Betsy Newmark is angry with Nancy Pelosi.

You'll like her when she gets angry.

Update: Airbrush alert! Betsy catches the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post touching up Pelosi's quotes to make them sound less dippy.

They don't call it the liberal cocoon for nothing.

It's Orson a-go-go in the Blogosphere! We look at how Welles' last movie prophesized men like Ward Churchill; Iowahawk, the man who gave Churchill his "Chutch" sobriquet looks at The War of the Worlds: The Lost Version.

James Panero of the New Criterion's "Armavirumque" Weblog observes the ongoing crushing of dissent in Bush's/Ashcroft's/Gonzales'/Rove's America:

The other day we received a Penguin paperback edition of Lewis Lapham's latest book Gag Rule: On the Supression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy. Here is the blurb, in part:

... Never before, Lapham argues, have voices of protest been so locked out of the mainstream conversation, so marginalized and muted by a government that recklessly disregards civil liberties, and by an ever more concentrated and profit-driven media in which the safe and salable sweep all uncomfortable truths from view.

Gag Rule.

Penguin Press.

Now in paperback.

By the editor of Harper's Magazine.

Oh, will the supression ever end?

If there's one man who would know--who can predict the future, Yoda-style, it's Lewis Lapham, Master of Time and Space.

When I was Googling for articles on Brian Williams, I came across this piece from the April 2005 Philadelphia magazine, a slick, glossy magazine whose advertising (and there's lots of it) and articles serve as a guide to shopping and dining in the City of Brotherly Love. Here's its opening paragraph:

Arby's! NASCAR! South Jersey! It's a white-trash bonanza this month as we chat with anchorman Brian Williams, who covered the Garden State for WCAU-TV (Channel 10) in the '80s before going network and succeeding Tom Brokaw in the NBC Nightly News chair.

If I wrote a piece that began "Ribs! Rap music! It's a black-trash bonanza this month...", whoever my editor was would strike out that phrase so fast it would make your head spin--and either give me a serious dressing down or never hire me again.

And quite rightly so.

But as Larry Elder wrote in 2000, "white trash" remains a perfectly acceptable phrase in America's PC-obsessed media:

We live in an era where radio talk-show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger catches fire for calling homosexuals "biological errors."

Schlessinger apologized, but protesters remain unappeased. On the NBC program "Will & Grace," critics attacked the show when a character referred to her Salvadoran maid as a "hot tamale." In response, the network dubbed in a less offensive expression. We call illegal aliens "undocumented workers." We call blacks "African-Americans." Fine.

But why, then, is it perfectly OK in polite company to call to low-income, often southern-dwelling people "white trash"?

Take the President Bill Clinton-Paula Jones scandal. Is there a greater example of the harsh treatment and media pile-on against so-called "white trash"? Recall that Jones, then an Arkansas state employee, claimed then governor Bill Clinton groped her and solicited sex.

* * *

As for Jones? Remember Clinton defender James Carville's famous line, "Drag $100 through a trailer park and there's no telling what you'll find."

In today's era of racial sensitivity, safe targets like white trash remain. Former California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown once called political opponents "white boys." Al Gore's campaign manager, Donna Brazile, referred to the GOP as the "party of the white boys."

Comedian Jeff Foxworthy makes a good living by poking fun at "rednecks."

But Foxworthy, himself a Southerner, calls his humor respectfully self-deprecating, rather than insulting or dismissive. But apparently anybody can ridicule low-income, uneducated whites by branding them "white trash." Could someone like Bill Maher go on national television and suggest that only "black trash" or "Latino trash" appear on such programs?

What's the point? When a guest or host appears on a show like "Politically Incorrect" and derides a category of people by race, that's entertainment.

But were the host to blanketly ridicule low-income minorities, that's hate speech. Indeed, many colleges have passed "speech codes," outlawing insensitive or demeaning language directed towards racial or ethnic groups.

Try it. Substitute "black trash" for "white trash." After all, a disproportionate number of blacks appear on these tabloid shows. Frankly, by not calling black guests "black trash," aren't we suggesting blacks who appear on "Springer" represent mainstream black America? Now that's insulting.

Picking on, demeaning, and ridiculing whites is OK. But by demeaning any group by race, we open the door and grant permission to demean others.

Bottom line, either race-based insults are offensive or they're not.

Pick one.

The irony in Philadelphia's case is that the magazine makes a great deal of its revenue--both from advertising and from purchases of individual issues--from South Jersey suburban readers looking for a guide to the big city on the other side of the Delaware.

I purchased it for years when I lived in South Jersey myself. Of course back then, I had no idea how condescending its publishers were to those of us unfortunates in the hinterlands.

Ed Morrissey writes that NBC's Brian Williams (who in the past has attempted to pay favorable lip-service to his viewers in the Red States, but trashed bloggers) said on the Nightly News that America's founders "probably were considered terrorists of their time by the Crown in England". Morrissey responds:

Did Washington bomb women and children indiscriminately in order to chase the British out of North America? Did John Hancock send teenagers with bomb belts into marketplaces to kill as many people as possible to destabilize colonial society? This comparison insults the intelligence and the memory of those who fought on both sides of the Revolutionary War, which (despite what's commonly thought) mostly saw European-style, set-piece combat between uniformed forces.

Williams indulges in the same, tired moral equivalency that led Michael Moore to declare Zarqawi as the Iraqi version of the Minutemen from our war of independence. This minimizes the cruelty and inhumanity of the enemies of freedom that use civilians as their targets while trying to impose tyrannies far worse than anything George III could ever have dreamed in his most feverish illusions. It also continues the generation-long effort to rewrite American history to eliminate the idea of American exceptionalism, where all forms of government are relatively equal and democracy is simply another choice with no special moral value over monarchies or autocracies.

Shame on Brian Williams, and shame on NBC.

The Punitive Liberalism introduced into the American culture during the late '60s and the McGovern-era early seventies has radically cheapened our national dialogue. I'll second Ed's remarks: Shame on Williams--and his writers--for cluelessly uttering such rhetoric, and thinking, ala Dick Durbin, that no one would notice.

Ol' Chutch, who is permanently trapped in a 1969 causality loop, is now advocating the killing of military officers.

(See our post below for additional thoughts on Churchill.)

You might remember the review I wrote in late April when Orson Welles' last movie, F For Fake was released on DVD, and the brief, related blog post that it inspired. The gist of that post was that in a way, Welles' movie could be seen as foreshadowing today's' media-savvy--and media-friendly--hucksters such as Michael Moore, Al Sharpton, and Ward Churchill.

I eventually combined several of those elements into a detailed article, which just went online at The New Partisan. Click on over to read it.

What I found interesting when writing it was the element that ties together Sharpton, Moore, and Churchill: The Big Lie that has become an almost entirely accepted method to break into the national scene. It gets the press's attention, launches your national career, and then quickly gets either whitewashed or ignored as the press happily quotes your latest utterances. In a way, Welles' foreshadowed this with his War of the Worlds mock-newscast radio broadcast, and his reaction to it. He simply laughed off the terror it caused amongst the people he viewed as the hicks and rubes in the hinterlands...and, next stop Hollywood and Citizen Kane. (The first line of dialogue Welles speaks in Kane is of course, "Rosebud". But the second is perhaps even more telling: "Don't believe everything you hear on the radio!")

I didn't get into this in the article, but you get the feeling that perhaps that the modern media eventually got jealous of abetting the hucksters, and decided to get into the game themselves. Hence, their willingness, seemingly new-found, to invent their own news to match their worldview, such as CBS's "fake but accurate" Ra^therGate and Newsweek's retracted "Piss Koran" story, which led to Dick Durbin's recent 15 minutes of fame.

In a post titled, "The Dumbest Controversy Ever", Ed Morrissey writes that "The New York Times eats up several column inches on what has to be the pettiest controversy of recent memory -- The Case Of The Missing Applause.":

from the moment that Bush walked into the auditorium -- the troops stood at attention, and didn't utter a peep when Bush had them sit -- but as I noted, his delivery made it obvious that he planned on no interruptions. The Fort Bragg soldiers maintained the discipline requested by their officers and the White House.

* * *

If the same soldiers had greeted Bush with wild cheers and hoo-ahs, or had repeatedly interrupted the speech with cheers, we'd be hearing that the White House had secretly arranged that reception. Instead, we now have Clapgate, which doesn't have nearly the fun that such a monicker might suggest, where the big question is who initiated the applause that followed the one line where Bush told the nation that we would stay in the fight to the finish.

Well, this certainly qualifies as a national emergency. Can we say, "Slow News Day"?

If any of the soldiers at Fort Bragg has information on what happened, please e-mail me from your military e-mail accounts before the conspiracy theorists spin this into a passive mutiny against the current Commander-In-Chief. I guarantee readers that within 24 hours, that's exactly how this meme will be spun in the more radical corners of the political arena.

Whoever serves on the Times' "Credibility Committee" is sure going to earn their pay.

Even the Russians, I guess. AP reports that "Russian President Vladimir Putin walked off with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft's diamond-encrusted 2005 Super Bowl ring, but was it a generous gift or a very expensive international misunderstanding?":

Following a meeting of American business executives and Putin at Konstantinovsky Palace near St. Petersburg on Saturday, Kraft showed the ring to Putin -- who tried it on, put it in his pocket and left, according to Russian news reports.

It wasn't clear if Kraft, whose business interests include paper and packaging companies and venture capital investments, intended that Putin keep the ring.

Patriots spokesman Stacey James said Wednesday that Kraft was traveling and he hadn't talked to him in four or five days, despite e-mails and calls. ``He's still overseas, I can't even tell you where. ... He's not due back until next week.''

``It's an incredible story. I just haven't been able to talk to Robert Kraft to confirm the story,'' James told The Associated Press.

However, a Kremlin official who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of compromising his position told the AP the ring was a present. ``Such a present was made,'' the official said.

He said Putin had given the ring to the Kremlin library where other foreign gifts are kept.

James said the ring's worth was ``substantially more'' than $15,000, as the value had been reported. He refused to be specific, but noted that the ring has 124 diamonds.

Kraft handed out Super Bowl rings to players and coaches at his home two weeks ago.

Bob--let him keep it. It'll be better for your health that way.

Update:The story quoted above was its first draft. If you click on the Yahoo link above (and what the heck, here, too), here's how it now reads:

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In his interview with John Hawkins, Mark Steyn has a great take on one of American newspapers' (many) ills--their bland liberal corporate dullness:

Well, there are two answers to that: the first is that it's true US newspapers are not exactly beating my door down. The second is that, when they do beat my door down, my loyal retainer sets the dogs on them and peppers their retreating posteriors with buckshot. I'll explain that second part first. I appear in newspapers in a lot of different countries, and the sad fact is that, mainly as a consequence of local newspaper monopolies, US syndication fees represent some of the lowest publication rates in the world - that's to say, to take one recent example, you'd earn more from a single reprint in a Fijian newspaper than one certain prominent US statewide daily was proposing to pay for my column for an entire year. The US syndication business is the publishing equivalent of vaudeville, and I don't particularly see why it's in my interests to fill up Gannett’s newspapers for free. If I'm going to give it away, I'd rather folks had to come to the website to see it, where there's a chance they'll hang around long enough to buy a book. So I've no interest in US syndication as a business model. We make exceptions for certain newspapers whose op-ed editors are genuinely eager to carry the column. But I have no great ambitions within US journalism.

