species was being wiped out."

Albert began speaking about the harmful effects of the pesticide at universities around the country, and in 1972 the federal government banned DDT.

For some background on this, remember that 1962 saw the publication of Rachel Carson's now-infamous Silent Spring. As Ronald Bailey of Reason noted in 2002:

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In a post appropriately titled "Our Spoiled and Unhappy Global Elites", Victor Davis Hanson looks at the global plutocracy's sadly predictable anti-Americanism. Included amongst them is what Hanson calls "the anti-American two-step", as performed by PepsiCo's chief operating officer, Indra Nooyi, after giving Uncle Sam the metaphoric middle finger:

Immediately after her silly remarks, the corporate mogul Nooyi provided a recant. Neither Khan nor Roy has vowed to stay out of the U.K. or the U.S., where the Koran is supposedly not respected and where the homeless starve as a result of capitalism — a system that both created and enriched them all and which they apparently love to chide.

The anti-Americanism that we frequently see and hear, then, is often a plaything of the international elite — a corporate grandee, a leisured athlete, or a refined novelist who flies in and out of the West, counts on its globalizing appendages for wealth, and then mocks those who make it all possible — but never to the point that their own actions would logically follow their rhetoric and thus cost them so dearly.

More here:

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How long before Newsweek jumps on this one, Middle Eastern politicians seeth, and crowds riot in anger?

(In other words, don't hold your breath waiting for any of the above to happen.)

My stats log this morning contains dozens of listings for someone (or a bot?) searching Google for "Bush Groucho". Here's the post from 2002 he/she/they/it have been clicking on.

All I can say is that the Internet is a place stranger than can possibly be imagined...

(Incidentally I just now replaced the 404-ing original link to the New York Post with its archived cousin on the Internet Wayback machine, because I was curious as to what the fuss was all about.)

Update: This seems to be what the Googlers are actually looking for.

In what surely must be the most-missed Weblog on the Internet, Steve Den Beste had a terrific observation about Europe's lack of high-tech industries back in 2002:

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As ABC's Terry Moran might say, with all due respect, who made leftwing Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) the editor of Newsweek? James Taranto notes that he's dusted off the bottled-in-2002 "conservative media bias" canard to attack the media--for being too soft on the president!

Taranto writes:

What is interesting is the reaction of the press--or rather, the lack of reaction. Here we have a government official calling official hearings to accuse the press of not doing its job properly. Shouldn't such interference occasion some outrage from the press? It certainly did when Scott McClellan criticized Newsweek last week.

Granted, a member of Congress from the minority party is far less significant than the White House. But suppose that, back when the Democrats controlled Congress, a Republican congressman had held hearings on liberal media bias? Our guess is that the press would have complained quite loudly.

Assuming that we are right about this, what does the lack of outrage over Conyers's hearing tell us? Perhaps journalists don't take complaints of "conservative bias" as seriously as complaints of "liberal bias." But if journalists themselves take the latter more seriously than the former, that suggests that liberal bias is indeed a problem, and journalists know it.

Or maybe journalists actually agree with Conyers's critique. But if they find themselves in accord with one of the most left-wing members of Congress, that would seem to illustrate that they have a liberal bias and don't know it.

That last paragraph reminds me of a comment we linked to on the weekend last July that (now recently departed ombudsman) Daniel Okrent admitted that The New York Times was liberal.

Update: Somewhat related post by Glenn Reynolds on the politics of the media.

Another Update: I wonder if Conyers will be holding hearings on this?

Regarding TV's Law & Order, a couple of week ago, I wrote:

I really loved Law & Order in its early days--but the combination of Rudolph Giuliani's election to mayor of New York in 1993, along with the Republican control of the House and Senate the next year has caused the show to tilt increasingly to the left. President Bush's reelection in November hasn't helped matters. Law & Order was once a groundbreaking--and at times great--TV series. But even before it sprouted, as Jonah wrote, "more franchises than Pottery Barn", it had cleared the take-off ramp and was airborne over a cartilaginous fish dangerous to man.

Its Law & Order: Criminal Intent spin-off is quickly headed in that direction as well.

Way to boost those red state ratings, boys!

Update: In regards to that last sentence, Neal Boortz looks to add a little balance to Law & Order scripts.

In the 1980s, I was much more of a fan of the rock group Genesis as a whole, than of Phil Collins' solo projects. (Though Collins is a great performer: I recently watched a videotape of one of their concerts from that period--it was a reminder of what charisma his between song shtick added to the band's otherwise somewhat dry stage show.)

There's no doubt though that Collins' "In The Air Tonight" was a great song. Mix magazine looks at how the song was created largely in his home studio.

One of Glenn Reynolds' readers notices some wagon circling by the New York Times in defense of their colleagues at Newsweek.

Meanwhile, Charles Johnson would like more information--a lot more--about who those 17 dead Afghans are.

Back in 2002, we linked to a Los Angeles Times story that a lack of family-oriented attractions was hurting the San Francisco tourist industry.

But San Francisco has a deeper problem--a lack of families themselves. James Taranto writes:

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It must synthesizer day in the Blogosphere--this afternoon, I uploaded my review of two software synthesizers to Blogcritics, and tonight, Glenn Reynolds' latest Tech Central Station piece went online, using hardware synthesizers to illustrate his thoughts on ergonomic product design.

Not sure of the connection, and I've somehow I've lost Carl Jung's #800 number...

Underneath his column last week, Newsweek's editor, Mark Whitaker had this item:

Monday afternoon, May 16, Whitaker issued the following statement: Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Qur'an abuse at Guantanamo Bay.

But that's not what Daniel Klaidman, Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief told the Middle East's Al Jazeera TV three days later on the 19th:

We are neutral on whether any form of Koran desecration took place. There are allegations out there, but the allegations have not been subjected to the kind of scrutiny or legal processes that normally are...you need before you can establish whether they are true and we certainly know that the military has not confirmed any of these allegations, and so what we are saying is we did not have the information we needed to go forward with this story and we are also saying that this specific act of Koran desecration was not confirmed by the US military investigators, and that is what we reported. As to whether these things happened or not, we are, like the rest of the people out there and news organizations - we don’t know. We have heard the allegations, we continue to report, and the US military and other entities are investigating, and as I said, we are neutral on whether any of this ever happened.

(Emphasis mine.)

To borrow something that Jonah Goldberg once wrote about Pat Buchanan, Newsweek "brilliantly manages to do with one language what Yassir Arafat does with two": apologize to the US for fabulist reporting and simultaneously tell the Arab world that they're "neutral on whether any form of Koran desecration took place".

Ernie Pyle just rolled over in his grave; and of course, feigning neutrality is what has caused so many problems for American-based media institutions in the first place.

As InstaPundit wrote yesterday about the Japanese edition of Newsweek's American flag in trashcan cover (and we are not neutral on whether or not any form of US flag desecration took place--it did):

many American journalistic enterprises engage in more America-bashing abroad than at home. I suspect that the Internet will make that much harder, as people are starting to pay attention, and to compare this stuff.

Exactly.

Update: Speaking of InstaPundit, in his latest MSNBC column, Glenn Reynolds writes:

I worry that freedom of the press -- which in its modern extent is basically a creature of the post-World War II Supreme Court -- is likely to be at risk if people see it as merely a special-interest protection for a news-media industry that is producing defective products that do harm.

Glenn believes that the rise of "we-dia" (i.e.: millions of bloggers) will help to maintain the First Amendment, even as "Big media outfits have been squandering their credibility and public regard for decades".

I haven't done much home recording blogging lately. But I have a review of the new versions of Cakewalk's Project5 Version 2 and Propellerhead's Reason Version 3.0 up on Blogcritics today.

Glenn Reynolds has long stressed the importance of carrying a digital camera whenever possible for blogs to do their own original reporting.

Now it all makes sense...

(Via Willisms.com, which is having a "Carnival Of Classiness" that's well worth perusing.)

Jonthan Last notes that another government representative has ripped Newsweek. Only instead of President Bush's press secretary, it's Hamid Karzai, president of Afghanistan:

Calling Terry Moran! If it's bad to have Scott McClellan questioning Newsweek's journalistic practices, how awful must if be to have an actual head of state doing so?

Meanwhile, Ben Bradlee, the former editor of the Washington Post, which owns Newsweek, also isn't very happy about their sister publication:

Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of The Washington Post and a onetime Newsweek D.C. bureau chief, criticized the news magazine for taking too long to retract its recent, inadequately sourced Koran-abuse item. He added that under certain circumstances he would reveal a source who lied to a reporter and came out against single-source stories

Speaking of the Post, In DC Journal notices that they're doing some unusual photo cropping in defense of Newsweek.

The man who designed the look of Los Angles in 2019 for Blade Runner, industrial designer and self proclaimed "visual futurist" Syd Mead will be in L.A.--not in 2019, but next month, at the Peterson Automobile Museum:

A SPECIAL PRESENTATION BY SYD MEAD

Save the date: Thursday, June 16, 2005 from 7:30 PM - 9:00 PM

Petersen Automotive Museum, 6060 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, will host a presentation by SYD MEAD, focusing on his career and his designs for the cars of tomorrow. Some of his early works are on display in the currently running exhibition, "DRIVING THROUGH FUTURES PAST". Immediately following his presentation, "SENTURY" and "OBLAGON" will be on sale, and Syd will be on hand to sign copies. It promises to be an evening to meet and greet some of the most influential automotive designers and examine their work in the "Driving Through Futures Past" exhibition.

Free for Museum Members, Non-members: $10 adults / $5 Seniors and Students (includes admission into 2nd floor galleries)

Even before Blade Runner, we've admired Mead's great industrial design and futuristic artwork (and had the pleasure to interview him a few years ago). If you're in the area, it's definitely worth stopping by.

Great take by Arthur Chrenkoff:

If the rest of the world are indeed Blue States, then our media and creative elites feel far more at home overseas than they do back in America which is much more split between the Blue and Red States, and where, regardless on specific political affiliations, the majority of people have generally positive feelings about their own country. Not only is it a matter of the staff at "Newsweek" and other major outlets having pretty much the same attitude towards America as do people in Berlin or Bangladesh, but trashing your own country actually serves a useful purpose of ingratiating and legitimizing yourself to your overseas audience - put the American flag in a rubbish bin, sneer at the swaggering Texan cowboy, and bemoan the Iraqi quagmire or the failure to ratify the Kyoto agreement and you can instantly show yourself to be a different, "good" American, more sophisticated and in-tune than the yokels back home. The foreigner are bound to think you're wonderful and reward you with recognition and applause - what comedian Martin Short once called getting the "French ego juice."

Meanwhile, Will Collier runs roughshod over a Washington Post columnist who no doubt feels that he's also "more sophisticated and in-tune than the yokels back home".

It takes two to tango, and likewise, the deaths of 17 Pakistanis didn't happen solely because of Newsweek's fabulist Koran-in-the-Gitmo-toilet story. Mark Steyn introduces us to Imran Khan, the other half of the equation, the man who lit the spark on Pakistani TV:

By my reckoning, just five American newspapers mentioned the name of Imran Khan last week. Who? Well, he's a world-famous -- wait for it -- cricketer. No, hang on: Don't all stampede for the exits, this isn't a column about cricket. He is, as it happens, a beautiful cricketer, the first great fast bowler from the Indian subcontinent and -- whoops, no, honestly, it's not a cricket column. But the point is he's a household name in England, Australia, India and everywhere else where the summer game means the thwack of leather on willow.

And in the same week a mere handful of American media outlets mentioned Imran, over a hundred newspapers mentioned Michael Isikoff of Newsweek. Isikoff was the guy who filed the phony-baloney story about some interrogator at Guantanamo flushing a Quran down the toilet. But Imran was the guy who, in a ferocious speech broadcast on Pakistani TV, brought it to the attention of his fellow Muslims, many of whom promptly rioted, with the result that 17 people are dead.

Read the whole thing.

(Via PoliPundit.com.)

I'm testing out the newly updated versions of both Propellerhead's Reason and Cakewalk's Project 5 for an upcoming Blogcritics post.

While I'm primarily a guitarist, I've been playing with software synthesizers since about 2000, and hardware synths since the mid-1980s. But the new features in these products allow any home musician with even a modicum of talent to write amazing sounding arrangements almost effortlessly.

Between the two of them, let's just say that I know how Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush felt when they played their first Fairlights and Synclaviers in the early 1980s.

When US News & World Report's John Leo begins an essay titled, "The media in trouble" with the following opening line:

It's official: conservatives are losing their monopoly on complaints about media bias"

...You know the rest of his column is going to be well worth reading. So just click on over.

Via Orrin Judd, who writes:

How can an institution that doesn't either reflect America or at least reflect upon it hope to serve it effectively? And if it serves only itself or the interests of its members then why continue to afford it a special status within the Republic?

Increasingly good question.

The Washington Times notes that Saudi Arabian authorities "reportedly arrested 92 people for being homosexuals during a raid on a gay party in eastern Riyadh":

Riyadh, May. 22 (UPI) — Saudi Arabian authorities Sunday reportedly arrested 92 people for being homosexuals during a raid on a gay party in eastern Riyadh.

The Al-Wifaq news website, with close links to the Saudi Arabian Interior Ministry, said the suspects were found inside a club in a state of drunkenness or high on drugs and dancing wildly, with many of them dressed in women's clothes and wearing wigs and make-up.

The newspaper said the arrested gay men were from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Syria and Lebanon.

Homosexuality, alcohol and drugs are all illegal in the Arab kingdom, which says it strictly applies Islamic laws.

As James Lileks once wrote in 2002:

I was passing the TV and saw Jerry Brown debating O’Reilly. Brown’s default facial posture always seems to be android-calm, as if his internal systems are in Sleep mode, waiting for the cursor to move. O’Reilly was quoting a “60 Minutes” story about PLO - Iraq links; Brown responded that since the Saudis fund radical mosques, shouldn’t we invade them?

Thank you! I thought; there’s my column.

“The proper response to this is a big wide grin: capital idea, old chap; why not, indeed? Let’s go! Glad you’re on board. We can liberate those American-born women our craven State department refuses to help; we can take the oil fields, set the pumps on “gush” and flood the world with sweet, cheap crude. We can defund the radical mosques, disband the religious police, and build swingsets in the parks they use for public hand-choppings. As an added bonus, the West will occupy the most holy sites of Islam, so we can photograph, fingerprint, and possibly detain anyone who comes for a pilgrimage. Invade Saudi Arabia? Dude! You are so hard core!”

Heh, to coin a phrase.

Power Line links to an amazingly clear-headed op-ed in The San Francisco Chronical by Keith Thompson:

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Via InstaPundit, we find overseas editions of Newsweek putting the American flag into a garbage can on its cover. (Glenn Reynolds wryly observes, "And yet they're complaining about Koran-in-the-toilet reports.")

That Newsweek's international editions make the domestic edition of Newsweek look as patriotic as National Review or Fox News is reminiscent of something that Fox's Roger Ailes once said about how CNNi differs from the version of CNN we watch (well, based on the ratings, don't watch) in the US. We wrote in early February, just as the Eason Jordan scandal was coming to a boil:

Incidentally, back in December, Roger Ailes told Brian Lamb that as bad as the main CNN cable channel can be, CNNi, their international feed, which Jordan helped to launch, is much worse--almost Al Jazeera worse. Of course, that's also good for business:

Well, the best way to get distribution around the world is to be the BBC or Al Jazeera or CNNi, basically do -- if you watch it day in and day out, you can't find a whole lot good about America. Now, they have no obligation to do good stories about America, but they do have an obligation to have balance and context. And Al Jazeera simply doesn't. BBC doesn't. And CNNi is less offensive, but they don't do it much, either. And I think that context is critically important to the news.

I guess I'm still naive about just how bad the problem is inside the mainstream media: I still find it hard to believe that as bad as the domestic version of Newsweek can be, its international version can be worse.

But it certainly sounds like a pattern with big media, doesn't it?

The next time the press--or Hollywood--asks, "Why do they hate us?", it might want to take a good hard look in the mirror.

Update: Ed Morrissey looks at a recent non-apology apology from Newsweek's domestic edition for its discredited Koran-in-a-toilet story.

Another Update: Why yes, indeed it is clobbering time.

One More Update: Welcome InstaPundit readers!

Incidentally, that Newsweek cover may be even worse than it initially appears. A reader of Little Green Footballs translates the text on the Newsweek cover to read:

The red text at the left just above the “Newsweek” logo says:

“America forsaken.”

The big white and yellow text says:

“The Day America Died — The ideal of ‘freedom’ falls to the ground due to Bush continuing in office.”

(Emphasis mine.) If that's an accurate translation, then all I can say is, what a staggering headline on a publication owned by the Washington Post. Foreign editions of American magazines are generally edited independently of their US counterparts. But I'd like to think that it's a somewhat safe assumption that a headline that bold on the cover would at least run be past the home office for approval--and if it wasn't, that raises all sorts of additional questions, doesn't it?

In any case, it's awfully tough to maintain a veneer of objectivity when writing cover stories like that--of course, several individual members of the mainstream media started peeling back that veneer shortly after 9/11 and the rise of Weblogs. And as Glenn writes:

many American journalistic enterprises engage in more America-bashing abroad than at home. I suspect that the Internet will make that much harder, as people are starting to pay attention, and to compare this stuff.

Note that it wasn't a household-name blog that broke this story--but it's been quickly picked up by InstaPundit and Little Green Footballs--and probably numerous other bigtime blogs by the time the dust settles. It's the Long Tail in action, yet again.

More: Here's what that cover would look like if the text was in English. Really packs a wallop--but not the one that Newsweek intended--when it's spelled out, huh?

And welcome Michelle Malkin readers.

Update (5/24/05): Newsweek hits bottom, continues to dig.

Power Line catches one of the world's most famous felines dissing the mainstream media:

As Power Line's John Hinderaker writes, "You know it's getting bad for the mainstream media when even Garfield is on to them".

Ever since we started this blog in early 2002, we've written about some of the most egregious examples of collegiate excess, culminating in stories of Ward Churchill and other radical chic professors.

Big media has been much less sanguine about discussing these issues, perhaps because they rely on universities for so many interviewees--and of course, future journalists.

But perhaps this story will change that, and horrors of the academy will be reported with the same tone the media reserves for Abu Ghraib, stories of Guantanamo Bay, and other military-oriented reportage.

...Nahh; probably not.

As Glenn Reynolds noted earlier this week, as a byproduct of Newsweek's debacle, big media is--almost four years after 9/11--just now coming to grips with the idea that Islam may have a problem. Glenn links to something Tom Friedman of the New York Times wrote:

The greatest respect we can show to Arabs and Muslims - and the best way to help Muslim progressives win the war of ideas - is to take them seriously and stop gazing at our own navels. That means demanding that they answer for their lies, hypocrisy and profane behavior, just as much as we must answer for ours.

While you can fault a religion that kills innocent people because of the fabulist writings of journalists on the other side of the globe, you can't fault how piously it considers its most holy book.

That's something that Hollywood--another big American media--doesn't seem to understand of this country's dominant religion. Brent Bozell writes that "Ken Woodward, the longtime religion writer of Newsweek, tried to explain to Christians just how offensive Koran-flushing is to Muslims: 'recitation of the Koran is for Muslims much like what receiving the Eucharist is for Catholics -- a very intimate ingestion of the divine itself.'":

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The Journal's "Taste" section says that George Lucas has taken a cue from such US-based filmmakers as diverse as Jerry Lewis, Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Moore, and looked to France for respect and the imprint of master auteur:

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Jack Schuessler, the CEO of Wendy's has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today on the damage control measures his company has taken since a finger was found planted in a bowl of his company's chili this past March:

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Frank Martin has a must read post (especially for the editors of Newsweek--who probably won't ever see it, of course).

Update: Jeff Jacoby's piece on "why Islam is disrespected" is also worthy of a just click.

Paul Thomasch of Reuters looks at moblogs, short for mobile weblogs:

Cranking out a column after a presidential debate or publishing a prize-worthy photo of the next catastrophe just got a whole lot easier -- no matter where or who you are.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others have started to offer simple-to-use tools that let anybody with a digital camera or personal computer create blogs and produce homemade news.

When twinned with new technology like camera phones and handheld computers, it's now possible to publish pictures or jot notes from anywhere: the street, a beach, a restaurant. Seconds later the information is posted to a Website for the world to read -- and suddenly you've got a mobile web blog, or moblog.

"Text messaging and camera phone have put two powerful storytelling tools in the hands of millions of potential correspondents around the world," Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review at University of Southern California's journalism school, said in an e-mail exchange.

"So it is now inevitable that when something newsworthy happens in public, someone will be there to document that event online instantly."

The recent tsunami in South Asia gave evidence of moblogs' power and widespread use. Shortly after it struck, dispatches began appearing on blogs, often beating mainstream media to the unfolding story. One such blog was Waveofdestruction.org, created by Australian Geoffrey Huntley and made up of video and photos taken at the scene.

Naturally, this being Reuters, there's no mention in the piece of Glenn Reyolds or Pajamas Media, each of whom has been looking to make laptops, digital cameras and camcorders the centerpiece of one man reporting.

Ed Morrissey proposes a senatorial addendum to Godwin's Law:

The next time someone uses Hitler or Nazis to construct an analogy or comparison to American politics during a Senate debate, his or her party loses an hour of floor time. Right now we're even between Robert Godwin Byrd and Rick Godwin Santorum, meaning that we have now restored the all-important balance of stupidity between the parties just as our Founding Fathers intended.

If any Senator feels the need to try to pervert that balance, the end result will be that we have to hear even less idiocy from the World's Greatest Deliberative BodyTM. Everybody wins!

Sounds good to me. I'm sure P.J. O'Rourke would be in favor as well.

(Incidentally, any man who's as great a writer as O'Rourke, and whose first initials are "P.J." definitely needs to be hooked up with Pajamas Media!)

Update: Lorie Byrd has some thoughts on the subject that are also well worth reading, including this point:

For those getting more of their news from Jon Stewart than from Brit Hume, and who have heard for more than four years now that Bush = Hitler, I wonder how bad a guy they think Hitler could have been?

As others have noted before, Bush=Hitler is a backhanded form of Holocaust denial. Diana Mosely would have been proud.

Yesterday, we linked to a Jay Nordlinger piece on the Assembly to Promote Civil Society in Cuba. Today, The Corner notes that someone whose address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue also has some thoughts:

CUBAN INDEPENDENCE DAY, 2005

I send greetings to those celebrating the 103rd anniversary of Cuban Independence.

Freedom is the birthright of all mankind. Leaders across the Americas understand that the hope for peace in our world depends on the unity of free nations. America's continued support of democratic institutions, constitutional processes, and basic liberties gives hope and strength to those struggling in our hemisphere to reclaim the rule of law and their God-given rights. As we observe Cuba's independence today, we look forward to the day when Cuba is free, and my Administration supports efforts to hasten that day's coming. The tide of freedom is spreading across the globe, and it will reach Cuban shores. No tyrant can stand forever against the power of liberty because the hope of freedom is found in every heart.

This milestone is an opportunity to celebrate the Cuban culture and the many contributions Cuban Americans have made to the United States. By sharing your proud history with all Americans, you enrich our society and contribute to the diversity that makes our Nation great.

May God bless the Cuban people.

GEORGE W. BUSH

No word yet from Charlie Rangel...