But, to go back to your first point, the reason they're not exactly beating the door down is because I'm not a good fit for American monopoly dailies. In London, the most competitive newspaper market in the world, papers thrive by encouraging distinctive controversial voices. In America, the average Gannett or other monodaily prefers a tone of self-regarding dullness. As my friend John O'Sullivan put it, "They neither offend nor delight" - as a matter of policy. Yes, they're broadly “liberal,” but not in a lively virtuoso engaging way, only in a dreary J-school way. I think they're missing the point here. They don't realize that they do have competitors now, in new media. In 1978, having driven your print competitors out of business, you could afford to be a dull city newspaper. I don't believe you can now.

In the 1960s, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and other writers tried to use their "New Journalism" techniques to end-run that blandness. That was in an era where many American cities still had multiple, competing newspapers (Wolfe was with The New York Herald Tribune, Talese with the Times, for example.) But once newspapers became monopolies in most cities, as Steyn says, there was little need--at least at first--for that sort of exciting style.

The Blogosphere of course, changed all that. Beyond the news that the Blogosphere picks up that isn't thought to be of immediate interest by newspaper editors (see Rather, Dan; Durbin, Dick; and Soldier, Winter), a huge part of the Blogosphere's popularity is its lively collection of voices, and that it's a meritocracy.

That extends not just to which bloggers link to each other the most often, but also to which writers outside the Blogosphere get frequent favorable mention. To paraphrase Steyn's comment to Hawkins, while US newspapers are not exactly beating his door down, Bloggers happily link to him, as they do writers such as Victor Davis Hanson and James Lileks, neither of whom will be appearing in a New York Times op-ed soon, much to that paper's detriment.

Kathryn-Jean Lopez writes:

Dick Durbin yesterday on Inside Politics blamed us for why he had to apologize: “Well, I think there were a lot of critics who's tried to blow my remarks up as much as they could, and to run them in some aspects of our press over and over and over again. I think they bear some responsibility, too. That speech might never have been noticed but for that activity on that side of the media.”

What's the purpose of entering a speech into the Senate records? Doesn't one give a speech with the hope that it will be noticed?

One fellow who definitely noticed it was attorney James H. Warner, who previously served as domestic policy adviser during the second Reagan administration. And prior to that, in the Marines:

As a Marine Corps officer, I spent five years and five months in a prisoner of war camp in North Vietnam. I believe this gives me a benchmark against which to measure the treatment which Sen. Richard Durbin, Illinois Democrat, complained of at the Camp of Detention for Islamo-fascists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The senator's argument is silly. If he believes what he has said his judgment is so poor that his countrymen, assuming, of course, that he considers us his countrymen, have no reason not to dismiss him as a witless boob. On the other hand, if he does not believe what he said, the other members of the Senate may wish to consider censure.

Consider nutrition. I have severe peripheral neuropathy in both legs as a residual of beriberi. I am fortunate. Some of my comrades suffer partial blindness or ischemic heart disease as a result of beriberi, a degenerate disease of peripheral nerves caused by a lack of thiamin, vitamin B-1. It is easily treated but is extremely painful.

Did Mr. Durbin say that some of the Islamo-fascist prisoners are suffering from beriberi? Actually, the diet enjoyed by the prisoners seems to be healthy. I saw the menu that Rep. Duncan Hunter presented a few days ago. It looks as though the food given the detainees at Guantanamo is wholesome, nutritious and appealing. I would be curious to hear Mr. Durbin explain how orange glazed chicken and rice pilaf can be compared to moldy bread laced with rat droppings.

In May 1969, I was taken out for interrogation on suspicion of planning an escape. I was forced to remain awake for long periods of time -- three weeks on one occasion.

On the first of June, I was put in a cement box with a steel door, which sat out in the tropical summer sun. There, I was put in leg irons which were then wired to a small stool. In this position I could neither sit nor stand comfortably. Within 10 days, every muscle in my body was in pain (here began a shoulder injury which is now inoperable). The heat was almost beyond bearing. My feet had swollen, literally, to the size of footballs. I cannot describe the pain. When they took the leg irons off, they had to actually dig them out of the swollen flesh. It was five days before I could walk, because the weight of the leg irons on my Achilles tendons had paralyzed them and hamstrung me. I stayed in the box from June 1 until Nov. 10, 1969. While in the box, I lost at least 30 pounds. I would be curious to hear Mr. Durbin explain how this compares with having a female invade my private space, and whether a box in which the heat nearly killed me is the same as turning up the air conditioning.

The detainees at Guantanamo receive new Korans and prayer rugs, and the guards are instructed not to disturb the inmates' prayers. Compare this with my experience in February 1971, when I watched as armed men dragged from our cell, successively, four of my cell mates after having led us in the Lord's Prayer. Their prayers were in defiance of a January 1971 regulation in which the Communists forbade any religious observances in our cells. Does Mr. Durbin somehow argue that our behavior is the equivalent of the behavior of the Communists?

Yes he does. And apparently, he's still only sorry that he got caught by "that side of the media"--the one that won't insulate him from his rhetoric.

I guess it's slice and dice day in the Blogosphere. In a post titled, "Remember When Medicine Was About Healing?", Orrin Judd links to this story in Australia's Age:

Two Australian philosophers believe surgeons should be allowed to cut off the healthy limbs of some "amputee wannabes".

Neil Levy and Tim Bayne argue that patients obsessed with having a limb amputated should be able to have it safely removed by a surgeon, as long as they are deemed sane.

"As long as no other effective treatment for their disorder is available, surgeons ought to be allowed to accede to their requests," the pair wrote in the Journal of Applied Philosophy.

Meanwhile, Charles Johnson looks at surgery of a different sort:

Shari’a law in action: Iranian court orders man to be blinded.

An Iranian court has sentenced a man to have his eyes surgically removed for a crime he committed as a teenager 12 years ago. Amnesty International has condemned the sentence, reported in the Iranian daily Etemaad, but local human rights groups say these unusual punishments are hardly ever executed. ...

Etemaad says the accused, identified only as Vahid, was 16 when he threw a bottle of acid at another man during a fight in a vegetable market in 1993. The top opened - Vahid insists accidentally - and blinded his victim in both eyes. A court said the crime should be judged as qisas, a category for which the Koran stipulates specific punishments, in this case an eye for an eye. The paper said the sentence was to pour acid on Vahid’s eyes, but an appeals court ruled it should be done surgically so as not to harm other parts of his face.

What planet are both sets of surgeons living on that they would sanction either procedure??

Byron York wonders why the Washington Post is wondering why Robert Byrd enjoys his image as a "pillar of the Senate", as the Post recently called him:

There was a striking passage in last Sunday’s Page One Washington Post story about Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) headlined, “A Senator’s Shame: Byrd, in His New Book, Again Confronts Early Ties to KKK.”

“Historians, political analysts and admirers have long sought to reconcile Byrd’s early Klan affiliation with his image as a pillar of the Senate,” reporter Eric Pianin wrote. “More extraordinary is how he managed to overcome such a blot on his record to twice become Senate majority leader.”

It’s true. Byrd has indeed enjoyed an image as a pillar of the Senate. And given his history, that seems a bit odd.

How do you suppose it happened? Do you think a newspaper — say The Washington Post — might have had something to do with it?

* * *

Over the years, the Post has often steered clear of Byrd’s history with the Klan.

There were very, very few exceptions, such as the story in 1981 in which reporter Martin Schram directly confronted Byrd over the issue and got an extremely chilly response. Much more common was the admiring Post profile of Byrd from 1999 — the paper was lauding Byrd’s opposition to the Clinton impeachment — which began this way:

“Sen. Robert Byrd is a believer in holy documents. They are the sacred tools for defending his Senate against the savages. The Bible is one such holy book. He learned to read with the King James Version and, seventy-some years later, has little use for any other Bible. Something about modern translations seems to sap the words of their sacred power. The U.S. Constitution is also holy writ. Watch him wield it. ...”

Not until 2,532 words into a 2,779-word story did the Post say this:

“As a young man campaigning for the West Virginia legislature in the ‘40s, Byrd briefly joined the Ku Klux Klan, hoping to gain votes. He quickly quit and has spent the past half-century publicly regretting it.”

The Post didn’t even go on a crusade when, in March 2001, Byrd twice used the N-word on national television. The paper published just one story, when Byrd apologized.

And now, after all these years of mostly soft-pedaling Byrd’s past, the Post wonders how it is that Byrd has managed to be regarded as a pillar of the Senate.

How do you suppose that happened?

Interesting how the cocoon can wrap itself around both a newspapers' readers and its favored politicians.

Meanwhile, Don Suber looks at a related topic that I probably should file under Muggeridge's Law:

The Robert C. Byrd Memorial for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Roll that last sentence around in your head for a few minutes.

Last August, Nick Schulz of Tech Central Station coined the phrase "Laphams", alternately spelled "Laphamism" or "Laphamisms" for violating the space-time continium, and filing reports from the future:

[Harper's magazine editor Lewis Lapham] wrote about the GOP convention speeches before anyone even stepped to the podium. Lapham has apologized for what he's calling a "rhetorical invention," use of "poetic license," and a "mistake."

But the only "mistake" Lapham made is in revealing for all to see what has long been known by anyone who pays attention to the news: the major media routinely bring to their coverage of significant political events a predetermined storyline -- you might want to call it a "Lapham". Facts that undermine the storyline are ignored or explained away as aberrations to The Truth. For the editor of Harper's and other establishment press figures, it really makes no difference to them what will be said at Madison Square Garden because the Laphams are already set, loaded in the scribblers' word processors and television anchor tele-prompters and ready to go.

We at TCS have seen Laphams at work at a number of gatherings we've covered over the years.

Charles Johnson spots another example, as AP writes up President Bush's speech tonight--before he gives it. Meanwhile, Power Line has some background on the article's author.

Hillel Halkin and Jim Siegel examine what Siegel calls the "three ideologies [that] are aligning to create a new strain of anti-Semitism that threatens Jews first in Israel, second in Europe, and third throughout the world", and how intertwined anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism often are.

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

As we were a moment ago; according to the Associated Press, "A newspaper investigation of a former columnist for The Sacramento Bee could not verify 43 sources she used in a sampling of 12 years of her work".

As Blogger USS Neverdock writes, "What's even more disturbing is the paper admits this is only a 'sampling' of her work".

I'm sure.

Via Instapundit, who writes, "The whole high-horse act" of the mainstream media "needs to be given a rest".

Roger L. Simon has links to a couple of reviews of the upcoming book on Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday that we mentioned here and here.

Sadly though, unlike Roger, we didn't title either post, "Papa Mao Mao Mao, Papa Mao Tse Tung!". And that is to our ever-lasting regret.

Jonah Goldberg writes:

About a month ago, I helped a Muslim woman with her groceries in a supermarket parking lot. She was dealing with her kids and her shopping cart started to roll away from her car with the groceries still inside. As it rolled, I saw a decent society of tolerance and kindness rolling away. The cart’s one wobbly wheel — going chapocketa, chapocketa, chapocketa — was onomatopoetically tapping out a small drumbeat for the forced march to oblivion of all we hold dear.

Thank goodness I was there.

Thank goodness this country produces heroes like me.

I sprang into action. Walking more than a dozen yards without concern about the parking-lot traffic, heedless of the SUVs barreling along at 5 perhaps even 10 MPH — not even caring about what my fellow Americans might make of me giving aid and comfort to a Muslim woman. I knew that this woman’s faith in the American way of life was on the line! And I was going to do what was necessary! I grabbed that shopping cart and I pushed it through all the fear and bigotry this country has smothered that poor woman with. I pushed that shopping cart back to that woman’s minivan not so much so she could more easily unload her Cocoa Puffs, but because I have a dream. I have a dream that one day little Muslim boys and little Jewish boys, little Arab girls and little Scots-Irish girls will be able to join hands as sisters and brothers and push that great shopping cart we call “America” together — with their one free hand.