Much like Abu Ghraib was clamped down by the Army long before the press even knew about it, Glenn Reynolds and John Podhoretz catch the New York Times taking a report of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan in December of 2002 and hyping it into the stratosphere. Podhoretz writes:

The New York Times continues the bizarre act of carrying Newsweek's water in the wake of the false Koran-desecration story (which I write about this morning here). The paper's lead story is a lurid account of the vicious treatment of two Afghan prisoners by U.S. soldiers -- events that occurred in December 2002 and for which seven servicemen have been properly punished. Let me repeat that: December 2002. That's two and a half years ago. Every detail published by the Times comes from a report done by the U.S. military, which did the investigating and the punishing. The publication of this piece this week is an effort not to get at the truth, not to praise the military establishment for rooting out the evil being done, but to make the point that the United States is engaged in despicable conduct as it fights the war on terror. In the name of covering the behinds of media colleagues, all is fair in hate and war.

(Emphasis added.) One of Glenn's readers notes that the men involved haven't been punished yet--because their trial is currently underway. "Fair point" Glenn adds, "but it's not like the NYT is breaking news here".

Expect more stories like this from a media, Jim Geraghty writes, that after the Newsweek debacle, would rather lash out indiscriminately (all the way to playing variations on the Chickenhawk sophism as ABC's Terry Moran did to Hugh Hewitt earlier this week) than wonder what the root causes are of so much of their distrust by the American public.

But at least after that badly reactionary stumble, Moran was willing to admit to Hugh that the media has a huge problem when the news they report about America's military is almost always guaranteed to be negative, rather than a more balanced--even nuanced--approach:

There is, Hugh, I agree with you, a deep anti-military bias in the media. One that begins from the premise that the military must be lying, and that American projection of power around the world must be wrong. I think that that is a hangover from Vietnam, and I think it's very dangerous. That's different from the media doing its job of challenging the exercise of power without fear or favor.

Geraghty looks at how the media's hatred of the military has caused journalism standards to slip badly at not just at Newsweek, but much of the mainstream media in general:

We know what's going on. What was the one moment that things looked darkest for the Bush presidency in the last three and a half years? During the endless all-Abu-Ghraib, all-the-time abuse coverage festival from last spring. When references to the prison abuse scandal were cropping up on the Washington Post’s Sports, Arts, and Metro sections.

The Isikoff story – and the inevitable coming deluge of in-depth investigative journalism of additional tales of abuse from those utterly trustworthy al-Qaeda prisoners – are a return to the “good old days” of last spring. When Teddy Kennedy could compare the U.S. military’s handling of prisoners to Saddam’s torture chambers with a gleeful, hearty grin. When our guys on the front lines could be portrayed as sadistic, black-hearted villains. When the face of our guys wasn’t the stoic loyalty of a Pat Tillman, the pride and dedication of a Jeffrey Adams, or any other one of our heroes but the nauseating sneer of Lynndie England.

Boy, did those days feel good to the media.

Call that whatever you like. But don’t call it journalism.

On the other hand, one positive benefit is that liberal journalists are now--finally, almost three years after 9/11, and, heck, over 16 years since the Iranian fatwa on Salmon Rushdie--beginning to call for accountability for the violence and lack of respect for human life emanating from the Muslim world as a result of the riots that killed at least 15 people as a result of the Newsweek story.

Update: How badly is the media--which up until recently used to insist, virtually to a man, that it was "objective" and "independent"--viewed by much of America? Charles Johnson writes:

Suppose that American media were really funded and supported by the Muslim Brotherhood, and openly opposed to the United States. How would the coverage differ?

Answer: not at all.

That's another negative shift for the media: nobody's comparing them to Switzerland these days.

Another Update: In his latest "Best of the Web column", James Taranto writes:

Newsweek's problem arose from credulity, not skepticism. The magazine was too willing to believe a story that made the military look bad (and that came from a Pentagon source, to boot). This whole problem might have been avoided if someone at Newsweek had been skeptical enough to ask: How do you flush a book down a toilet, anyway?

A little skepticism likewise could have saved CBS from that fraudulent National Guard story, and the whole press corps from the problems it is now having after flogging Joe Wilson's unsubstantiated allegation that his wife had been illegally "outed."

The trouble with American journalism, in short, isn't that it's too skeptical, but that it's too willing to throw skepticism to the wind when it suits the agenda of proclaiming every war a Vietnam and every Republican president a Nixon.

Exactly.

In the Weekly Standard, Dean Barnett writes that with three Super Bowl rings on his fingers, Tom Brady has gone from a no-name sixth round draft choice by the New England Patriots in 2000, to that rarest of professional sportsmen: a role model for others.

Dave Johnston writes that Detroit's Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is proposing a "fat tax" on fast food. Dave writes that it's sure to be followed by additional proposals, as the New Purtanism continues to spread across the left.

Earlier this week, Power Line noted that the president and CFO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi, compared the fingers of the hand to different parts of the world in her speech at Columbia Business School's commencement. "The United States got the middle finger. What a surprise!", as Hugh Hewitt wrote in his post on the subject.

Hugh also has some thoughts on the backlash that's followed, as well as a look on how quickly and easily information can flow in the new media:

I interviewed Terry Moran yesterday at 3:40 to 4:15 PM, Pacific. The transcript was up at Radioblogger at 6:00 PM. Instapundit linked 40 minutes later, and my WeeklyStandard.com piece went up at midnight est. Taranto's Best of the Web headlined Moran's comments in today's edition, and bloggers have been chewing on them all day. I suspect that Moran's comments have been read by 90% of MSM elites and most of political Washington, and far more importantly, millions of American information junkies, who are talking about Moran's many admissions (with a degree of respect for his candor and his willingness to give the interview --see the comments at RightWingNuthouse, run by Moran's brother). It has been less than 24 hours.

PepsiCo had better hurry. Scorn, and lost loyalty, won't wait for McKenzie & Co to come up with a report.

Jonah Goldberg had an interesting essay this week on the European style of much of America's left--and part of modern Europe's political legacy is transnationalism. So I guess it's not entirely surprising that as previously all-American companies like Pepsi, McDonalds, Chrysler and Subway become increasingly internationally-oriented (such as Chrysler's acquisition by Mercedes Benz), comments by their spokesmen or imagery in their campaigns can also tend to have an anti-American or leftwing taint. (I think we're also seeing something similar happening with Google right now as well.) Like Ms. Nooyi of PepsiCo, it's sort of intriguing that business spokespeople usually act surprised when they're called on their rhetoric by conservatives--who ironically, are typically infintely more pro-business than the left.

Update: Heh. Wish I had thought of that title!

Speaking of Jonathan Last, his actual review of Star Wars: Episode III is now online at The Weekly Standard. Right at the start, Jonathan has a great observation:

It is now safe to declare the Star Wars prequels a failure. Whatever their merits as films, the three panels of George Lucas's new triptych, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and The Revenge of the Sith have failed to add permanently to the Star Wars mythology. Try to name one character or image or line of dialogue from these prequels that will, 30 years from now, have the cultural resonance that Darth Vader, the Death Star, the Millennium Falcon, the Mos Eisley creature cantina, "Use the Force," or "Luke, I am your father" have today.

The only iconic figure to emerge from the prequels is Darth Maul, the horned, red-faced Sith who had barely any dialogue and was dead by the end of Phantom Menace. But at least we'll remember him. Next to Darth Maul, the image most likely to endure from the prequels is Jar-Jar Binks, who is regarded as a campy mistake, like the ewoks from Return of the Jedi. The rest of these three movies--some seven hours of story-telling--has turned out to be merely disposable cinematic product, like Tomb Raider or Planet of the Apes.

You can judge the size of the prequels' cultural footprint by studying the merchandising. For instance, when Cingular began hawking its Star Wars tie-ins recently, they used characters from the original Star Wars movies--Chewbacca, Vader, Storm Troopers--not characters from Revenge of the Sith. The Star Wars toy industry has likewise become a shell of its former self: Where toy stores had permanent aisles devoted to an ever-growing collection of Star Wars vehicles, action figures, and paraphernalia from the late 1970s throughout the 1980s, toys tied to the prequels are now seasonal items--they blossom every three years when a movie comes out, and then quickly recede.

I noticed a variation on the same phenomenon in the audience last night:

The audience in the theater I saw it in, in a San Jose suburb, was filled with at least two geeks in full Darth Vader regalia, a pony-tailed fellow in his mid-30s wearing Obi-Wan's khaki and brown robes, and someone in an orange X-Wing pilot's uniform, and helmet. In addition, several who weren't otherwise in costume brought their own plastic D-cell powered light sabers.

These were the hardest of the hardcore Star Wars geeks, and nobody was dressed like a character from the prequels. As Jonathan noted--other than Darth Maul, with his demonic black and red grease paint, who would be iconic enough for the fanboys to bother getting dressed up as?

Update: Glenn Reynolds also buries the film.

In a nifty piece of contrarianism, Jonathan Last expands on his 2002 essay, "The Case for the Empire", by bringing it up to date in an NPR broadcast that discusses Star Wars: Episode III. As Jonathan says, "A Flawed Despot is Better than a Smug Jedi".

It's also reminiscent of James Lileks' take on the second Matrix movie:

I thought it was a ponderous, boring mess. Sure, it had a certain buzz, but so does a beached flyblown whale carcass. The metaphysics were sophomoric, the acting stiff and pained, the action without consequence or drama. The FX, while amazing, were just a demo reel for new CGI programs. Nothing meant anything. Why should I root for Zion? The machines had built this enormous civilization for themselves, and the guys down in the Rave Hole hadn’t even figured out how to make decent shoes. Me, I’d be begging for admission to the Matrix, but not Morpheus and crew: oh, no, you’re not sending me back to the world of steak, tailored shirts, cigars and fine bourbon! I’m staying right down here in the Temple of No Particular Deity with Cornell West and that guy who used to be in Night Stalker!

Heh.

Update: For drolly funny "Straussian reading" on the failures of the Jedi Council and their successors, the Rebels, check out Tyler Cowen's "The public choice economics of Star Wars".

Jay Nordlinger writes that tomorrow could be an important day in Cuba:

Tomorrow, an astonishing event is scheduled to take place in Cuba: the General Meeting of the Assembly to Promote Civil Society in Cuba. This is a great democratic gathering, and those participating have put themselves at great risk: For days, Castro has been arresting democratic activists, and otherwise flexing the muscles of his police state.

Anything that promotes spreading democracy to Cuba sounds great, doesn't it? But alas, not everybody likes the idea:

Various groups and institutions around the world have expressed their solidarity with the Cuban democrats, including the U.S. Congress. The House passed a resolution — and 22 congressmen voted against. Oh, yes.

Who were they? Oh, you know — the usuals: Charles Rangel, Dennis Kucinich, Maxine Waters, John Conyers, Barbara Lee, Jim McDermott, Cynthia McKinney, Pete Stark . . .

You’ve heard me say a thousand times before that Rangel is about Castro’s best friend in the United States — at least in the political class. This is doubly a shame, because Rangel is so beloved of the American media. “Good ol’ ‘Chollie,’” they say (because Rangel is a New Yawker, and he talks like that — irresistibly charming guy, most people find).

Guess what he told Meghan Clyne of the New York Sun? He said that he voted against the Cuba-democracy resolution because American politicians “refuse to give the government the respect that it deserves.” He was referring to his friend Fidel’s regime, of course: a regime that imprisons, tortures, and executes at will. That denies its subjects all rights. That is listed by the State Department as terrorist.

We hear all the time that all Americans — certainly those in our political class — love freedom and democracy. We’re all joined in the same cause, no matter what our (minor) differences.

But guess what: It isn’t so. It just isn’t. We are not all on the same side, even broadly speaking. It is sometimes called McCarthyite to point that out. I regard it as realistic.

I agree. It will be interesting to see what comes from the Assembly to Promote Civil Society in Cuba. And hopefully Nordlinger will write a follow-up.

I just got back from a midnight showing of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. The last half-hour was as thrilling a piece of filmmaking as I've seen. The special effects throughout are staggering. Visually, this is a stunning and utterly believable universe.

...And it's all largely for naught, because everything John Podhoretz wrote in his damning review for The Weekly Standard is true: like the other two Star Wars prequels, the dialogue (such as the line in this post's title) is wooden and inert, the acting only more so, and only the lighting fast pacing manages to mask those sins--and then only slightly.

Podhoretz really hit the nail on the head, here:

Back in 1977, we were told in the original Star Wars that Darth Vader "was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force"--that Vader had become a villain because he had been consumed by a lust for power, so that he could boss people around, blow up planets, and, generally speaking, control the universe. Like all great villains, the Darth Vader we saw in the first Star Wars actually loved being a bad guy. He enjoyed being able to choke annoying underlings by pinching his thumb and forefinger together. He relished his swordfight with his old mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi. He didn't even mind slicing his own son's hand off (in the second film) just to prove a point.

But the Darth Vader we see at the end of Revenge of the Sith hasn't been seduced. He's been tricked. He's not a villain. He's a schmuck.

And what of George Lucas? He is, by leagues, the most commercially successful moviemaker in history. Forget the billion-plus dollars he has earned from the Star Wars movies. Industrial Light & Magic, the special-effects firm he began with his Star Wars profits, grosses $1 billion per year.

But what happened to the director who made the thrilling mood piece American Graffiti, that deceptively casual account of a bunch of teenagers in a California town in 1962 hanging out on the last summer night before the school year begins? What happened to the guy who revolutionized science fiction by making an outer-space adventure that managed to be cheerful, exciting, and lighthearted?

The tragedy of George Lucas is that he made billions of dollars, and all it did was turn him into a drag.

The audience in the theater I saw it in, in a San Jose suburb, was filled with at least two geeks in full Darth Vader regalia, a pony-tailed fellow in his mid-30s wearing Obi-Wan's khaki and brown robes, and someone in an orange X-Wing pilot's uniform, and helmet. In addition, several who weren't otherwise in costume brought their own plastic D-cell powered light sabers.

They were let into the theater at 9:30 PM--they waited a full two and a half hours for the film to begin. When the lights went down, and the trailers were over (quick prediction: based on the audience's reaction, this film will print money for Disney at Christmastime), they roared at not just the LucasFilm logo, but the 20th Century Fox logo, and even the THX Sound logo. And then they really went crazy when the screen went black and the magic "A Long Time Ago" words and the Star Wars logo appeared.

When the last shot faded out and "Written And Directed By George Lucas" appeared in that familiar blue typeface, they clapped, somewhat perfunctorily and politely.

The first Star Wars, in 1977, was a fun little hot rod of a movie, appearing in the middle of a decade worth of great, but typically dark, cynical films. The majority of this film creaked and stumbled as badly as Darth Vader's first steps when he emerges in his black mask and costume at the climax of the film.

To borrow from James Lileks' riff on Episode II, this film didn't entirely suck. But if it didn't carry the Star Wars name, its reels would have been quickly tossed into the same volcano that dominates and fuels its last 30 minutes--and quite deservedly so.

It pains me to write such a cynical take--and yet, these three prequels are so far removed from the tone and the fun of their predecessors from '77 to '83 that it's sad.

The 1977 edition of Star Wars was eventually subtitled "Episode IV: A New Hope". The largely inert Episode III I saw tonight gives that phrase new meaning.

Update: For an alternate view, the ending of Episode III was powerful enough for Will Collier of VodkaPundit to have loved the rest of the film, writing, "In a word,
'Wow.'" and "At long last, this really is the one we've been waiting for."

Will makes a great point here, something I should have included in my post (but hey, it was 3:15 in the morning when I wrote it):

the alleged Bush-bashing stuff has been completely overblown. Trust me on this one. If you get offended by this movie on political grounds, you probably also go into a frothing rage when the car in front of you turns on its left-turn signal. If it weren't for the dumb press coverage, you wouldn't even notice the supposed "controversial" bits.

I think a few of the lines still would have symbolically kicked me in the ribs even without the earlier reviews, but all-in-all, the symbolism in Episode III is pretty minor stuff--Fahrenheit 9/11, it ain't.

Update (5/20/05): Welcome InstaPundit and Slate readers!

Since we've spent the week bashing the media and discussing Star Wars, we might as well link the two together, by flashing back a few years to examining how Reuters, the New York Times or Newsweek would have covered the ending of the first Star Wars movie: "Massacre At Yavin".

A T-shirt company called Metrospy is selling Newsweek-inspired T-shirts.

Maybe they should send a few to Gitmo--the guards don't need them, but it sounds like some of the prisoners do.

Michele Catalano has one stop shopping for Star Wars action in the Blogosphere--email her if you've got a Star Wars-related post you'd like included in "The Carnival of the Force".

Jonah Goldberg's take on Newsweek's debacle:

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Is Darth Vader supposed to be a science fiction stand-in for President Bush?

Is he Karl Rove:

Or is he Patrick Ruffini?

Heck, I'm still trying to figure out who is John Galt!

Update: Not Darth Vader, but I almost forgot this photo I shot in January:

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So as he flies the blue lady of the skies into the sunset, we say "aloha, 5 O'clock Charlie" and return to our duties. Let me remind you the Weblog is open 24 hours for your dining and dancing pleasure.

(I know, I know, I ran that one before, when Dan signed off from The CBS Evening News. But I thought I'd dust it off again as the man who brought you Ra^therGate is further eased into the background by CBS, even as he accepts awards for his fine, fine journalism.)

Update: Speaking of the original 60 Minutes, its ratings aren't exactly into the stratosphere these days--and its demographics are even worse.

Meanwhile, in an op-ed called, "Newsweek: A Dan Rather Rerun", Brent Bozell writes, "How many eerie parallels are there between the CBS scandal and the Newsweek scandal? Let us count the ways".

Roger Kimball has a must-read post at The New Criterion's "Armavirumque" blog, found via Glenn Reynolds, who also some thoughts well worth reading on the future of big media.

Meanwhile, John Hinderaker of Power Line writes:

This is just unbelievable. Newsweek publishes a false report libelling the U.S. military, which contributes to riots and fatalities abroad, and, in the eyes of American journalists, who are the villains? The Bush administration, the military, and--how bizarre is this?--Pat Robertson. I guess he's a villain for all occasions.

At some point, if I were running the administration, I would re-think whether it makes any sense to continue being polite and cooperative toward reporters.

I dunno--the tone of the Nixon Administration towards reporters was to be pugilistic (remember Spiro Agnew's "Nattering Nabobs" speech? You can also watch the footage of Nixon's press secretary Ron Ziegler in action in All The President's Men. In contrast the Bush administration "being polite and cooperative toward reporters", to borrow John's phrase, has led to the New York Times, the L.A. Times, CBS, CNN and now Newsweek being driven absolutely crazy --and consequently, one by one having large swatches of their credibility demolished (with a little--well, a lot--of help from the Blogosphere).

It's a strategy that's been paying off handsomely by both a presidential administration that knows how to handle the press, and a press that's so full of hatred, they largely consider themselves at war with the president and his voters.

Update: It's a strategy that couldn't have worked without "the new, new media", including blogs, talk radio, and e-zines such as National Review Online and Tech Central Station. Speaking of which, in his Tech Central Station column, Glenn Reynolds believes that they've caused "old media" to reach the proverbial tipping point.

Earlier today, we linked to James Taranto's latest "Best of the Web Today" column, which began with his noting that "The obsession with Vietnam and Watergate is central to the alienation between the press and the people". The segment we linked to concentrated on the latter; an editorial in today's edition of Taranto's paper looks at the former:

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Rush Limbaugh has a great take on how the Newsweek incident came to be:

The media is [the terrorists'] Stradivarius. All they have to do is plant rumors, stories, get them published in local newspapers about how evil and mean US soldiers and troops and prison authorities are -- and, bam! The US media will believe it. The US media will report it. It's beyond question that the militant Islamists in these countries are going to believe it. So you have a dual audience here for the terrorists. This is war, and they know they're in one. We have two wars going on. We're at war, the United States with militant Islam, and the US media is at war with George W. Bush -- and the US media and the militant Islamists end up unwittingly on the same side, and don't think for a moment the American people don't see it. They do.

(Emphasis mine.)

Iowahawk "reports" that a "Newsweek Lutefisk Story Sparks Fury Across Volatile Midwest":

Decorah, IA - The debris-strewn streets of this remote Midwestern hamlet remain under a tense 24-hour curfew tonight, following weekend demonstrations by rock- and figurine-throwing Lutheran farm wives that left over 200 people injured and leveled the Whippy Dip dairy freeze. The rioting appeared to be prompted, in part, by a report in Newsweek magazine claiming military guards at Spirit Lake’s notorious Okoboji internment center had flushed lutefisk down prison toilets. Newsweek’s late announcement of a retraction seems to have done little to quell the inflamed passions of Lutheran insurgents in the region, as outbreaks of violent mailbox bashings and cow tippings have been reported from Bowbells, North Dakota to Pekin, Illinois.

Whether the violence was triggered by Newsweek’s report of lutefisk desecration or frustration over chronic shortages of Beanie Babies and Old Style, one thing seems certain – occupying U.S. troops face a steep road to reestablish trust in this tinderbox of ancient hatreds and delicious dairy products. Some analysts say the latest outbreak represents the most vexing challenge to US strategy since its invasion the region three years ago.

“It could be months before we get the area back under control,” said Brigadier Gen. Glen Hastings of the US Army’s Southern Minnesota Command. “We’re hoping the tractor pull and swap meet seasons will help calm down some of the violent elements.”

Read the whole thing, for it is good.

James Bowman looks at what he calls "Unparalleled Propaganda"--the World War II films of Michael Powell. One of his best (and still not out on DVD in the US) was The 49th Parallel, one of the great films of the Second World War:

The directorial career of Michael Powell, a major retrospective of whose films begins today at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, spanned half a century, but his best and most characteristic movies date from the World War II years and are essentially war propaganda. Yet there has never been such propaganda before or since — largely because it doesn't look like propaganda.

In 1941's "49th Parallel" (May 21 and 22), a German submarine crew stranded in the Canadian north tries to make its way to the then-neutral United States. Only the leader (Eric Portman) is a committed Nazi, and Powell was criticized for making the rest of the Germans look too human. One of them, played by Niall MacGinnis, even decides to stay in Canada in a community of Hutterite Germans. He is shot for desertion.

Here neither the bad nor the good guys are mere caricatures. Leslie Howard's gentle Canadian author and outdoorsman, who just happens to have a Picasso and a Matisse in his tent in the Rockies, comes close when calmly discussing art and literature with the Nazi, who despises his apparent softness and destroys his "degenerate" artworks. But Howard shows he's no wimp, striking a series of blows: "That's for Picasso," he says, "that's for Matisse; that's for Mann, and that's for me!"

This was early in Powell's wartime career, and rather a crude reaching for cultural contrast that he didn't need later on. By the end of the war his propaganda was much more subtle. Unlike the Nazi or the Soviet varieties, or even America's aggressive promotion of democracy in Frank Capra's "Why We Fight," he has no ideology, not even the ideology of art, and so doesn't overpromise. There is no utopia to fight for.

Or rather, a sort of utopia already exists. It is England with its storied past and its gentle, decent, humorous people. Unlike the more political utopias it is not perfect. Some adjustments will have to be made as a result of the war. But this only makes it more believable, and more cherishable.

I bought Criterion's version on laser disc off eBay a few year ago after seeing the film at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto for the first time. But sadly, while it's available on DVD in Powell's England, this is a film that truly should be on disc in the US as well.

All of which begs the question of course: where are the modern equivalents of men like Powell and Michael Curtiz?

James Taranto writes that the Newsweek scandal is yet more self-inflicted media damage caused by impulses born during the days of Watergate and Vietnam:

The obsession with Vietnam and Watergate is central to the alienation between the press and the people. After all, these were triumphs for the crusading press but tragedies for America. And the press's quest for more such triumphs--futile, so far, after more than 30 years--is what is behind the scandals at both Newsweek and CBS.