I don't use the word "hero" lightly, but I am the greatest hero in American history. Except, maybe, for Al Gore.

Meanwhile, the object of Gore's heroism is apparently the Times' female answer to Greg Packer. Or maybe Jayson Blair.

Mark Steyn writes that "there aren't many examples of successful post-religious societies":

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Hollywood screenwriter Barbara Nicolosi is that rarest of rare birds--a conservative Christian working in Hollywood and openly discussing her faith and politics.

Oddly enough, this seems to frighten the New York Times:

This is a somewhat paraphrased and somewhat literal transcription of an interview I did Sunday night with a NY Times reporter named James. This was the follow-up interview to one he did with me a few weeks ago. That first interview started with the following exchange (after intro comments):

James: So, in the last six months, there have been 37 pairings in the Times of the word "Christian" with words like "scary", "frightening", "theocratic" and "intimidating". My question is, what is it about Christians that makes you so scary?

Barb: (loud, snorting and sneering laughter) Are you kidding me?

James: What?

Barb: I finally get interviewed by the New York Times, and you ask me a question like that?! (more snorting and laughing)

James: (sniffs) Are you laughing because you think it's funny that people find Christians frightening?

Barb: No. I'm laughing because you want me to tell you why you and your friends are scared of Christians -- and I think you should ask your therapist!

Here's the article that James contacted her for.

Okrent wasn't kidding when he wrote this piece last summer, huh?

(And neither was Rod Dreher, of course.)

Update: Related thoughts from Tom Maguire, who has a quote from Times editor Bill Keller which tacetly reinforces Dreher's thesis:

I also endorse the committee’s recommendation that we cover religion more extensively, but I think the key to that is not to add more reporters who will write about religion as a beat. I think the key is to be more alert to the role religion plays in many stories we cover, stories of politics and policy, national and local, stories of social trends and family life, stories of how we live. This is important to us not because we want to appease believers or pander to conservatives, but because good journalism entails understanding more than just the neighborhood you grew up in.

As Tom writes, "I will know they are pandering when they assign a sports columnist to NASCAR".

Scott Ott puts the last few Supreme Court decisions into humorous perspective: "Court Allows 10 Commandments on Seized Land".

In the New Partisan, Jonathan Leaf writes:

Here’s a riddle:

Which American publication this week objected to Vice-President Dick Cheney’s remark that he didn’t take seriously Amnesty International’s description of the U.S. internment camp at Guantanamo as a “gulag”? Which also presented bribed English parliamentarian and Saddam Hussein stooge George Galloway as a hero?

The Nation? Mother Jones?

Here are some more clues:

In its cover story this magazine also defended “the culture of protest of the 1960’s” and lamented the collapse of the Black-Jewish alliance, going on to say that “the New Left in great degree [was] the direct off-spring of the old. Without the radical Jewish children, there would have been no early SDS, no Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, no New York kids going South for Freedom Rides to turn the civil-rights movement into a matter of national consciousness.” Too, the periodical criticized the rise of the Christian Right and called Robert McNamara “the fire-bomber of Tokyo, napalm-bomber of Vietnam”.

Dissent? The American Prospect? Or something still more nostalgically left-wing?

Nope. The magazine was The American Conservative. Yes, the one edited by Pat Buchanan and funded by socialite and sometime coke fiend Taki Theodoracopulos.

Read the rest, for as the last sentence quoted above implies, it's fascinating, if in a slightly bitchy sort of way.

Of course, this isn't the first time that Pat and the left have been accused of coming full circle.

Via Roger L. Simon, we learn that the Checkpoint Charlie Monument in Berlin--which memorializes the over 1,000 killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall to the west and freedom--is scheduled to be bulldozed--on July 4th.

As we were saying...

Warren Bell writes that "According to Amnesty International's website, today is United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture". But it gets even better:

I thought I would poke around their website and see if there was a local rally against the beheadings in Iraq or the murder of Daniel Pearl. I didn't find anything like that (shocking!), but there is this: "Please join Survivors of Torture, International in commemorating United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture--Chocolate and Cabernet Reception to Follow".

Bell writes, "I am not a good enough writer--I only wish I could make this up". Congratulations Warren, you've just run smack into Muggeridge's Law.

Update: This qualifies as well, of course.

John In Carolina explains that the Washington Post has a two-speed spin-cycle--and that Karl Rove knew exactly how to set it for fast agitation.

Betsy Newmark and Prime Minister Ibrahim Al-Jaafari of Iraq take turns explaining to the media the difference between insurgents and terrorists.

Mark Steyn isn't too crazy about a flag-burning amendment passing, and he makes some great points along the way as he explains why:

And maybe a few would feel as many of my correspondents did last week about the ridiculous complaints of ''desecration'' of the Quran by U.S. guards at Guantanamo -- that, in the words of one reader, ''it's not possible to 'torture' an inanimate object.''

That alone is a perfectly good reason to object to a law forbidding the "desecration" of the flag. For my own part, I believe that, if someone wishes to burn a flag, he should be free to do so. In the same way, if Democrat senators want to make speeches comparing the U.S. military to Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, they should be free to do so. It's always useful to know what people really believe.

For example, two years ago, a young American lady, Rachel Corrie, was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza. Her death immediately made her a martyr for the Palestinian cause, and her family and friends worked assiduously to promote the image of her as a youthful idealist passionately moved by despair and injustice. ''My Name Is Rachel Corrie,'' a play about her, was a huge hit in London. Well, OK, it wasn't so much a play as a piece of sentimental agitprop so in thrall to its subject's golden innocence that the picture of Rachel on the cover of the Playbill shows her playing in the backyard, age 7 or so, wind in her hair, in a cute, pink T-shirt.

There's another photograph of Rachel Corrie: at a Palestinian protest, headscarved, her face contorted with hate and rage, torching the Stars and Stripes. Which is the real Rachel Corrie? The "schoolgirl idealist" caught up in the cycle of violence? Or the grown woman burning the flag of her own country? Well, that's your call. But because that second photograph exists, we at least have a choice.

Have you seen that Rachel Corrie flag-burning photo? If you follow Charles Johnson's invaluable Little Green Footballs Web site and a few other Internet outposts, you will have. But you'll look for it in vain in the innumerable cooing profiles of the "passionate activist" that have appeared in the world's newspapers.

One of the big lessons of these last four years is that many, many beneficiaries of Western civilization loathe that civilization -- and the media are generally inclined to blur the extent of that loathing. At last year's Democratic Convention, when the Oscar-winning crockumentarian Michael Moore was given the seat of honor in the presidential box next to Jimmy Carter, I wonder how many TV viewers knew that the terrorist ''insurgents'' -- the guys who kidnap and murder aid workers, hack the heads off foreigners, load Down's syndrome youths up with explosives and send them off to detonate in shopping markets -- are regarded by Moore as Iraq's Minutemen. I wonder how many viewers knew that on Sept. 11 itself Moore's only gripe was that the terrorists had targeted New York and Washington instead of Texas or Mississippi: ''They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, D.C. and the plane's destination of California -- these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!"

In other words, if the objection to flag desecration is that it's distasteful, tough. Like those apocryphal Victorian matrons who discreetly covered the curved legs of their pianos, the culture already goes to astonishing lengths to veil the excesses of those who are admirably straightforward in their hostility.

This past week, PoliPundit linked to a Chicago Tribune article that diagrammed how Senator Dick Durbin's (D-IL) speech was ignored or quarantined by the MSM, but was heard or read by millions first via Laura Ingraham (whose producer happened to catch it live via C-Span), then Rush, Hewitt, and the Blogosphere. Nothing must gall the left more than the fact that unlike during the 1970s and '80s, so many end-arounds now exist for information about their excesses and radical hyperbole. (Something that Senator Kerry didn't seem to factor-in last year.)

So if you're going to light up Old Glory, just be sure a photographer with Internet access is present.

Update: Related thoughts from Power Line.

Hugh Hewitt has a great comparison between two governmental organizations, both of which have literally burned others--and themselves--in the past. But only one of which might have learned not to repeat the same mistake:

On May 4, 2000, officials of the U.S. Forest Service started a fire in the Bandelier National Monument. The was was supposed to be a "controlled burn," but the Service miscalculated conditions on the ground and the weather forecast was wrong, and the fire became a runaway disaster, eventually consuming 235 homes and 47,000 acres. The Service did not intend to start the fire, but it surely caused the destruction, and it admitted responsibility. No criminal charges were brought. The United States government paid for the losses not covered by insurance.

If the Forest Service were to initiate another controlled burn in the same spot under the same conditions and with the same weather forecast as it did in 2000, the public would be outraged. Not only would the Service' proclamation of innocent intent be insufficient to quell the anger, but demands for criminal investigation into culpability would surely follow.

Indeed, if any controlled burns get away from the Service for years to come, they will be under immediate suspicion of fecklessnes and and best gross negligence. The public assumes they should know better, and the Service will be held to a much higher standard of care for years to come, a standard that will brand them as arsonists in fact if not in intent if any more of their experiments in forest management result in the destruction of private property, especially homes.

The Democratic Party and its liberal/left supporters negligence with regard to southeast Asia in the '70s bought about the deaths of millions and the enduring communist governments of Vietnam and Laos and the desperate circumstances of Cambodia. They did not intend that result. In his famous testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry predicted of the aftermath of a unilateral withdrawal of American troops that the United States would have "an obligation to offer sanctuary to the perhaps 2,000, 3,000 people who might face, and obviously they would, we understand that, might face political assassination or something else." His blindness was neither unique nor even notable. They did not see the carnage coming, or the consequence of American retreat from Vietnam as it would manifest itself in Africa, Central America and ultimately in Afghanistan.

Now the same Democratic Party, the same liberal/left, the same John Kerry and Ted Kennedy and some of the same anti-war protestors grown old and respectable are urging that timelines for unilateral withdrawal be set, the words "bug out" and "quagmire" and back, and once again an ally is beginning to feel the full support of the Democratic Party like a knife in the back. The same tactics, the same denunciations, the same theater that cloaked the approach of disaster are in play in D.C. The Democrats want to start a controlled burn.

If they succeed again, the deaths will surely occur far away and by the hundreds of thousands if not millions.

But they will also occur here. The president knows this, as does the vice president, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State. What Rumsfeld must have been thinking when Kennedy ranted on about the need for the controlled burn to begin in Bandelier Monument immediately.

What Rumsfeld could not say, Rove did, and good for him. More and more people should say it, and are saying it. Serious people don't have to rely on MSM for repackaged talking points from the left. There are new voices and new sources, and they know the one key political fact: The leadership of the Democratic Party is now committed to a strategy of retreat that will inevitably lead to disastrous defeat and the deaths of Americans here at home. They have reverted to type, and the type is naive and dangerous. Their intentions don't matter, and their predictions can't be trusted. The voters have taken away most of their matches. In 2006, they should take away the rest.

Click on over and read it on Hugh's site--he has plenty of links to accompany his remarks.

Will Collier links to this US News & World Report article on who is funding the insurgents terrorists killing civilians and American soldiers in Iraq:

Who's funding the insurgents in Iraq? The list of suspects is long: ex-Baathists, foreign jihadists, and angry Sunnis, to name a few. Now add to that roster hard-core Euroleftists.