It's also behind the Valerie Plame kerfuffle, which hasn't been properly recognized as a journalistic scandal. The mainstream media accepted uncritically a Democratic partisan's unfounded allegations of criminal conduct within the Bush administration, suddenly discovering that there was no crime only when the ensuing special prosecutor investigation threatened to put two reporters behind bars. (See our February account of the New York Times' evolution on the subject.)
In response to the Koran-flushing debacle, Newsweek has acknowledged only technical problems with its reporting. This follows the pattern of CBS, which commissioned an "independent" report that allowed the network to claim it was free of political bias. In the Plame case, we don't know of any journalistic outfit that's admitted an error; the Times, for instance, still insists baselessly that Plame's "outing" was "an abuse of power."

The problem in all three cases is that news organizations were so zealous in their pursuit of the next quagmire or scandal that they forgot their first obligation, which is to tell the truth. Until those in the mainstream media are willing to acknowledge that it is this crusading impulse that has led them astray, we are unlikely to see the end of such journalistic scandals.

Somewhat apropos of Taranto's post, you could make a pretty good case that more so than the actual Watergate scandal, the movie version of All The President's Men starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Batman and Robin armed with Smith Coronas and a '69 Volkswagen for the Batmobile did more to cause far too many people to become reporters--and almost always for the wrong reasons: not to, you know, report the news, but to have a shot at superstardom by bringing down those in power (provided they're not Democrats or the UN of course). And awards--such as this year's Peabodys (note their exquisitely unintended timing, though)--honoring those proven to have falsified stories doesn't help matters.

At the risk of sounding even more cynical though, I think Steve Green is right: don't hold your breath waiting for big media to clean its own house. It's just not going to happen. If 9/11 didn't change anything, Newsweek's body count won't, either.

Ed Morrissey looks at the Peabody Awards for journalistic integrity in 2004:

The Peabody Awards luncheon yesterday provided a stage for the reunion of Dan Rather and Mary Mapes, who were honored for their journalistic prowess in revealing the Abu Ghraib prison scandal that had already been addressed by the Pentagon before CBS ever found out about it -- and both of whom later disgraced themselves in one of the worst breaches of journalistic ethics ever revealed in broadcast history. In comments that reflected the cluelessness of the Peabody voters, Mary Mapes continued to insist that the story she presented on CBS' 60 Minutes II was factually true and that CBS covered it up for "corporate" reasons.

* * *

Nor was CBS the only beneficiary of Peabody's rehab work yesterday. NPR, whose Iraq War coverage has come under deserved fire for its bias and empty doomsday prophecies, also received its blessing from the news industry. They even honored the poster boy for the fake-but-accurate meme, Jon Stewart, for his work in producing news with his comedy show.

In this through-the-looking-glass atmosphere, Mapes' arguments that her Killian memos will eventually be authenticated don't surprise so much as they amuse. The Peabody committee demonstrated the operating environment that allows uberpartisan activists like Mapes to flourish in their own fantasy lives rather than in truth. For those of us who actually read the CBS report and the reports of independent document examiners -- something Mapes never did -- the fact that the Killian memos were crude forgeries is both inescapable and inarguable. They're not only stylishly anachronistic, they're factually deficient in several basic ways. (For a complete analysis of the documents, please click on the CBS category for a review of my posts on the matter.)

Rarely has an industry so honored people who have dishonored them. The Peabody committee should be ashamed of themselves for continuing to provide a platform for the incompetent and the corrupt. If that is what broadcast news chooses to champion, small wonder it is a dying industry.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds links to a reporter who writes that his fellow newspaper staff wasn't thrilled with a post-9/11 revision of their paper's masthead:

After 9/11 the newspaper where I spent 2 years as a reporter added an American flag to its masthead. Many of my colleagues - a hard working lot that did their best to report fairly and accurately - hated the new masthead. To them it reeked of jingoism.

Isn't that the problem in a nutshell? Here's an industry that honors "fake but accurate", and won't tell us whose side they're on. And yet they wonder why they're not trusted by the majority of their readers, which Glenn notes in a fascinating comparison:

the latest poll results, which suggest that many Americans trust the government more than they trust the press, suggest that the press needs to work on its image, as well.

As I wrote back in January, they might want to take a cue from local city sports coverage.

Update: Brilliant! This is exactly the doctor ordered to rebuild the tattered legacy of the workaday press! [/sarcasm]

On "The Corner" on National Review Online, Warren Bell writes:

Am I the first to notice this? "Star Wars Episode III: ROTS."

I'll let you know later this week. Of course, by then, you'll have seen it too. And probably blogged about it yourself...

Update: One reasonably safe guarantee is that Star Wars: ROTS will jump-start Hollywood's moribund domestic box office. In a recent "Backfence" column, James Lileks explores the numerous reasons why Americans haven't been going to the movies as much this year.

Another Update: Related thoughts here.

Hopefully The Last Update: John Podhoretz definitely believes that Star Wars ROTS.

In his latest Newhouse column, James Lileks looks at the fuzzy logic that powers Europe's equivalent to America's Class of '72, and allows Iran's nuclear program to sail ahead with nary a protest:

In the good old days, one could count on the progressive elements to side with a pluralistic, tolerant, secular democracy against a theocratic regime made up of glowering, Jew-hating misogynists. But that was before the permanent adolescents of the '60s hijacked the left with their fragrant blend of anti-Americanism and loathing of the very culture that guarantees their freedoms. To them, Iran is a problem only inasmuch as it provides the Zionist Oil-Cabal Neocons with an "enemy." And if the mullahs respond to a successful revolution by nuking Israel on the way out? Well, how many Jews does the world really need, anyway? Europe's been asking that question for centuries. An answer might be nice.

When suicide bombers start going after something the European left truly cares about, the "activists" might wake up, but it's hard to tell what they think is worthy of defending.

The churches are empty vestiges of an abandoned past; the art museums are bourgeois temples for the dead hand of the artistic patriarchy. The European left prizes naught but thin, windy bromides about justice and tolerance, ideas the enemies of the West (how quaint a phrase!) use to enable their own agenda. One day the hash houses will be closed down because they offend religious sensibilities; then the naughty districts will be shuttered.

As the saying goes: They came for the pot-smoking hookers, and I said nothing, because I was not a pot-smoking hooker. (Recently.)

As Lileks writes, "in the name of multiculturalism, Europe will lose the culture that made such an idea possible."

Writing in Tech Central Station, Jack Birnbaum observes a key historical precedent for Newsweek's "story":

So now riots in Afghanistan have left at least 15 people dead. Some experts say (now they've got me doing it… see how easy it is?) that our efforts to introduce democracy there have been irreversibly damaged. There are protests across the Islamic world, from Indonesia to Pakistan to Egypt. And everyone who had a reason to want to believe the original story, now believes that the magazine's own admission that the story was unsubstantiated is just further proof of conspiracy and suppression of the truth about the evil of America.

In the early years of the 20th century, Russian secret police reprinted an old forgery called "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a supposed outline of Jewish plans to dominate the world. In the time since, millions have read it and been swayed by it; it probably played at least a minor role in the recrudescence of European anti-Semitism that ended in the Holocaust. Still, today, in the 21st century, it is a best seller in much of the Muslim world.

Now Newsweek has given us their own "protocols". Only time will tell how deep and long-lasting the damage will be, and even then, we will never really know how much of a role it may have played in a failure to succeed in bringing free political systems into the Arab world, or in an Iranian use of a nuclear weapon, or in a group of suicide attackers spreading smallpox around American cities. But we do know this: Newsweek has forfeited any pretensions it had about being a reliable source of information. The only honorable thing to do would be to apologize without conditions, and to shut itself down. I'm not holding my breath. But then, I'm not subscribing any more either. I can't even bear to look at it.

Newsweek might want to follow the Tylenol model for rehabilitating its reputation--until they inevitably run a similar story in the name of 'fake but accurate' again in the future.

A commenter on Austin Bay's Weblog (who says he works for a mid-sized newspaper) makes a great point about how Newsweek's story directly impacts how the US as a whole is viewed by many in "the Arab Street" (to dust off a hoary old media cliche):

What the MSM does not seem to "get" down deep in those quiet sessions over a drink that help set the tone of their editorial policies is that large parts of the world do not follow the "we're neutral" meme. In large parts of the world what appears in the press is only at the instructions of the government, and people come to expect it. Freedom of the Press is a viable concept here; not so in large parts of the world, especially in a significant part of the Muslim world.

Meanwhile, Will Collier has harsh words for Newsweek's Michael Isikoff:

As of yet, there's been no public word from the bogus story's authors, Mike "Spikey" Isikoff and John Barry. Since I haven't read anybody else saying it yet, I'll jump up and be the first: they should be fired, at a bare minimum. The editors who allowed the bogus story to run should be fired. Richard M. Smith, the editor-in-chief of the magazine, should resign in disgrace, or be fired himself.

Want to know why I think all that? Even if you put aside the sixteen dead people (and you can't, and shouldn't), my own brother-in-law is stationed in Afghanistan, and thanks to the above ass clowns, his job just got a whole lot harder and more dangerous. [Blogosphere favorite Jim Geraghty, currently living, along with his wife, in Turkey is none-too-thrilled about this turn of events, either--Ed]

Nice work, Spikey. Proud of yourself?

Yeah, all those wonderful credentialed "journalists" and "editors" in the MSM. Great people you got there. Very professional and careful. I'm sure Steve Lovelady and his ilk will be out there defending them all, tooth and nail.

Meanwhile, Will's partner in Stoli writes:

Yes, Newsweek and Michael Isikoff screwed up.

Yes, because of their screw-up, people died.

Yes, the US position in the Middle East and Central Asia was damaged - not fatally, but perhaps permanently.

No - nothing will change in the way the MSM conducts business.

Let me repeat that, just to make myself clear: Nothing will change. No improvements will be made. For the MSM, the lesson learned is not "let's stick to the facts next time." The lesson is, "let's be more careful in how we present what we think the story is/should be."

If there's any kind of tipping point here, it will be in how the public perceives the news. There will be no change, none at all, in how the MSM perceives the news - nor in how it will choose to shape the story.

I think that's exactly right: "The Brutal Afghani Winter" and the Blogosphere's corrections didn't change anything in big media. Abu Ghraib, and the Blogosphere's context didn't change anything in big media. "Christmas in Cambodia" didn't change anything in big media. And neither did RatherGate.

Steve Green adds, "Change will come. Someday, someday, eventually – maybe. But not today. Not over this."

Yes--it's possible for the media to change--they've certainly taken a few distinct turns for the worse over the past thirty years. But changes in the opposite direction will be much slower in coming.

If ever.

On Sunday night, James Lileks posted a beautiful--and beautifully geeky--remembrance of both Enterprise in general, and the Star Trek franchise as a whole, as Enterprise's last episode--the last first run Star Trek for the immediate future--aired over the weekend.

Meanwhile, another famous science fiction franchise is of course also (sorta kinda maybe perhaps) coming to an end this week.

Promising lots of additional Star Wars content this week, Will Collier of VodkaPundit has some thoughts on its creator's "oddball Marin politics" (as Collier puts it) and his own ability to overlook them:

Let me put it bluntly: I'm not much inclined to take Lucas's politics seriously either way. He's proven himself to be a pretty unsophisticated political thinker in the past, to say nothing of a raging hypocrite, as Jim Geraghty aptly pointed out a while back. I compare my reaction to alleged Bush-bashing in "Episode III" the same way I viewed the Wachowski Brothers' lame politicizing of the two "Matrix" sequels: the ideological musings of anybody dumb enough to take Cornell West seriously aren't worth getting worked up over.

Ditto for Lucas. Come Thursday (very early), I plan to snicker at the politics and enjoy the moviemaking instead. As Lileks said going into "Episode II," my requirements are simple: just don't suck.

So does it? The New York Daily News' Jami Bernard writes:

The fundamental, overarching "Star Wars" theme, established in 1977 and still going strong, is that when you are old enough to leave the farm and responsible enough to take the wheel, then — and only then — will you be allowed to drive fast.

In 1977, Luke chafed at the bit to be taken seriously, and in 2005, his father, Anakin, pouts about how everyone gets promoted to Jedi master except him. When Samuel L. Jackson's noble Mace Windu effectively tells Anakin to go to his room, you know the Dark Side is just a temper tantrum away.

This theme of wanting to be treated like a grownup, with its hints of displacing the father, is why kids love "Star Wars" while older audiences are cool to it. This also explains why "Sith" opens with yet another video-game-like space chase, in which Anakin's and Obi-Wan's driving skills help determine the outcome of the Clone Wars.

There's a lot riding on "Revenge of the Sith." Accordingly, it cloaks itself in operatic grandeur, which it doesn't really deserve until the extensive and effective ending. Even so, imagine how utterly moving this could have been if the stick-figure humans contained half the emotional heft of their computer-generated cousins.

I admit to a thrill of sick delight when the black Darth Vader mask at last descends upon the face of Anakin, sealing his fate and changing his breathing, bringing full circle something that began with far more offhand charm back in 1977.

It's a reminder that in the "Star Wars" saga, there are pockets of brilliance, surrounded by the yawning emptiness of space.

That last sentence in particular is spot-on. Of course, the same is very much true (in spades) of Star Trek. But between the movies and the episodes, we're talking something like 45,000 minutes of footage. In contrast, Star Wars has only about 720 minutes (not including of course the Star Wars Holiday Special!), and its batting average will only be above .500--if this movie, a la Lileks' riff, doesn't suck.

Over the weekend, I received quite a bit of German-based email about Dresden and World War II. At first, I thought it was related to a review I wrote a few weeks ago of Frederick Taylor's 2003 book, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945. It turns out that it was actually spam generated by the latest version of the "Sober" mass mailing worm:

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So far today, we've written about the Middle East, the War on Terror, the media, and Rudy Giuliani. Astonishingly, in an op-ed found via Instapundit, John Tierney, who along with Virginia Postrel are the New York Times' token libertarians, ties all those themes together in a neat little bundle:

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Newsweek and the Koran isn't the only item this week involving big media and religion. Jonah Goldberg has a look at last week's Law & Order episode, which I also watched as well, gritting my teeth through big portions of it:

The episode tells the story of a racist who committed murder nine years ago but who, in shame and remorse, subsequently found Jesus and was born again. In the nine years since he dedicated himself to Christ, he has led an exemplary life. But his guilt is discovered, and he decides to confess and show true contrition.

Based on comments in his writing over the years, like myself, I don't think Jonah would qualify as an overly religious person. And last time I checked, he's neither born again, nor Christian. But Jonah's thoughts were remarkably in tune with mine about that episode. As he writes:

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In the New Criterion's "Armavirumque" Weblog, Roger Kimball asks a rhetorical question:

Why is it that all the stories you read in Time-Newsweek-The New York Times-The Washington Post-Etc. or see on CNN-The BBC-CBS-NBC-Etc., why is it that all their stories about Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, etc., why is it that the presumption, the prejudice, the predisposition never goes the other way? Why is it that their reporters always assume the worst: that we're doing dirty at Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., and are primed to pick up and believe any rumor damaging to the United States? Shakespeare knew that rumor was a “pipe/blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures,” not to be trusted. So why do these journalists, trained to sift evidence, to probe sources, to listen beyond the static of rumor: why do they only do so in one direction, so to speak? Yes, I know that's a self-answering question, at least in part, but it is worth pondering nonetheless. Austin Bay calls the incident at Newsweek “The Press’ Abu Ghraib.” I hope that he is right.

Incidentally, Power Line's John Hinderaker isn't that thrilled with Bay's Abu Ghraib analogy:

I really think that calling Newsweek's blunder "the press's Abu Ghraib" is unfair to the low-lifes who carried out the Abu Ghraib abuses. After all, they didn't even hurt anyone, let alone kill them. And the people they abused were almost certainly terrorists. One can't say the same for the people who were murdered in the riots that foreseeably followed Newsweek's story.

Read the rest--Hinderaker's got some equally interesting thoughts on Newsweek's use of anonymous sources.

Paul Marshall writes in National Review Online that "Even if Newsweek publishes a full retraction, the damage is done":

Much of the Muslim world will regard [a retraction] merely as a cover-up and feel reconfirmed in the view that America is at war with Islam. It will undercut the U.S., including in Afghanistan and Iraq, far more than Abu Ghraib did. “We can understand torturing prisoners, no matter how repulsive” Newsweek quotes one Pakistani saying, “But insulting the Qur’an is like torturing all Muslims.”

It would be charitable to think that if Newsweek had known how explosive the story was it may have held off until it had more confirmation. If this is true, it is an indication that the media’s widespread failure to pay careful attention to the complexities of religion not only misleads us about domestic and international affairs but also gets people killed.

Much to the chagrin of many of his supporters on the right, President Bush has gone to great lengths to demonstrate America is fighting a war on terrorism in general--and Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein specifically--and not against Islam. Ironic, isn't it, that one news magazine may have harmed America's reputation in the Middle East far more than our own government.

Punitive liberalism, indeed.

Update: Great point made by a commenter on Ed Morrissey's Captain's Quarters Weblog:

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Back in early February of last year, I noted that I heard Rep. Peter King (R-NY) saying that "the media is the enemy" on Laura Ingraham's radio show, while I was driving around that night.

At the time, his statement, while containing much truth about how the media handled coverage of the war in Iraq, had a whiff of hyperbole about it. But that was before a brutal election year featuring a series of increasingly fabulistic big media reporting, culminating in Ra^therGate and its lesser-known but almost equally damning "NYTroGate" by the New York Times.

It was also before a Newsweek article based on shabby "source of a source" reporting led to 16 people killed in riots this weekend in Afghanistan--along with additional protests in "Pakistan to Indonesia to Gaza" according to Reuters, because Newsweek reported that a US interrogator at Guantanamo Bay flushed a Koran down a toilet to intimidate a captured prisoner--the results led to 15 killed in riots in Afghanistan.

As Glenn Reynolds has noted, there's two big elements to this story: one, that riots over a book--any book--would cause people to get killed. I remember back in 1988 walking past protestors in front of the Ritz Theater in Philadelphia to see The Last Temptation of Christ, but they didn't try to stone me--or Martin Scorsese, for that matter.

But the other element is that Newsweek surely had to have considered that in the tinderbox atmosphere that is the Middle East, that something along those lines could have happened, when they wrote their story--if they didn't, they need only ask Salman Rushdie.

But they ran the story anyway, even though they knew they didn't have evidence to support it (heck, try flushing any book down a toilet--it's not going to get far), and the result, as numerous bloggers have already somewhat drolly noted, "Newsweek Lied, People Died".

And so did Newsweek's reputation--and increasingly, the reputation of big media as a whole.

I've written before that back in the old days, most people--including myself--believed that if it was reported in the news, an event was true, ("And that's the way it is") even if its ramifications and causes were often open to debate. But ever since 9/11, big media, thanks to the repeated fact checking by the Blogosphere, has turned the Gipper's famous statement about the Soviet Union on its head: verify--and only then, trust.

And as Glenn wrote, "Really, I don't want to hear another word about the superior 'responsibility' of Big Media. Not one more word".

I'm back, after a fun weekend excursion. More to follow shortly.

Ralphie is the beloved, bespectacled bobble-headed mascot of Minnesota's Northern Alliance Radio Network, based on his looking much like Hugh Hewitt (if Hugh himself was a 13-inch tall polystyrene bobblehead doll). And he's just gone where no bobblehead doll has gone before: almost a mile in the air.

Chalk up another success for America's other rocket program!

Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution says it's dead, Jim.

(Via Tech Central Station.)

Will Collier of VodkaPundit has some most apropos thoughts on the topic as well, especially as it applies to investment diversification.

That post of mine that Manolo mentions on his Weblog can be found here. Or just scroll down a little 'til you see the "Hope For The Secret Vice" headline.

Three years ago, when I saw Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, I was surprised that George Lucas inserted an anti-smoking message (remember the "death sticks" bit near the beginning of the film?) into the middle of a movie set "a long time ago in a galaxy...", well, you know the drill.

This time around, Craig Winneker, editor of Tech Central Station's European site, says that Revenge of the Sith is "rife" with "a recurring anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war message. Forget about the merits of the argument in question. This stuff has no place in a Star Wars flick":

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Sam Jaffe (who I assume is not related to Ben Casey's sage mentor) looks at four under-reported stories, which may be bubbling up sooner than you think.

His thoughts on GM are particularly interesting.

Thinking of starting a blog? (No? Well, why the heck not, everyone else either has or will!) If so, John Hawkins has some excellent advice that you could save you a considerable amount of time and headaches.

To paraphase one of the sayings of that kindly old Buddhist philospher, Judge Reinhold in Fast Times At Ridgemont High: Learn them. Know them. Live them.

Update: Here's more very good advice.

Betsy Newmark links to an interesting op-ed by Robin Sheppard on which tyrant was worse, Hitler or Stalin, and the folly of actually trying to pick one as "a winner":

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The last time I remember hearing about Lawrence O'Donnell, it was in the context of his October voodoo freakout "Liar! Liar! Liar!" performance against a typically ice-water cool John O'Neil on MSNBC's Scarborough Country, which fortunately remains preserved on video.

Michelle Malkin links to this page on Cathy Seipp's Website, which includes a rather astounding photo of O'Donnell, neck veins bulging away, fists pounding the table, (at least he kept his shoe on, unlike Khrushchev) teeing off on Seipp while the two were on Dennis Miller's show "discussing" Arnold Schwarzenegger and teachers unions.

I never thought I'd long for the return of Tom Daschle's mock "sensitive new age guy" schtick, but at least he tried to maintain the public appearance of being a civil (to the point of being caricatured) member of the left. On the other hand, O'Donnell's tirade is a reminder why I stopped getting most of my news and opinion from cable TV: I watched The Morton Downey Jr. show back in the late 1980s, when it seemed like every episode would end with guests throwing chairs at each other, at Mort, or at the audience--or in all three directions. I don't need to see reruns.

Speaking of the Grey Lady, here's a Times article on menswear by Cathy Horyn that I enjoyed, but even so, there's a hint of baby boomer absentmindedness to it:

Peacock displays seem to come in 20-year cycles, reflecting the stock market as well as social changes. In the 60's, when Mr. Wolfe wrote "The Secret Vice," about the mania for custom suits, Pop artists had come uptown, London was swinging, and it was cool to have your clothes made on Savile Row. Even Lyndon Johnson did, ordering six suits from the firm of Carr, Son & Woor, following the 1960 election, with the instructions, "I want to look like a British diplomat."

But this assumes that menswear began in 1960, as opposed to observing a millennia of change. (It's ironic: the left is absolutely mortified of the concept of Creationism and its theory that God created the Earth 6000 years ago being taught in schools. But you get the sense that so many baby boomers seem to believe that the universe only dates back to about 1963, with JFK's assassination as the Big Bang.)

As Wolfe himself wrote in his wonderful "Secret Vice" article--which was written in the early, Kennedy-era '60s, not its later Austin Powers phase when pop artists had come uptown, and London was swinging:

In Europe, all over England, in France, the mass ready-made suit industry is a new thing. All men, great and small, have had tailors make their suits for years, and they tend to talk a little more with each other about what they're getting. But in America it's the secret vice.

In the excerpt quoted above, Horyn also wrote, "Peacock displays seem to come in 20-year cycles, reflecting the stock market as well as social changes". But in actuality, as menswear designer and fashion historian Alan Flusser has written in his various books (most recently in this one), it was the 1930s, when the stock market was at its lowest ebb, that menswear design was its peak, curtailed only by World War II. As to the second half of Horyn's statement, the apogee of menswear's style in the 1930s had nothing to do with the election of FDR, but rather as a continuation of design trends of the 1920s, and the ability of the Duke of Windsor to seemingly invent and introduce new styles at will.