Turns out that far-left groups in western Europe are carrying on a campaign dubbed Ten Euros for the Resistance, offering aid and comfort to the car bombers, kidnappers, and snipers trying to destabilize the fledgling Iraq government. In the words of one Italian website, Iraq Libero (Free Iraq), the funds are meant for those fighting the occupanti imperialisti. The groups are an odd collection, made up largely of Marxists and Maoists, sprinkled with an array of Arab emigres and aging, old-school fascists, according to Lorenzo Vidino, an analyst on European terrorism based at The Investigative Project in Washington, D.C. "It's the old anticapitalist, anti-U.S., anti-Israel crowd," says Vidino, who has been to their gatherings, where he saw activists from Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Italy. "The glue that binds them together is anti-Americanism." The groups are working on an October conference to further support "the Iraqi Resistance." A key goal is to expand backing for the insurgents from the fringe left to the broader antiwar and antiglobalization movements.

Color me unsurprised. As Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote:

In the words of one persecuted novelist Turki Al-Hamad, "The problem is not from the outside, the problem is from ourselves; if we don't change ourselves, nothing will change."

In the United States, we are told that we have created terrorists. Saudi liberals would beg to differ. So the theologian Al-Maleky confesses, "If Wahhabism doesn't revise itself, it will produce more terrorism."

This is all so strange.

Free-thinking Arabs refute all the premises of Western Leftists who claim that colonialism, racism, and exploitation have created terrorists, hold back Arab development, and are the backdrops to this war.

Indeed, it is far worse than that: Our own fundamentalist Left is in lockstep with Wahhabist reductionism — in its similar instinctive distrust of Western culture. Both blame the United States and excuse culpability on the part of Islamists. The more left-wing the Westerner, the more tolerant he is of right-wing Islamic extremism; the more liberal the Arab, the more likely he is to agree with conservative Westerners about the real source of Middle Eastern pathology.

The constant? A global distrust of Western-style liberalism and preference for deductive absolutism. So burn down a mosque in Zimbabwe, murder innocent Palestinians in Bethlehem in 2002, arrest Christians in Saudi Arabia, or slaughter Africans in Dafur, and both the Western Left and the Middle East's hard Right won't say a word. No such violence resonates with America's diverse critics as much as a false story of a flushed Koran — precisely because the gripe is not about the lives of real people, but the psychological hurts, angst, and warped ideology of those who in their various ways don't like the United States.

I will pass over quickly the day's other sorry stories, but they were equally revealing. From Karachi, we learn that Pakistani Shiite Muslims burned down a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. You see, a Sunni suicide bomber had just blown up 19 Pakistani Shia. In reaction to that attack, the Shiite mob went out and killed six employees of a business owned and operated by a Pakistani Muslim. Follow the logic of the Middle East: When you are angry at your own for their murdering, and are too weak or terrified to do anything about it, go out and destroy anything remotely American-affiliated.

The glue that binds them together.

Fred Barnes writes:

Democrats don't have a death wish. It just seems that way. What they actually have is a habit of falling into the national security trap. They did it in 1972. They did it in 1984. They did it in 1994. They did it in 2002. And they're doing it again this year as they prepare for the 2006 midterm elections, in which they hope to produce a breakthrough as sweeping and decisive as Republicans achieved in 1994.

The national security trap is simple. When faced with a choice between supporting or criticizing the use of military force along with a strong national security policy, Democrats often side with the critics. Which is how they fall into the trap, which leads to electoral defeat. When they back a vigorous defense of America's national security, however, the opposite happens. They usually win. Even when Democrats merely neutralize the national security issue--this happened in 1996 and 1998--or the issue is peripheral, they stand a good chance of winning.

At the moment, Democrats are convinced the country has turned against the war in Iraq. So House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi is quite comfortable declaring the war a "grotesque mistake" and boasting that she has thought so from the start. Senator Edward Kennedy felt confident enough last week to inform American generals home from Iraq that the war is an "intractable quagmire." This prompted a sharp rebuke from General George Casey, the top commander in Iraq. "You have an insurgency with no vision, no base, limited popular support, an elected government, committed Iraqis to the democratic process, and you have Iraqi security forces that are fighting and dying for their country every day," Casey said. "Senator, that is not a quagmire."

Kennedy lost that exchange. And Democrats did no better on a related issue, the treatment of terrorists imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin was forced to apologize for likening the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to that of the Soviet gulag, Hitler's death camps, and the Cambodian killing fields. What was striking was the matter-of-fact manner in which Durbin drew the parallel in the first place. He seemed to be oblivious to the possibility he might be seen as worrying more about the detainees than about America's national security.

Democrats haven't learned the lesson on national security from elections over the past 30-plus years. In 1972, Democrats thought the public had turned strongly against the war in Vietnam. So they nominated a fervent antiwar candidate, George McGovern. He lost in a landslide to incumbent Richard Nixon.

Speaking of Vietnam, Don Suber and Jeff Harrell remind us what a timetable for withdrawl looks like when it's announced to the enemy. Hint: the results are not pretty.

Speaking of The War of the Worlds, Matt Drudge has a transcript of Tom Cruise's interview with Matt Lauer on The Today Show. Based on that transcript, it appears that somehow, the interview went off on a tangent based around one of Cruise's obsessions--psychiatry and antidepressant drugs.

Assuming it's a complete transcript, the interview wraps up with this exchange:

MATT LAUER: Do you want more people to understand Scientology? Is that-- would that be a goal of yours?

TOM CRUISE: You know what? I-- absolutely. Of course, you know. And people--

MATT LAUER: How do you go about that?

TOM CRUISE: You just communicate about it. And the important thing is, like you and I talk about it, whether it's-- okay, if I wanna know something, I go and find out. /Because I don't talk about things that I don't understand. I'll say, you know what? I'm not so sure about that. I'll go find more information about it so I can-- I can come to an opinion based on-- on the information that I have.

MATT LAUER: You-- you're so passionate about it. And I'm--

TOM CRUISE: I'm passionate about learning. I'm passionate about life, Matt.

So why on earth wouldn't Lauer, who I'm sure believes himself to be an objective hard-hitting liberal journalist, who would think nothing of questioning the religious beliefs of any red stater, ask at some point during the interview, "Tom, it's obvious that you think that the psychiatric profession is misguided. And I'm sure there are many who'd agree with that.

"But if I may blunt, like many in Hollywood, you belong to a religion created by a pulp science fiction writer whose critics say believed that mankind evolved from clams, and that 75 million years ago, there was an alien galactic ruler named Xenu who nuked planet Earth. Any thoughts, Tom?"

And let the viewers watch what happens next. It's possible it would produce an exchange similar to what Ted Koppel got, when he asked Louis Farrakhan about Farrakhan's science fiction beliefs:

Farrakahn believes Elijah Muhammad, the (by all accounts deceased) former leader of the Nation of Islam, is living on a spaceship circling the planet. Also, a few years after Elijah "died," the spaceship picked up Farrakhan and the two men had a nice chat with each other. Afterward, Farrakhan says the spaceship let him off near Washington, D.C.

The only major television journalist I've ever seen query Farrakhan about this stuff was Ted Koppel, host of ABCs "Nightline," in 1996. Koppel asked him about the spaceship stuff, saying, "It sounds like gibberish, but maybe you can explain it."

Farrakhan didn't back off. The spiritual leader explained that the huge spaceship is "over the heads of us in North America, and soon you shall see these (spaceships) over the major cities of America." This fact is being kept "above top-secret by the United States government."

Farrakhan didn't stop there. Offended at the "gibberish" remark, he fell back on some hard science: "And if it were gibberish, they made an awful lot of money, Mr. Koppel, on that movie called 'Independence Day' --- it flooded the theaters." Koppel conceded this point, but also alerted Farrakhan to the fact that "Independence Day" wasn't a true story.

Or, Cruise might simply unclip his lavalier mic and storm off the set. No matter how the conversation broke, like Koppel and Farrakhan, it certainly would make for exciting TV.

Update: Joe Gandelman has some thoughts and an additional quote from the interview:

When asked if he could be with someone at this stage in his life who doesn't have an interest in the Church of Scientology — girlfriend Katie Holmes has said she's embracing the religion — Cruise told Lauer: ''Scientology is something that you don't understand. It's like you could be a Christian and be a Scientologist.''

''It is a religion. Because it's dealing with the spirit. You as a spiritual being. It gives you tools you can use to apply to your life.''

Which would have been the perfect opportunity for Lauer to ask about Xenu and friends.

Meanwhile, via Michele Catalano, here's video of "Cruise Gone Wild", along with some surprisingly harsh comments from Canadian talking heads.

As this link-filled round-up from Glenn Reynolds indicates, Karl Rove has gotten the left into a fit over his remarks on Wednesday at a Manhattan fundraiser for the Conservative Party of New York State.

The irony is that this is a strategy the White House has done again and again, arguably since the Adam Clymer maybe it was/maybe it wasn't a gaffe incident during the 2000 campaign.

Perhaps the most impressive example was last August, arguably the pivotal month in the 2004 president race. (click through my archives that month: August bisected both parties' conventions similar to that river that snaked through the Vietnam war like a main circuit cable plugged straight into Col. Kurtz. Whoops--sorry to go all Apocalypse Now on you--and speaking of which, it was also the month when the Swift Boat Vets and Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia debuted as national issues.) Back then, I titled a post, "The Bully Pulpit Boxes Kerry":

President Bush has gotten Senator Kerry to publicly state that he'd also have gone into Iraq, even knowing, as do today, that their capacity to produce WMDs was much more limited than we know now.

One of the commenters on the Brothers Judd Blog makes a great point: Kerry is now in a box. This is one opinion that he can't flip-flop on, because if he does, President Bush can call him on it, via the Bully Pulpit--and the press, which has to cover the President of the United States, has to report it, no matter how much they loathe the man. And as Jim Geraghty wrote, "Somewhere, some Republican operative is emailing that statement to every anti-war voter he can find. Or perhaps the Nader campaign is."

The chief reason that so many on the left would vote for Kerry--that he would have avoided Iraq, is now off the table.

The Bully Pulpit--or at least an adjunct to it, since Rove gets almost as much exposure from an obsessed press as the President does--has boxed the left in again.

One element that makes this strategy work is the fact that neither Rove nor President Bush are extemporaneous, free-flowing speakers--and they know that everything they say will likely be used against them by a hostile press that lives for gaffes by conservatives. I wish I could find the article where President Bush and Senator Kerry's speaking styles were compared, I think during the presidential debates. Kerry's years of rambling extemporaneously in the Senate caused him gaffes throughout the campaign, the most deadly of which was the "I actually voted for the $87 million before I voted against it" line, which tarred him, very early in the election cycle as a flip-flopper in the public's eye when pointed out repeatedly by the president and his aides. As with Rove this week, the press may hate the president and his staff, but they have to report them and quote their speeches.

Similarly, as Glenn noted, the Democrats' demands for Karl Rove's resignation "just provide an excuse for Republicans to repeat every single stupid or unpatriotic thing that every Democratic politician ever said. And there are a lot of those", as the examples in his links illustrate.

And the next time someone on the left does another Durbin--and they will--the White House or any one of a zillion conservative bloggers and talk radio commentators can say simply remind them of how spot-on Rove was.