I'm glad to see that the Times has hope though. And I'll second that emotion: while in San Francisco yesterday, Nina and I stopped by Cable Car Clothiers, which we were surprised to see in a much larger location that they moved into a couple of years ago ("with quite a long-term lease", a salesman told me), in addition to their Internet portal and wonderful "dead tree" catalog. (Cable Car's owner, a spry octogenarian named Charles Pivnick, understood in the late 1960s that mail order was a key to his business's survival.)

At the other end of the Bay, a handsome new Brooks Brothers opened last week in The Village Santana Row in San Jose. And Brooks as a whole is undergoing an interesting revival, as current owner Claudio Del Vecchio, who purchased the line in 2001, is steering it away from its dark and pitiful era in the 1990s when England's Marks & Spencer owned it, back to its more traditional 1920s and '30s look. He's brought back some very nice items from the past, including club-collared dress shirts and other handsome designs long since thought dead.

Who knows: maybe there's hope for how the average American man dresses (as opposed to you and I, of course) yet.

The New York Times, with 70 years of reporting bookended by Walter Duranty on one end and Jayson Blair on the other, with this statement by its publisher, "Pinch" Sulzberger sandwiched in the middle...

One day, the elder Sulzberger asked his son what Pinch calls, "the dumbest question I've ever heard in my life." If an American soldier runs into a North Vietnamese soldier, which would you like to see get shot? Young Arthur answered, "I would want to see the American get shot. It's the other guy's country."

...is lecturing the Blogosphere on ethics.

As the Professor writes:

the use of ethics establishments as smokescreens [often conceals] deeper institutional problems. I think that most of the late-twentieth-century ethics apparatus, and certainly much of the journalistic ethics apparatus, falls into that category. But competition is coming, and the Times is already starting to feel a touch of discipline. Which I suspect is what motivated [Times reporter Andy Cohen's] column to begin with. . .

Exactly.

Update: This item, posted today on Power Line about the filibuster battle is actually about a disengenous Washington Post article, not something in the New York Times, but it underscores exactly what the Times is afraid of: its reporting and analysis (or lack thereof) being open to examination and (if necessary) ridicule in the general public. That's why Matt Drudge took such a beating from traditional journalists when he opened the door to one-man journalistic Websites in the mid-1990s, and with the coming of seven million or so Weblogs for the general public to chose from, the Times is all the more worried.

Found on the Brothers Judd Blog:

"Academic politics is so vicious because the stakes are so small"--Henry Kissinger.

Heh...as one particularly well-known academician would say.

When I was going over some old Washington Posts at a garage sale, I came across an interesting item from April 6th, 1945, 50 years and a month ago, only a few short months after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had won his reelection bid for the White House by defeating New York Governor Thomas Dewey by approximately three million votes--an amount some considered narrow. But enough background--here's the article text I found:

In the course of a discussion on filibusters and Senate rules, Washington's top Republican gave the 60 juniors a lesson in partisan politics, particularly about the commander in chief. "The man's cousin was a wonderful human being," Senate Minority Leader Wallace H. White said in response to a question about President Roosevelt's policies. "I think this guy is a loser.

"I think President Roosevelt is doing a bad job," he added to a handful of chuckles.

"He's driving this country into bankruptcy," Reid said, referring to the president's "New Deal" programs. "He's got us in this intractable war in Europe and Japan where we now have about 405,000 American soldiers dead and another 600,000 injured."

Don't remember that one?

Neither do I--other than a change of parties and presidential names, it's actually from today's Las Vegas Review-Journal, and the Senate minority leader in question isn't Republican Wallace H. White, but Democrat Harry Reid.

At least Reid had enough sense afterwards to call Karl Rove (President Bush was in transit to Europe), and "apologized for what I said."

Update: Ed Morrissey also has some thoughts on Reid, and as Ed puts it, Reid's bad case of projection, and also his prospects of leading a continued filibuster in the Senate.

Another Update: Some most definitely related thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson.

Donald Luskin observes that for recently departed New York Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent, "It was never about being the 'reader's representative' -- it was about 'doing service' for the paper, and protecting it from 'enemies'". Luskin highlights this quote from Okrent's recent interview in On The Media:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What in your opinion was your most important column?

DANIEL OKRENT: Mmm. That's really tough. I guess I would have to say it was the one where I confronted the issue - the headline was: Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? And I probably did not do the paper as much service as I would have liked to with that column, because by the very headline, and the first line, which was: Of course it is, [LAUGHTER] I handed the paper's enemies something that could be taken radically out of context. I made it too quotable.

Of course: heaven forbid a newspaper should be quotable.

Sorry for the lack of posts yesterday afternoon. I was out with my digital camera, shooting numerous images of the hardware inside the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I ended up spending quite a bit of time last night color correcting the images in Photoshop, as a result of whatever lights the museum uses in its overhead lighting grid. I don't think they were fluorescent, which has always been known for adding a green tint to color photos. This was more of a strange yellowy tint, which required lots and lots of fooling around with Photoshop's color balancing to make look (sorta, kinda) normal.

Until only a couple of years ago, the Computer History Museum was housed in a Quonset hut in Moffitt Field, formerly a Naval air base, and now owned by NASA. That Quonset hut was kind of a funky place to see the computers that dominated American businesses (and eventually, homes), but it was cramped and had limited room for expansion. Having to check in at a gate staffed with MPs and obtain a day base to the base was also a bit awkward for visitors.

The museum is now housed in a very large, ultra-modern building built originally for (I believe) Silicon Graphics, with lots of room for expansion.

I've written about the Computer History Museum before--in fact, in a weird bit of synchronicity, writing about it led to this Weblog, as I've also written before: the second article I wrote for National Review Online was about the museum (it's still online, incidentally), and it was linked to by Glenn Reynolds, who was in his second or third week of publication with InstaPundit. I found it via a Google vanity search, and thought, "hmmm...this is interesting". It was the first time that I became aware that Weblog software could be used something other than day-in-the-life diaries and ephemera--you could link to an interesting news item, and post a few words of thought about it. (Only later did I find, via InstaPundit, sites like Steven Den Beste's, who used blogging software to post tens of thousands of words (brilliant written in Steve's case) on a subject. Nine days later, 9/11 happened, which changed America, the world, and how we interact with the media, and along with numeous other post-9/11 Weblogs, this blog started in late February of 2002, as an adjunct to my other writing.

But I digress: watch for an article or two about the new version of the Computer History Museum in a few months.

Jim Geraghty, who runs National Review Online's "TKS" Blog is your one-stop source for British election coverage. Just keep scrolling.

(He clearly has faultless taste in his links, by the way.)

Update: Speaking of the British elections, this comment by Max Boot in the L.A. Times about the Tories makes perfect sense on both sides of the Atlantic.

Back in March, we linked to a post by Stefan Beck on the New Criterion's Weblog, who argued that the far left cant of the academy is actually hurting its liberal students--and benefiting campus conservatives:

As I've written before on this blog, the predominance of these blue-state academics on campus is a problem--but hardly for conservatives. It is a problem for liberal students. These poor specimens must often retreat like turtles from debate, because they know nothing of conservative positions--except from their professors' testimonials, which rely on dilution or caricature. Meanwhile, conservatives are given every opportunity to "know the enemy," and they can test and strengthen their own opinions in the process. They ought to be thanking their instructors for providing a daily object-lesson in enemy S.O.P.

Ann Coulter agrees, by way of telling Fox's Hannity & Colmes that the questions (actually more like disguised heckles) she received recently when speaking at schools such as the University of St. Thomas and St. Olaf College were, as she put it, "stunningly bad":

I think there really is a problem on college campuses and if you want liberalism to continue in this country — I don't — but just to give you a little tip: Liberal students are being let down by their professors, by the world.

I mean, they're buffeted along by a liberal media. They have liberal public school teachers. They go to college. They have liberal professors. They don't know how to argue. They can't put together a logical thought, whereas you could put a college Republican on TV right now and he can debate you...

HANNITY: Yes, they're good.

COULTER: ... and do a credible job. But liberals, they throw food, they curse.

And then they graduate and go out into the real world, and wonder what happened.

Did Congressman John Linder (R-GA) really say:

"if an airline is blown up in the air, that is a very bad circumstance for 200 or 300 people, but it is not a catastrophe".

Wow--what a staggering piece of idiotarianism.

Found via The Daily Blitz.

About ten days before Christmas last year, Peggy Noonan wrote:

Always in politics it comes down not to words but to actions. It's not poetry but policy that claims support and wins. Allow me to prove this, for I think I can. I know something the Democratic Party can do right now that will improve its standing and increase its popularity. It can be done this week. Its impact will be quick and measurable.

It is this: Stop the war on religious expression in America...Do this, Democrats. Announce you will apply pressure to antireligious zealots throughout the country. You have nothing to lose but a silly and culturally unhelpful reputation as the party that is hostile to religious expression. What you could gain is respect and gratitude.

How well did Peggy's advice sell? Not surprisingly, it didn't. Check out this op-ed by John McCandlish Phillips, a former New York Times columnist, writing today in the Washington Post:

In more than 50 years of direct engagement in and observation of the major news media I have never encountered anything remotely like the fear and loathing lavished on us by opinion mongers in these world-class newspapers in the past 40 days. If I had a $5 bill for every time the word "frightening" and its close lexicographical kin have appeared in the Times and The Post, with an accusatory finger pointed at the Christian right, I could take my stack to the stock market.

Glenn Reynolds adds:

I disagree with the Christian Right on most of the hot-button issues, but I don't think that they're indistinguishable from the Taliban, though one hears such overheated rhetoric all the time. I can't help but think that the mainstream press would be far more sensitive to avoid stereotyping blacks, Muslims, or gays.

The party that's out of power is actually always auditoning with the American public for its return. But since November, both through their representatives in the media and in government, the left continues to alienate big, big swatches of the American public--the same public that they'll ask to vote for them next year and '08.

Of course, if their efforts continue over that time period, it will create a perfect opportunity for triangulation by Hillary...

Update: Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt has some related thoughts.

Reuters has an interesting look at the efforts of some city governments to create their own Wi-Fi networks:

A number of U.S. cities are becoming giant wireless "hot spots" where Internet users will be able to log on from the beach or a bus stop, a trend that is triggering a fierce backlash from telecom and cable giants.

"We look at this as another utility just like water, sewer, parks and recreation, that our communities should have," said St. Cloud, Florida, Mayor Glen Sangiovanni, who hopes to provide free wireless service to the entire city by the fall.

For some thoughts on the negatives of this approach, be sure to check out this Reason article by Tim Cavanaugh from November of last year.

I'll be curious to see what impact WiMax will have on the municipalities' efforts in the coming years.

I've signed onboard with the new Pajamas Media consortium you've probably already heard about from Roger L. Simon or Glenn Reynolds. It will be interesting to see what comes of this--especially since it was founded by the Blogosphere's equivalent of household names, including (see if you can spot them by their first names alone) Glenn, Roger, Charles, and Hugh.

But Jonah Goldberg has reservations, in a column in the (also rather new) DC Examiner:

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We're "Site of the Day" today at John Hawkins' Right Wing News. Thanks!

Welcome to RWN readers--be sure to look around, there's lots of content here, including offsite links to some of our longer articles and essays.

In a few weeks, Star Trek: Enterprise will be ending its run, and with it, the end of first-run Star Trek episodes since Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted 18 years ago.

James Lileks has a typically witty recap of the various series and their pluses and minuses, over at the The American Enterprise magazine.

Meanwhile the swan song of another long-running science fiction series will be debuting later this month in theaters. Jim Geraghty explores the hypocrisies of its creator.

Of course, we haven't seen the last of either franchise. I just wish we'd speed up our manned exploration of the real thing.