What's really curious is the escape valve that he gave them, when said:

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers

How hard would it have been for Dean or Hillary or Kerry to have said to the press, "Hey, Karl was talking about liberals. Both parties have their extremists both in office and on the Internet and on talk radio. But we Democrats in the vital center have been as patriotic as we possibly could be on this vital issue, while occasionally disagreeing with specific elements of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."

Instead, in their rush to tar Rove, Democrats self-identified as liberals for perhaps the first time since before Michael Dukakis ran for the White House. As Rich Lowry noted last July, Democrats have shunned the L-word for decades:

It must be particularly galling to committed liberals that some time in the past 30 years the natural word to describe them -- "liberal" -- became a political embarrassment, so much so that Republicans gleefully hurl it as an epithet, Democrats avoid it if they can, and it is sometimes known only as "the L-word." Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham shed light on this phenomenon a few Sundays ago when he challenged "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos to call him a conservative, begged to be called a conservative, and noted the Democratic ticket would never be so happy to be called liberal.

In a mirror image of Graham's appearance, great liberal hope Barack Obama, the young black Senate candidate from Illinois, refused to say he was a liberal on a recent Sunday show. When liberal dinosaur Ted Kennedy was recently asked if John Kerry -- who has consciously modeled his liberalism on the Kennedy family's -- is a liberal, he said he doesn't find labels useful. This will be news to all the "reactionary right-wingers" denounced by Kennedy throughout the years.

As GayPatriot wrote about Rove's comments:

They were in my view is a brilliant chess-move by Karl Rove to refocus the country on the matters of national security and the War on Terror (Worldwide Theatres). There is no doubt in my mind that Republicans do see this as a war, while on the whole, Democrats/Liberals see this as a "police action"....in the words of John Kerry.

Karl Rove was spot on... and the Dems fell for the bait: Hook, Line & Sinker...

Like I said, it wasn't the first time.

Update: Related thoughts on the L-Word from Jonathan Last:

Here's where the Rove trap is sprung: Democrats as a whole, did not behave like the far-left establishment in the aftermath of September 11. Democrats acted like pretty much everyone else in America.

It was the far left--the group which has hijacked American liberalism--that reacted with such sourness. But in the intervening years, the far left has somehow convinced us that they and the Democratic party are one in the same--all numerical and electoral evidence to the contrary.

To be sure, Republicans have tried to help sell this notion, but now it seems that the Democratic party itself confused as to who it really is. Rove has just goaded them into self-identifying with a bunch of nuts who really don't represent the party's mainstream.

I mean, do Democrats want to keep losing elections?

Another Update: Mark Steyn compares the reaction to Governor Schwarzenegger's "Girlie Men" speech, and reprints his essay from last summer about that speech's ensuing controversy.

One more: Roger L. Simon writes about "how deeply reactionary the Democratic Party has become":

Liberalism as we knew it no longer exists. What we have now are holographs of liberalism in the form of spectres like Chris Dodd and Joseph Biden. Nothing is really there.

Sadly, I agree.

James Lileks once dubbed Hollywood's output post-9/11 as "the Golden Era of beating around the bush" for its fear of actually tacking the Big Story of Our Times head-on. And of course, it's also the golden era of beating around the bush about beating up on Bush, and often in the same picture.

For the latest in a never-ending stream of examples, check out this quote from David Koepp, the writer of the upcoming Cruise/Spielberg version of The War of the Worlds (which started filming just after the November presidential election, incidentally):

“And now, as we see American adventure abroad’ he (David Koepp} continues ‘in my mind it’s certainly back to it’s original meaning, which is that the Martians in our movie represent American military forces invading the Iraqis, and the futility of the occupation of a faraway land is again the subtext”

(Found via PoliPundit.)

Hey I agree--invasions are futile; let's get the troops out of foreign lands ASAP. Mind if we start in Germany, where Koepp probably feels our troops have been futilely stationed for 60 years after we won what Spielberg once essentially dubbed the futile battle known as World War II?

Then there's that whole Red Planet thing. Boy, after the November election, the wag who said that the newspapers should send some foreign correspondents to report on the Red States didn't know the half of it! Red states as a foreign country? Heck, they're a whole other planet as far as Hollywood is concerned!

And as Frank Rich hinted at in his latest op-ed, there's also the F For Fake Invasion Orson Welles radio broadcast subtext.

It's curious how time (and a different president) changes both Hollywood's perspective, and its critics. When Starship Troopers was released in 1997, Paul Verhoeven was roundly criticized for making a seemingly pro-fascist movie. ("Doogie Himmler!" was the reaction of a film critic on Comedy Central's Daily Show when Neil Patrick Harris showed up at the end of the film in a leather trenchcoat.) Had Verhoeven released his film in 2004, rather than receiving brickbats, he would have gotten many of the same accolades from the critics that Michael Moore received for producing a trenchant satire of the modern US military and the propagandistic nature of the conservatively biased media.

I wouldn't have as much of a problem with any of the post-9/11 films, if there was some balance. Nobody begrudged Hollywood producing anti-war films like Paths of Glory or All Quiet On The Western Front (both superb pictures of course, especially the former), as long as we were also getting Casablanca and 30 Seconds Over Tokyo. Even as late as the 1980s, Hollywood could gave its audiences both Platoon and Cruise's own Top Gun.

A while back, Mark Steyn noted that the leftwing fetish for multiculturalism has had the perverse effect of making Hollywood movies less ethnocentric than ever before.

And just as with newspapers, an industry that obsesses over cultural diversity is writing more and more of its stories from the exact same homogenized cookie-cutter template, even as they wonder why they keep losing audience share.

Michelle Malkin and Billy Yates introduce a new word into the vocabulary: "Durbinize".

Michelle also has a sneak preview of tomorrow's Day By Day cartoon, with the magic word: Ritalin!

Update: Somewhat related to Durbinizing, this pretzel logic debating trick has, not coincidentally, popped up a few times over the last week.

(Via Conservative Grapevine.)

Well, Lincoln Chafee that is. Alexander K. McClure of PoliPundit notes that President Bush is apparently supporting Senator Lincoln Chafee in the upcoming Republican primary in Rhode Island:

Of course, Republicans will be infuriated by this decision, but if Chafee is challenged by a conservative, the President’s support will be all the Senator has to save him from a primary defeat.

Conservatives who are jumping up and down at the notion of a Chafee primary defeat should recognize that if Chafee loses, this seat goes Democratic. Chafee may not vote with the GOP all the time, but he certainly votes with the majority a lot more than the senior Senator from Rhode Island does.

Moreover, it is rather interesting that President Bush is supporting a man who openly opposed his re-election. What an intolerant ideologue he is!!

Yeah right--next thing you'll do is tell me that he'd leave a Clinton appointee in charge of PBS for four years.

Err--wait a second...

Mark Steyn uses the catch phrase from the new Batman movie, "It’s not what you feel inside that counts, it’s what you do that defines you", as a springboard to write on the "vast ongoing Tsunami Tshakedown":

A couple of days [after seeing Batman Begins] I read that Oxfam had paid the best part of a million bucks to Sri Lankan customs officials for the privilege of having 25 four-wheel-drive vehicles allowed into the country to get aid out to remote villages on washed-out roads hit by the Boxing Day tsunami. The Indian-made Mahindras stood idle on the dock in Colombo for a month as Oxfam’s representatives were buried under a tsunami of paperwork. Aside from the ‘tax’, they were charged £2,750 ‘demurrage’ for every day the vehicles sat in port.

This was merely the latest instalment in what’s becoming a vast ongoing Tsunami Tshakedown Of The Day retrospective — you can usually find it at the foot of page 37 in your daily paper, if at all. Fourteen Unicef ambulances sent to Indonesia spent two months sitting on the dock of the bay wasting time, as the late Otis Redding so shrewdly anticipated. Eight 20ft containers of Diageo drinking water shipped via the Red Cross arrived at the Indonesian port of Medan in January and are still there, because the Indonesian Red Cross lost the paperwork. Five hundred containers, representing one quarter of all aid sent to Sri Lanka since the tsunami hit on 26 December, are still sitting in port in Colombo, unclaimed or unprocessed. At Medan 1,500 containers of aid are still sitting on the dock.

The tsunami may have been unprecedented, but what followed was business as usual — the sloth and corruption of government, the feebleness of the brand-name NGOs, the compassion-exhibitionism of the transnational jet set. If we lived in a world where ‘it’s what you do that defines you’, we’d be heaping praise on the US and Australian militaries who in the immediate hours after the tsunami struck dispatched their forces to save lives, distribute food, restore water and power and communications.

Instead, a fellow Quebecker of my acquaintance sneered, ‘Can you believe those Americans? A humanitarian disaster strikes and they send an aircraft carrier!’ Er, well, yes. Because for large-scale humanitarian operations it helps to have a big boat handy. It seemed unlikely to me that even your average European politician would utter anything so fatuous in public, but Clare Short came close. The sight of Washington co-ordinating its disaster relief efforts with Australia, India and Japan outside the approved transnational structures was too much for her. ‘This initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to co-ordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN,’ she told the BBC. ‘Only really the UN can do that job. It is the only body that has the moral authority.’

Whether or not it has ‘moral’ authority, the UN certainly can’t do the job. It becomes clearer every week that Western telly viewers threw far more money at tsunami relief than was required and that much of it has been siphoned off by wily customs inspectors and their ilk. If you really wanted to make an effective donation to a humanitarian organisation, you’d send your cheque to the Pentagon or the Royal Australian Navy.

Read the rest.

Over at The Corner, Tim Graham writes:

Forgive me for noticing so late in the week, but why does Time look like a pathetic communist poster this week? (Mao is not the subject inside.) Is this any way to show the world your fervor for the people and their human rights? Presenting like a sun god a man who slaughtered millions?

70 million to be precise, according to what sounds like a scrupulously researched book due out this fall written by Jung Chang, Chinese expatriate author of the bestselling Wild Swans and her husband, Jon Halliday, a British historian.

Earlier this month, we linked to an Australian article about Chang and Halliday which had this classic radical chic rebuttal from Philip Short, a British author and journalist who published his own book on Mao in 1999:

"Mao was ruthless and tyrannical enough in real life that there's no need to reduce him to a cardboard cut-out of Satan. Do we really gain in understanding by denying his complexity, his perversity, his genius and reducing him to a one-dimensional caricature?

"Mao was a tyrant, but [also] much more than that. He was the reverse of a one-dimensional man. He was a great poet, a visionary and, I would argue, a military strategist of genius. He had great skills and enormous failings. Let's not oversimplify and pretend he was just a monster.

Fine. But the reverse should be equally true: let's not oversimplify as Time does on their cover this week and imply that he was just a beneficent leader and kindly father-figure, either.

Update: Pamela, a.k.a., "Atlas Shrugged" has some related thoughts.

Want a PC in your home theater? Or an all-in-one home theater PC? That's the subject of my new article over at ConnectedGuide.com.

The Brothers Judd link to a New York Times article titled, "Democrats Call for Firing of Broadcast Chairman":

Sixteen Democratic senators called on President Bush to remove Kenneth Y. Tomlinson as head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting because of their concerns that he is injecting partisan politics into public radio and television.

"We urge you to immediately replace Mr. Tomlinson with an executive who takes his or her responsibility to the public television system seriously, not one who so seriously undermines the credibility and mission of public television," wrote the senators.

They included Charles E. Schumer of New York, Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, Jon Corzine and Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey, Bill Nelson of Florida, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California.

As the Times article and a Judd commenter both note--wait for it--Tomlinson is a holdover from the Clinton administration.

Meaning that Dubya could take placate the left...and then put his own man in.

Want to see the enormous chasm that separates conservative and leftwing viewpoints? It couldn't be more obvious than these two items, currently making their way through the Blogosphere today. The first, via Instapundit, is this piece that's in the current issue of The American Enterprise magazine:

The War is Over, and We Won
By Karl Zinsmeister

Your editor returned to Iraq in April and May of 2005 for another embedded period of reporting. I could immediately see improvements compared to my earlier extended tours during 2003 and 2004. The Iraqi security forces, for example, are vastly more competent, and in some cases quite inspiring. Baghdad is now choked with traffic. Cell phones have spread like wildfire. And satellite TV dishes sprout from even the most humble mud hovels in the countryside.

Many of the soldiers I spent time with during this spring had also been deployed during the initial invasion back in 2003. Almost universally they talked to me about how much change they could see in the country. They noted progress in the attitudes of the people, in the condition of important infrastructure, in security.

I observed many examples of this myself. Take the two very different Baghdad neighborhoods of Haifa Street and Sadr City. The first is an upper-end commercial district in the heart of downtown. The second is one of Baghdad’s worst slums, on the city’s north edge.

I spent lots of time walking both neighborhoods this spring—something that would not have been possible a year earlier, when both were active war zones, where tanks poured shells into buildings on a regular basis. Today, the primary work of our soldiers in each area is rebuilding sewers, paving roads, getting buildings repaired and secured, supplying schools and hospitals, getting trash picked up, managing traffic, and encouraging honest local governance.

What the establishment media covering Iraq have utterly failed to make clear today is this central reality: With the exception of periodic flare-ups in isolated corners, our struggle in Iraq as warfare is over. Egregious acts of terror will continue—in Iraq as in many other parts of the world. But there is now no chance whatever of the U.S. losing this critical guerilla war.

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt quotes from this staggering comment by former Clinton spokesman Paul Begala on CNN's Inside Politics:

This whole thing has been a disaster for the country, for our country, and thee president seems to be disengaged from reality. The debate in Washington, I think, among those who are observing this, with respect, is the president and his team, are they purposefully misleading us, do they understand what a debacle it is but they are lying, or are they so delusional that they think that we are winning this thing. I have no idea which it is. But I'd like to know, but maybe there are two camps, the reality-based people who understand that we are loosing but they are lying to u [sic] and then there's the delusional wing.

(I doubt Begala would have used similar language in 1998, but that's a whole 'nother post or two.)

To tie this in with two of our earlier posts today, those who deploy the chickenhawk slur should, based on its own internal pretzel logic, agree with someone who's actually been to Iraq recently and seen it with his own eyes.

But they won't--and that's merely the begining of the chasm-like disconnect that separates what Ryan Sager dubbed the Hyperbolic Opposition, and the rest of the country.

National Review Online has an interview with Fred Siegel on Rudy Giuliani. Siegel has just written a new book titled The Prince Of The City: Giuliani, New York And The Genius Of American Life. (Full disclosure: his son Harry edits The New Partisan, where I contribute from time to time):

NRO: You refer to Gotham as a once-great city. It's not anymore? Who do we blame?

Siegel: When I refer to once-great, I'm talking about the early 1990s when under Mayor David Dinkins there were six murders a day, Gotham with 3 percent of the country's population had lost 25 percent of the jobs eliminated in the recession, 60 percent of the city population wanted to leave, it seemed the underclass had won, and just asking for a cup of coffee at a luncheonette could get you a fat lip. And if that weren't bad enough when a cop tangled with a drug dealer setting off a riot by drug dealers in Washington Heights, Mayor Dinkins sided with the drug dealer. You can't make this up

NRO: If you had to explain the Rudy crime cleanup to the uninitiated, what would be the basic sum-up?

Siegel: Giuliani's extraordinary success in reducing crime was based on one key insight and one key innovation. The first embodied in "Broken Windows" policing is that if you police the small crime you'll also capture the big criminals. When the city cracked down on people who jumped the subway turnstiles they found that one in seven had an outstanding felony warrant or a weapon. Then what kept the success going was COMPSTAT, the computer mapping of the daily crime reports. In the bad old days, statistics were egghead stuff the police looked at six months after the fact. But now the police used up-to-the minute statistics to map their tactics on a day-to-day basis. That meant that if there were a lot of drug arrests on Avenue B in the East Village on Monday, the police were ready on Tuesday to move on Avenues A and C where the dealers were likely to have moved.

NRO: How damaging were scandals like the Abner Louima case to Rudy, the NYPD, the city?

Siegel: In the long run, the scandals didn't have a marked effect. But they did produce an hysteria that led upstanding liberals to insist that they were more afraid of the NYPD than they were of criminals

NRO: Did David Dinkins REALLY dismiss crime reduction by saying, "[T]here was no crime in Nazi Germany?"

Siegel: Yes, Dinkins believed in the "root causes theory of crime." He didn't think that the police could have much effect, so when embarrassed by Giuliani's successes in not only reducing crime but reducing police violence as well, he responded with hyperbole

NRO: What's a "hard-edged moderate"?

Siegel: A "hard-edged moderate" (or immoderate centrist, and angry optimist as I sometimes describe him) is a man of sharply contradictory characteristics. Giuliani, for instance is a self-promoting, self-absorbed man who made his own enormous ego serve the city's well being. He ran his government with a Kennedy-like band-of-brothers assumption that those outside his circle couldn't be trusted. But he placed this tribal ethos in the service of universal ideals that transcended the traditional parochialism of New York's ethnic politics. He was the traditionalist who promoted the virtues of service, duty, and hard work so evident on 9/11, but he was sometimes unable to honor those values in his personal life."

NRO: Could Rudy have made it as a Mets fan?

Siegel: Never, a guy like Giuliani who kept score, pitch by pitch, as if he was managing the Yankees, would have been driven mad by the Mets' sloppy play.

NRO: Why can't I help but call him Rudy?

Siegel: Like great mayors before him, Giuliani was a larger-than-life figure. When he entered a room his fans would shout ROOODEE, ROOODEE, as if he were coming to bat.

Read the rest for Seigel's thoughts on whether or not Rudy will be coming to bat in 2008.

Ryan Sager writes that "For those who have supported the war all along--or at least want to see us win--it's sad not to have a loyal opposition to help keep the administration honest":

There's an important debate to be had in this country about just how far we're willing to go in our interrogations. But it's a difficult debate to even get started when one side thinks that we should be extremely concerned with the possibility that someone, somewhere might have desecrated the Korans of the people responsible for the murders of Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, Fabrizio Quattrocchi, three-thousand Americans and now hundreds upon hundreds of Iraqi civilians.

Read the rest.

USA Today actually seems surprised that Vietnam vets in Iraq aren't making the same shopwarn cliched comparisons to the LBJ era that reporters in Iraq are making:

If there are parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, these graying soldiers and the other Vietnam veterans serving here offer a unique perspective. They say they are more optimistic this time: They see a clearer mission than in Vietnam, a more supportive public back home and an Iraqi population that seems to be growing friendlier toward Americans.

"In Vietnam, I don't think the local population ever understood that we were just there to help them," says Chief Warrant Officer James Miles, 57, of Sioux Falls, S.D., who flew UH-1H Hueys in Vietnam from February 1969 to February 1970. And the Vietcong and North Vietnamese were a tougher, more tenacious enemy, he says. Instead of setting off bombs outside the base, they'd be inside.

"I knew we were going to lose Vietnam the day I walked off the plane," says Miles, who returned home this month after nearly a year in Iraq. Not this time. "There's no doubt in my mind that this was the right thing to do," he says.

Someone alert Tom Harkin!

(Via Tech Central Station, which has this blurb attached to the link: "Those darn Vietnam Vets... why won't they compare Iraq to Vietnam?")

Not surprisingly, given that it's his industry, Roger L. Simon has some thoughts on why Hollywood's box office is down this year. Be sure to read the often extremely interesting comments as well underneath.

When my wife and I saw Batman Begins this past weekend, I was surprised at how awful the trailers looked--especially since, if you can't make the trailers look good, the films that they're promoting are no doubt even more dreadful.

The trailers I recall seeing included:

The Dukes of Hazzard: Yet another bad '70s remake. Let's make fun of rednecks!

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: On one level, it must have sounded can't miss on paper--Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka. But have you seen its trailer? It's Johnny Depp as fey androgynous '70s rock star as Willy Wonka! Where have you gone Gene Wilder? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

The New World: Like Punxsutawney Phil coming out and seeing his shadow--or maybe Bigfoot and Elvis--it's time for this decade's Terrence Malick sighting. Now with two-thirds more leftwing guilt over Europe colonizing America and supplanting the Indians Native Americans!

Stealth: Artificially intelligent US fighter plane runs amok. It made a better Star Trek episode when it starred Dr. Richard Daystrom and M-5.

As William Goldman once said, every Oscar night you look back and realize that last year was the worst year in the history of Hollywood. But it's even more painful to watch a series of trailers for movies yet to be released and wonder...how on earth did these films get greenlighted?

This editorial just has to be a cry for attention from a Seattle television reporter looking to make a name for himself as a sort of kamikaze figure shot down in flames by incoming Blogospheric flak.

In other words, it's just begging to be fisked.

Perhaps because Chicago's Mayor Daley came out against him, Senator Durbin has attempted to apologize again. Ed Morrissey says that it's better than the first one--and he's right--but it still contains these weasel words:

"Some may believe that my remarks crossed the line," the Illinois Democrat said. "To them I extend my heartfelt apologies."

Morrssey writes:

At least this is an apology, instead of a "statement of regret". However tearfully delivered, though, it still contains qualifiers that shift the responsibility to everyone but Durbin. "Some may believe that my remarks crossed the line, and to them I extend my heartfelt apologies."

No, no, no.

Your remarks did cross the line, Senator. Why can't you just admit that, without qualification? This is yet another halfway dodge in putting the onus onto those whom you offended instead of taking responsibility for your own actions and comments.

Color me unimpressed. His fellow party members will now ask us all to move along. I'll consider doing that if they now will admit that Durbin's original statement slandered the military and debased the memories of those millions of victims that truly experienced what genocidal maniacs do with their innocent captives. If not, then they are just playing word games until they discover the right combination to climb out of the box in which Durbin has put them.

Somehow, the left has to move beyond the rhetoric of the Class of '72. Unfortunately, the outrage over Durbin's remarks won't do it alone.

Update: Ian Schwartz has video of Durbin's attempted apology.

Another Update: Rusty Shackleford, after thinking it over, accepts Durbin's apology.

More: Glenn Reynolds has an additional round-up of links, and be sure to checkout this stinging retort from Will Collier of VodkaPundit.

Glenn Reynolds (who was kind enough to link this post earlier today.) has been tracking over the past couple of days the first attempt at building a spacecraft that's long been the dream of science fiction enthusiasts: a solar sailer:

In an effort to promote space exploration, a private group plans today to launch the first spacecraft to sail in Earth orbit on the solar wind.

If successful, the mission will provide scientific proof for a concept that has captivated science fiction for decades - that ships can travel great distances across the heavens under the power of giant solar sails nudged by the faint energy of light itself.

Glenn notes today that its had a successful launch. As he says, "So far, so good."

For our look at earlier, slightly more brute force-style spacecraft, click here.

Update: The solar sailing mission may have entered its quagmire phase...

UPI reports that obscenities have ended the LA Times' wiki project:

The Los Angeles Times has ended an experiment that let readers rewrite editorials on its Web site after pornographic pictures were posted on the site.