Update: More from Geraghty on Lucas.

Rich Galen runs roughshod over the Small Business Administration. A sample:

They wouldn't let me put a really terrific column I wrote a couple of years ago in honor of small business people on the tables … because the sponsor of this dinner - Sam's Club - more or less had the exclusive rights to put crap at the tables. Sam's Club is owned by Wal-Mart.
I said, "You are the Small Business Administration, not the biggest retailer in the world Administration."

Read the rest.

Found via Ramesh Ponnuru, who writes that Galen's story "once again brings up the question: Exactly why do we need" the SBA?

Why do we need most of Washington's alphabet soup?

Back in 1998 (wow, has it been on that long?) there was a South Park episode that had the following scene that took place at the "Unplanned Parenthood Clinic":

Mrs. Cartman: I want to have…an abortion.
Receptionist: Well, we can do that. This must be a very difficult time for you Mrs....
Mrs. Cartman: Cartman, yes, it's such a hard decision, but I just don't feel that I can raise a child in this screwy world.
Receptionist: Yes, Ms. Cartman, if you don't feel fit to raise a child, an abortion probably is the answer. Do you know the actual time of conception?
Mrs. Cartman: About eight years ago.
Receptionist: I see, so the fetus is....
Mrs. Cartman: Eight years old.
Receptionist: Ms. Cartman, uh, eight years old is a little late to be considering abortion.
Mrs. Cartman: Really?
Receptionist: Yes, this is what we would refer to as the fortieth trimester.
Mrs. Cartman: But I just don't think I'm a fit mother.
Receptionist: But, but we prefer to abort babies a little earlier on. In fact, there's a law against abortions after the second trimester.
Mrs. Cartman: Well, I think you need to keep your laws off of my body!
Receptionist: Hmm, I'm afraid I can't help you Ms. Cartman. If you want to change the law, you'll have to speak with your congressman.
Mrs. Cartman: Well, that's exactly what I intend to do! Good day!

If I'm doing the math right, the headline on this Drudge Report link, "Fla. Judge OKs Abortion for 13-Year-Old...", works out to be about the 65th trimester.

I'm moderately pro-choice, but that seems just a tad excessive to me...

Update: Not surprisingly, Scott Ott of Scrappleface has his own take on this story.

Josh Clayborn has a detailed early review of Ridley Scott's new film Kingdom of Heaven, its numerous errors, and au courant PC biases.

(Via Hugh Hewitt.)

Update: Found via Betsy Newmark, Front Page says that historians are none too pleased with Scott's film, either. Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds has links to other bloggers writing about the film.

We're having some work done on our home's rear deck by two young guys in their mid-20s, who are trading out manual labor for legal work from my wife as they start their own business.

It's really bizarre listening to their music as it blasts in via their ghetto blaster: it's the same music I listened to in my teens: Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest, AC/DC, Ozzy Osbourne et al.

Last year, Jonah Goldberg wrote about how pop culture has been living off its past for quite a while now. Jonah's essay was in the context of TV and movies but his point is also applicable to music:

I speak to college kids on occasion. And whenever I do, I tend to make references to TV shows and movies because, well, I'm me and that's what I do. At this point you would think that my references would be lost on many of them — and theirs on me. But that doesn't seem to be the case. What's also interesting is that these kids are quoting the same movies that my buddies and I quote, which might be a function of the fact that young men today would rather re-watch, say, Stripes or Roadhouse, than invest time in My Wife and Kids or some other drek. In effect, kids today are living off the entertainment capital of the previous generation.

One reason why the music of the past continues to live on in pop culture is that pop craftsmanship has really gone downhill--or to be charitable, has not kept up--as musical technology has escalated.

Now, I'm not a Luddite--and I use a lot of these tools when I make my own music and love them. (I wrote a piece in 2003 defending the Antares Auto-Tune pitch correction program, and stand by it.) It's also not necessarily a technology issue. Metallica were never my taste, but they were a blast of raw fresh air in the hair-metal days of the 1980s. But when every friggin' heavy metal group sounds like them these days, and eschews tunes, chord changes and interesting song structures for thrashed-out 16th note dropped-D guitar bashing and Cookie Monster vocals, it's not an avenue for exploration and growth.

Hey, maybe rock music really did jump the shark at Live Aid!

Don't know where I am going with this--but it does seem strange to see a new generation of young adults listening to exactly the same music I used to listen to.

Time to switch to the Atkins diet: not even in his wildest, Skittlebrau-fueled dreams could The Simpsons' paterfamilias have envisioned...The 15 Pound Hamburger.

Hardees, take note!

Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics looks at Brian Anderson's South Park Conservatives, in an article titled, "The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias".

As he says, Brian Anderson has been a busy man promoting his book--and links to our interview and Tech Central Station profile, amongst the many other interviews Brian's done--to prove it. I think this passage is key:

What's more, the string of publicity for South Park Conservatives isn't likely to stop any time soon. Anderson says he's working through several more Q&A's with bloggers and that there's "no end in sight" to the schedule of talk radio interviews.

This is all as it should be, because Anderson is now living proof of one of the central arguments of his book: conservatives today are able to reach the public in much greater numbers than ever before thanks to the growth of "new media" outlets like talk radio, Fox News, right-leaning book publishers and the blogosphere.

After an appearance last week on The O'Reilly Factor (now the top rated show in all of cable news) sent the book zooming up to number seven on Amazon.com's non-fiction best-seller list, South Park Conservatives currently sits at number twenty-nine and is in the top 150 titles carried by Amazon overall.

Pretty impressive numbers, given that South Park Conservatives has received close to zero attention in traditional "mainstream" media outlets - notwithstanding Frank Rich's rather fatuous critique in The New York Times the other day.

The reality is that ten years ago Anderson's book probably wouldn't have been published at all. If by some chance South Park Conservatives had made it into print back then, given the ossified structure of the liberal-leaning media establishment the chances of anyone hearing about the book were close to nil.

I think that's exactly right. In promoting his book, Brian was able to benefit from the Long Tail of Weblogs and Websites, versus what Alvin Toffler would call the Second Wave mass media model of three TV networks, one newspaper per big city and a handful of big publishers.

Glenn Reynolds links to this Popular Mechanics illustration of a potential Space Shuttle replacement designed by Lockheed-Martin.

The design makes a lot of sense, at least to this layman: it simplifies the shuttle by seperating the crew module from a mission module that can be modified and changed out for various missions, and rather than gliding down to a rolling stop on a runway, uses parachutes to slow its decent.

I can't help but think that this fellow had the right idea for another successor to the shuttle: dust off the technology from the Apollo program.

It's proven, it's simple (compared to the shuttle) and after Apollo 1, it worked pretty darn reliably--it even survived being struck by lightning on Apollo 12, and the explosion on Apollo 13.

NASA could always use the shuttle derivative for more complex missions, and the Apollo derivative for simply ferrying crews to and from the ISS or its successor.

Glenn Reynolds has a review of George Gilder's new book on Silicon Valley and high-tech innovation, over at the Wall Street Journal.

The all Condi-is-hot all the time version of EdDriscoll.com, found via InstaPundit.

What, no photos?

My wife wanted to see a movie this weekend, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had just opened, but it got middling reviews, so I started looking for alternatives. Fortunately, Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur and Dial M For Murder were playing in a double feature at the Stanford Theatre on University Avenue in Palo Alto.

Quick aside: Palo Alto is a beautiful jewel-like town in the middle of the Bay Area--it's both HQ for most of Silicon Valley's venture capitalists, and for Stanford University (where Chelsea Clinton attended in the mid to late 1990s--for a time, whenever her parents came to visit, Air Force One was a somewhat regular fixture at nearby Moffitt Field).

Unfortunately, Palo Alto's handsome architecture, enormous collective net worth and exclusive storefronts are combined with David Dinkins-style laissez faire big city liberalism, which means that walking amongst lots of college kids in their Tommy Bahama khakis and T-shirts past the shops on University Ave. are lots--and lots--of feral Night of the Living Dead homeless people. Which is all the more ironic, considering that Rudy Giuliani's Broken Window urban crime fighting techniques--which involve taking the homeless problem seriously--have their roots in a Stanford study from the late 1960s.

But I digress. Back to the movies.

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Speaking of Matt Drudge, I'd like to think we must be doing something right (crossing fingers) when the lead story on the Drudge Report is whether or not Paula Abdul will be bounced from American Idol.

Dave Johnston catches Matt Drudge dissing Weblogs. Of course, it's not the first time that that's happened, but I'm not sure why Matt (whose pioneering work we've long been big fans of) is so upset about his site being labeled anything:

They tried calling it “Me-Zine” before, that was the word they were going to do, which also was offensive, as if the editors of the papers don’t make their own decisions and it’s their own version of a Me-Zine, as if Bill Keller doesn’t make the decision what is on the front page - that’s HIS Me-Zine.

I just don’t like these negative terms. They’re individuals on the internet, living out their dreams.

Too a certain extent, it reminds me of what Tom Wolfe once dubbed "the ever-clever Fielding dodge", but whereas 18th century author Henry Fielding didn't want books like Tom Jones being associated with novels (then considered strictly a low rent media), Matt doesn't want to be labeled at all, saying, "This new medium to me is too important to start maginalizing non-corporate people on the internet."

I dunno--Power Line certainly didn't sound too upset when Time magazine labeled them "Blog of the Year" last year. Maybe it helps to soften the blow to consider that the Long Tail of the Blogosphere has more consumers than virtually all individual big media outlets.

Heh.

This weekend marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, when the last American personel were helicoptered off the roof of the American Embassy. "Within three years" of our evacuation, David Horowitz wrote this past December, "the Communist victors had slaughtered two-and-a-half million peasants in the Indochinese peninsula".

What led to that bloodshed? A Democratically-controlled Congress dominated by the Class of '72, and a liberal media.

More Horowitz:

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Matt Drudge links to a New York Post article that says that gas station convenience stores are shedding Slim Jims for sushi, in an effort to bolster profits and improve their image:

It's an attempt by the industry to discourage the gas-up-and-go mentality and bolster the bottom line with artisanal cheeses, freshly baked breads and high-end meals that entice consumers to linger and eat — and to do it often.

"We're trying to make these stores destinations rather than convenience stops," said Stuart Lowry, marketing director for The Markets of Tiger Fuel, a Virginia convenience chain that offers fresh seafood, a fancy deli and professional chefs.

"If you choose to just get in and get gas you can," Lowry said. "But if you want to sit down and have a gourmet meal, you can do that, too."

Supermarket sushi is usually terrible, and I'm sure gas station sushi will be equally gross. Stick with a reputable mid to high-end sushi restaurant with well-trained chefs, not the Exxon tiger. (I'm rather partial to Kobe in Santa Clara, myself.)

Its point is a bit underplayed, but the article's conclusion might be its most important section:

The change comes at a crucial time for the nation's 138,000 convenience stores, most of which historically have relied on gasoline and cigarettes for more than three-quarters of their sales.

As the profit margins on those products shrink, the $395 billion industry is facing new competition from grocers adding fuel pumps and drug stores that offer more food than pharmaceuticals. Until recently, the industry has focused mostly on one type of customer, what National Association of Convenience Stores spokesman Jeff Lenard calls the Bubba — a blue collar man who smokes.

As James Lileks (whose father owned a gas station for decades) noted last year, it's not the high price of gasoline that provides the bulk of the profits for these businesses. Indeed, high gas prices drive (so to speak) customers away, which lowers sales of more profitable items like soda, Slim Jims--and coming soon, sushi.

Betsy Newmark says that Brian Lamb will be interviewing the great Charles Krauthammer on C-Span's Q&A tonight at 8:00 PM EST. Set your VCR TiVo.

Power Line looks at a new biography of Orson Welles, and links to a review of the book written by Budd Schulberg (author of What Makes Sammy Run). For more on Citizen Welles, we've written extensively about his first and last movies.