The project began Friday and was cut off early Sunday when obscene pictures and words were found on the site, the Times reported Tuesday.

It said the so-called "wikitorial" project could return at some future time.

"As long as we can hit a high standard and have no risk of vandalism, then it is worth having a try at it again," Los Angeles Times Interactive General Manager Rob Barrett said.

The publication last Friday allowed readers to rewrite its lead editorials using "wiki" technology, by which many people can write on a single Web page. Some 1,000 users signed up.

Even early messages were often obscenity-laced, the Times said.

Jim Wales, who founded "Wikipedia," volunteered to monitor the process but logged off about midnight Saturday. By 4 a.m. Sunday, pornographic pictures had been posted on the site, leading administrators to suspend the project.

The L.A. Times itself reports:

Within hours one user had managed to change the headline on several pages to read "F*** USA". Editors scrambled to remove the offensive headline, but lost some readers' comments at the same time.

But the number of "inappropriate" posts soon began to overwhelm the editors' ability to monitor the site and on Sunday they decided to remove the feature.

Earlier this month, as Patrick Ruffini noted, at least one liberal blogger chided many conservative blogs for not having comments after their posts. The L.A. Times' Wiki experiment is reason number 328,281 why we don't have them--and their experience was one that virtually everyone (who works outside of the L.A. Times' offices) could have spotted coming a mile away.)

Forbes looks at a new biography of Paul Desmond, who played Sancho Panza to Dave Brubeck's Don Quixote. Their review is titled, "Better Than A Dry Martini" (Is that even possible?):

In 1959 the quartet recorded an album featuring a song in 5/4, a time signature not commonly used in jazz. The co-author of that enduring hit, "Take Five," was the band's alto sax player, Paul Desmond, who is now the subject of a lavish, beautifully produced, large-format biography by Doug Ramsey called Take Five (Parkside Publications, $44.95).

Throughout his career, Desmond was a fount of melody. His trademark sound and laid-back swing--he said he wanted to sound like a dry martini--hinted at the influence of tenor saxophone master Lester Young, a tendency shared by many white saxophonists of the time. Desmond thrived at medium tempos, separating him from the mass of saxophonists ripping through bebop chord changes in the wake of Charlie Parker. Even Parker was a fan, and Desmond topped magazine polls at a time when that counted for something. Ramsey's book avoids most of the negative press criticism of Brubeck (and of Desmond), but behind the praise for Desmond there was often the suggestion that he was too good for Brubeck, an altogether less subtle musician.

But Desmond fell for Brubeck early and hard.

Read the rest. Because Time Out, the album that featured "Take Five" and Brubeck's other classic, "Blue Rondo A La Turk", sold in such hugh numbers, it wasn't initially appreciated by many of Brubeck's contemporaries in the jazz world, but it's now seen as one of the great touchstones of 1950s cool jazz.

With Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise's new version of The War of the Worlds set to open later this week, John J. Miller writes that H.G. Wells, its original author, "was a sci-fi pioneer, but his political ideas were abominable":

Wells, for his part, was often appallingly wrong. "Human history is in essence a history of ideas," he once wrote. That may be, but Wells flirted with the worst ideas of his time. After interviewing Lenin, Wells called him "creative" and described communism as the best hope for reforming Russia. The man simply never met a collectivist movement that didn't intrigue him. "There is good in these Fascists," he said of Italians in 1927. "There is something brave and well-meaning about them." He despised Catholicism and mocked Jewish traditions as "nonsense." It was for views such as these that George Orwell delivered a blunt verdict in 1941: "Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany."

Orwell also was referring to the utopianism that distinguished so much of what Wells wrote. Whereas the author of "Animal Farm" and "1984" possessed a keen sense of how and why totalizing states go badly wrong, Wells was constantly drawing up plans for ideal societies driven by rationalist principles and governed by high-minded elites. This could lead to bizarre results: In "Men Like Gods," Wells envisioned a scheme of eugenic reproduction and centralized planning so perfect (in his mind) that everybody went shamelessly nude.

Defending this particular notion, Wells commented that the practice of wearing clothes was a silly taboo. He certainly had little patience for sexual mores. Admirers have hailed Wells as a proto-feminist, but he was more accurately an advocate of free love--a doctrine that typically benefits men who shirk their duties. As it happened, Wells treated the women in his life shabbily. He cheated on his wives and impregnated his mistresses.

Maybe he was just acting on Darwinian impulses. Wells was in fact a strident devotee of the evolutionary creed, which he learned from the biologist T.H. Huxley at the Normal School. "The War of the Worlds" is best interpreted as an aggressive statement of what C.S. Lewis called "Wellsianity"--the promotion of materialistic science as true faith. The moral of the story may be found in the novel's first sentence, which describes the sobering reality of "intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as our own." Humans aren't noble creatures of God, but animal feed for hungry Martians. If we are to go on living, it isn't for any purpose greater than "the sake of the breed" (as one character says in a late chapter).

At least Wells didn't let the Martians get away with their dastardly plot. They fall victim to disease spread by bacteria, which Wells called "the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon the earth." The author of these words would have profited from a little more humility himself. We should be grateful that he left his imprint on the science-fiction genre, and almost nowhere else.

He wasn't the only British proto-technophile to also be a political radical. Last week, I Googled to find the name of the man who uttered a famous quote to give credit when I paraphrased it in this post. I found the Wikipedia page of early 20th century British geneticist and evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane, which had this staggeringly naive paragraph:

Haldane was himself a very idealistic man, and in his youth was a devoted Communist and author of many articles in The Daily Worker. Events in the Soviet Union, such as the rise of the anti-Mendelian agronomist Trofim Lysenko and the crimes of Stalin, caused him to break with the Communist Party later in life. He joined the Communist party in 1937 but left in 1950, shortly after having toyed with standing for Parliament as a Communist Party candidate.

Hard to believe, of course, that 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall that the author of that Wikipedia page could still equate communism and idealism in a single sentence with a straight face without some sort of additional rationalization.

For more on a similar topic, but brought up to date, check out this post on The Volkh Conspiracy, where Clayton Cramer writes, "nothing has really changed; academics are overwhelmingly on the side of totalitarian thugs throughout the world".

The Wall Street Journal has an essay by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge with a distinct "win one for the Gipper" tone:

The left has reached the same level of fury that the right reached in the 1960s--but with none of the intellectual inventiveness. On everything from Social Security to foreign policy to economic policy, it is reduced merely to opposing conservative ideas. This strategy may have punctured the Bush reforms on Social Security, but it has also bared a deeper weakness for the left. In the 1960s, the conservative movement coalesced around several simple propositions--lower taxes, more religion, an America-first foreign policy--that eventually revolutionized politics. The modern left is split on all these issues, between New Democrats and back-to-basics liberals.

The biggest advantage of all for conservatives is that they have a lock on the American dream. America is famously an idea more than a geographical expression, and that idea seems to be the province of the right. A recent Pew Research Center Survey, "Beyond Red Versus Blue," shows that the Republicans are more optimistic, convinced that the future will be better than the past and that they can determine their own futures. Democrats, on the other hand, have a European belief that "fate," or, in modern parlance, social circumstances, determines people's lot in life. (And judging by some recent series in newspapers on the subject, the party appears to have staunch allies in American newsrooms at least.)

If the American dream means anything, it means finding a plot of land where you can shape your destiny and raise your children. Those pragmatic dreamers look ever more Republican. Mr. Bush walloped Mr. Kerry among people who were married with children. He also carried 25 of the top 26 cities in terms of white fertility. Mr. Kerry carried the bottom 16. San Francisco, the citadel of liberalism, has the lowest proportion of people under 18 in the country (14.5%).

So cheer up conservatives. You have the country's most powerful political party on your side. You have control of the market for political ideas. You have the American dream. And, despite your bout of triste post coitum, you are still outbreeding your rivals. That counts for more than the odd setback in the Senate.

Indeed.

James Lileks on Woody Allen:

Saturday night I stayed up very late and watched “Annie Hall” and “Anything Else,” two Woody Allen movies on the HD feed. Instructive, and a little depressing. Long –time Bleatniks (sorry) will recall how much I love certain Woody Allen films, but find the bulk of his later work labored and mannered beyond redemption. Of course, I should be so lucky as to make 30 money-losing films. Still, I do not understand the uncritical response of his fans – maybe because I am still a fan myself. “Annie Hall” works for a variety of reasons – the exceptional cinematographer, the canny editor, the (AHEM) co-writer, the loose structure that makes the story a journey of constant discovery. It’s such a strong movie it even survives the Dreaded Animation Sequence. I first saw the movie alone in Iowa City, and it was like Star Wars: this is for me. This one goes right to the pith of the gist of the marrow of me. O to be a neurotic amusing nebbish incapable of dealing with California. O to live in a world where literary allusions hang from everyone’s lips like bait from fishhooks. O to have been a little boy in New York in the 40s with Aggressively Ethnic Parents. Of the great films of the 70s, it’s in my top five. I love that movie.

“Anything Else” is “Annie Hall” c. 2004, but Allen’s powers have deserted him; it’s empty, tired, mannered, unfunny, and the actors are not so much “directed” as they are poked around by a long stick with a vinegar-soaked sponge lashed to the end. His hero is a young comedy writer who never says anything particularly funny, and who lives in a gigantic apartment while he avoids writing a novel. His girlfriend is Christina Ricci, a girl who has all of Annie Hall’s neurotic tics with none of the charm or heart. Woody plays a cynical, slightly paranoid schoolteacher who stammers advice to the hero while they walk around the park. On and on it goes. Young people in analysis who talk about Dostoevsky - it’s a parody of Woody Allen, and the only reason it got some good notices had to do with the reviewer’s relief that Grandpa Woodman did not play the romantic lead. Having him paw Ms. Ricci would put the “Paw” in paw, frankly. It’s depressing to watch a movie and realize that a parody of modern Woody Allen would be funnier than a Woody Allen movie on almost any level, since the parodists probably couldn’t resist the opportunity to be honestly funny and interesting, two things Allen can’t do anymore. No one dares tell him.

“Sweet and Lowdown” is next. Like I say: I’m a fan.

He's more of a fan than I am--I loved Woody Allen (for much of the same reasons that Lileks did) right up until Manhattan Murder Mystery. (To follow up on Lileks' "Ahem", not coicidentally, it shares the same co-writer and co-star as Annie Hall.) After that, his touch seemed to ooze away from him, film by film. I TiVo-ed Anything Else last month and couldn't make it past the first ten minutes. And while Sweet And Lowdown is a much better film (I saw it in the theater with my wife), it's lumbered with one big problem: that foreign affairs correspondent from the San Francisco Chronicle that Allen disconcertingly chose as his lead.

Writing in Tech Central Station, Adam Thierer of the CATO Institute contrasts the late 1990s-era fears of a Big Media Boogeyman with the current malaise of the MSM:

OK, now let's flash-forward to the present. What a difference a few years makes. Today's headlines about the media industry all scream one consistent message: Traditional media providers and outlets are in big trouble. A recent issue of The Wilson Quarterly featured a cover story / symposium on "The Collapse of Big Media." The Christian Science Monitor recently ran a story entitled, "Newspapers Struggle to Avoid Their Own Obit," which was ironic since the CSM is currently undergoing major changes and is rumored to be considering a switch to an all Internet-based format. In an editorial entitled "Death to the Networks," Broadcasting & Cable magazine posits that several of the traditional TV networks may be extinct within the next few years.

What has happened over the past few years to lead to such a stunning reversal of fortunes for traditional media? The Age of Scarcity has given way to the Age of Abundance. The code words for our new media environment are customization, personalization, choice, competition, and, above all, abundance. Citizens now enjoy more news and entertainment options than at any other point in American history or human civilization.

These developments were well underway when the AOL-Time Warner deal and the FCC ownership revisions were announced, but many still feared that the old media giants would just buy up everything in sight and stifle the new forms of competition and choice. That fanciful scenario never developed, of course. Indeed, since the time of AOL-Time Warner, old media operators have done a stunning about-face and engaged in DE-consolidation maneuvers to get back to basics and salvage some value out of deals gone wrong. As a result, beyond the gradual disintegration of AOL-Time Warner, we have seen divestiture moves or spin-off proposals by many large media operators over the past year, including: Viacom, Clear Channel, Disney, Emmis Commnications, Liberty Media, and Cablevision just to name a few.

In some cases, the "synergies" that many media operators hoped for simply did not develop. In other cases, technological change and the rapid evolution of the media marketplace overtook them and nullified any advantages that might have been gained from the mergers.

Regardless, this is an example of a well-functioning, dynamic marketplace at work. Media critics seem to think that any merger or acquisition is all just part of some sort of grand conspiracy to destroy democracy or competition, but in the end, things sort themselves out and we end up with an ever-expanding universe of media options at our disposal. Indeed, ask yourself a simple question: Do you have more media options and outlets at your disposal today than you did 5 to 10 years ago?

Unarguably.

Guess who said this:

"I call on those who question the motives of the president and his national security advisors to join with the rest of America in presenting a united front to our enemies abroad."

--Senator Dick Durbin, in 1998, defending then-President Bill Clinton, when he attacked Iraq.

But then, he wasn't the only one saying such things back then.

Update: Instalanche! Welcome Glenn Reynolds readers, as well as those of the several other blogs who have trackbacked to this post.

Another Update: Via James Taranto, here is the full quote from a press release issued by Senator Durbin on December 17th, 1998:

Read More »

Trey Jackson has managed to intercept a copy of a letter sent to Amnesty International from a real gulag.

Someone alert Dick Durbin!

Writing, staggeringly enough, in the L.A. Times, David Gelernter looks at how America's culture war is impacting our kids' knowledge of history--or lack thereof:

I was amazed to hear about teenagers who don't know Fact 1 about the Vietnam War draft. But I have met college students who have never heard of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge — the genocidal monsters who treated Cambodia in the 1970s to a Marxist nightmare unequaled in its bestiality since World War II.

And I know college students who have heard of President Kennedy but not of anything he ever did except get assassinated. They have never heard JFK's inaugural promise: that America would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to ensure the survival and the success of liberty." But President Bush remembers that speech, and it's lucky he does.

To forget your own history is (literally) to forget your identity. By teaching ideology instead of facts, our schools are erasing the nation's collective memory. As a result, some "expert" can go on TV and announce (20 minutes into the fighting) that Afghanistan, Iraq or wherever "is the new Vietnam" — and young people can't tell he is talking drivel.

There is an ongoing culture war between Americans who are ashamed of this nation's history and those who acknowledge with sorrow its many sins and are fiercely proud of it anyway. Proud of the 17th century settlers who threw their entire lives overboard and set sail for religious freedom in their rickety little ships. Proud of the new nation that taught democracy to the world. Proud of its ferocious fight to free the slaves, save the Union and drag (lug, shove, sweat, bleed) America a few inches closer to its own sublime ideals. Proud of its victories in two world wars and the Cold War, proud of the fight it is waging this very day for freedom in Iraq and the whole Middle East.

If you are proud of this country and don't want its identity to vanish, you must teach U.S. history to your children. They won't learn it in school. This nation's memory will go blank unless you act.

"Not knowing history is worse than ignorance of math, literature or almost anything else", Gelernter writes, and he's dead-on. "Ignorance of history is undermining Western society's ability to talk straight and think straight. Parents must attack the problem by teaching their own children the facts. Only fools would rely on the schools."

Or the L.A. Times, of course.

Update (7/17/06): The full text of Gelernter's article has scrolled off the L.A. Times' site, but is still (at least for now) available at Jewish World Review.

Saw an afternoon showing of Batman Begins on Sunday. Short synopsis: as a fan of Batman ever since I was a kid, all I can say is that this is the film they should have made all along.

Well of course, that's not all I can say. Long, uber-geeky synopsis? I thought the pacing was just a tad slack, and the last act rather formulaic. (The heavy attempts to poison Gotham's water supply. Wasn't that the last act of the first Batman, with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson?) Batman slugs it out with said heavy on Gotham's "L", just as Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus fought on Manhattan's "L" last year. (But Manhattan doesn't have...I know, I know. Don't blame me, blame Sam Raimi.)

But of course it's going to be formulaic. Heck, Batman itself is pretty formulaic: we know Batman's core backstory pretty darn well by now: millionaire parents murdered, gunned down in front of a theater with young Bruce Wayne watching. Bruce decides to use the symbol of a bat to strike fear into the hearts of criminals. (Besides, Rabbitman or Grasshopperman would have been too silly.) Faithful family butler Alfred willing to assist. Discovers cave under mansion, decides to build crime laboratory there. Arms himself with more gadgets than James Bond. Gotham's underworld is never the same.

Like a bag of Tinkertoy parts, the trick of course, is assembling those elements in unique ways. Christopher Nolan begins his take on Batman by cross-cutting between Bruce as a child, and Bruce as an adult in the Himalayas, where's he's undergoing training vaguely reminiscent of David Carradine's mystical flashbacks in Kung Fu, but with extra added black-clad Ninjas for additional danger and mayhem, and an ultimately well-cast Liam Neeson as his mysterous mentor.

In the comics, Bruce's father was always a successful doctor, but here, he's a zillionaire philanthropist who's inherited his wealth, and both using it to help Gotham during "The Depression", and also working as a doctor on the side, as another way to do good. Based on Bruce's Age and when his father was gunned down, The Depression would have been around the Carter years. Or maybe the Ford years, prompting that famous New York Post headline, "FORD TO GOTHAM: DROP DEAD".

To help the citizens of Gotham, Bruce's dad has built a spectacular overhead monorail, which makes Seattle's or Disney World's look like an HO-scale toy. In the flashbacks, it's pristine, shiny and brand new, but these days, it looks like the 1974-era New York Subway, with cars covered inside and out with graffiti.

Fortunately, Bruce returns from the Himalayas, finds Morgan Freeman working in the basement of Wayne Enterprises, hires him to play the same role that "Q" plays in the James Bond movies, and is off to clean up the streets of Gotham--which look remarkably like the streets of Chicago, since that's where much of the film's urban landscape was shot. (I'm pretty sure I recognized One Illinois Center at 111 Whacker Drive, one of Mies van der Rohe's last office buildings. Gotham's homeless are apparently living under it.)

Rather than Pat Hingle or Neil Hamilton's distinguished and graying veteran police Commissioner Gordon, Batman's aided by young police detective James Gordon, played in remarkably subdued fashion by a mustachioed Gary Oldman, who really does look like a younger version of the comic books' Commissioner Gordon.

He's also aided by Michael Caine's as Alfred, doesn't look much like the comic books' balding 40- or 50-something Alfred, but who does look exactly the same age in the flashbacks with the young Bruce Wayne and his parents as he does in the present, but we're not supposed to notice that. But then, lots of people age very differently in the comics and the movies than they do in real life: Batman has been 35 for nearly 70 years, and James Bond has been 40 for almost 45 years, right?

Besides the film's occasionally languid pacing, if there's a weak link to Batman Begins, it's Katie Holmes as a crusading assistant district attorney: when you make Angie Harmon's Law & Order character more believable as a D.A., you know you're in trouble. Holmes was the one actor in Batman Begins who I never bought.

Beyond that, this is a well cast, well conceived updating of the Batman legend, and at a bare minimum, it's a great popcorn movie. My wife, whose idea of Batman is Adam West and Michael Keaton, loved it. And needless to say, so did I. And to bring this post full circle, when I was a kid, whether it was Adam West's campy Batman, or the darker, tougher Batman of the early 1970s, Batman was my superhero.

It took a long time, but Hollywood finally got him right.

Hopefully they won't blow it again too badly when the sequels begin.

Roger L. Simon (found via Instapundit, who has additional links) is wondering whether or not the Democrats are breeding a new generation of Father Coughlins, adding "that's what it sounds like in the wake of the meeting chaired by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, once a revered civil rights leader". That meeting was a mock impeachment trial that Conyers chaired. But that schtick is actually nothing new for Conyers and the left, as Brent Bozell noted a few years ago:

In 1983, Clinton defender John Conyers called for Reagan's impeachment for invading Grenada. (For good measure, he earlier called for impeachment over the Gipper's alleged "incompetence" in dealing with unemployment.) In 1984, as he ran for President, and again in 1986, Jesse Jackson suggested Reagan should be subject to an impeachment probe over U.S. actions in Nicaragua. Rep. Henry Gonzalez called for impeachment in 1983 over Grenada and again in 1987 over Iran-Contra. The National Organization for Women and the American Civil Liberties Union advocated impeaching Reagan in 1987.

Glenn Reynolds writes that the new generation of Father Coughlins "was bred 40 years ago; it's just reaching maturity now". Sadly, he's right on both counts.

Mark Steyn is really knows how to punch those keys--especially when given a subject like Sen. Dick Durbin. Durbin is the Democrat's Senator from Illinois, and the following essay appears in today's Chicago Sun Times:

Throughout the last campaign season, senior Democrats had a standard line in their speeches, usually delivered with righteous anger, about how "nobody has a right to question my patriotism!" Given that nobody was questioning their patriotism, it seemed an odd thing to harp on about. But, aware of their touchiness on the subject, I hasten to add that in what follows I am not questioning Dick Durbin's patriotism, at least not for the first couple of paragraphs. Instead, I'll begin by questioning his sanity.

Steyn's just getting warmed up, adding "give Durbin credit" though:

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James Lileks has a Roddenberry-inspired solution to the War On Terror:

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Senator Dick Durbin (D-Il) says he's sorry--sorry if you took offense at his words:

"I have learned from my statement that historical parallels can be misused and misunderstood. I sincerely regret if what I said caused anyone to misunderstand my true feelings: Our soldiers around the world and their families at home deserve our respect, admiration and total support."

Of course--Durbin showed his respect, admiration and total support by comparing them to Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.

As Ed Morrissey notes, Durbin's latest spin is cloaked in classic non-apology apology weasel language:

Note that he doesn't retract a word of what he said. He says that he regrets if others misunderstood his "true feelings", not that what he said was wrong and historically inept. Basically, this is the translation one is meant to hear:

I'm sorry you were too stupid to understand me.

If this is the best that Durbin can do after comparing the men and women of our armed forces to Nazis and Stalin's goons, as well as comparing Islamofascist terrorists to Japanese-American victims of WWII detention centers, then he's a bigger idiot than I thought.

Will Collier calls Durbin "A Window On The Moonbat Soul":

A confession: I'm having a hard time getting worked up over Dick Durbin.

Yes, what he said was indefensible and stupid, but Durbin's never been anything but a party machine hack, and few senators on either side of the aisle are often described as "intelligent." Yes, the statement itself is destructive nonsense destined to be endlessly recycled in propaganda from the al-Jazeeras and New York Timeses of the world, and one would hope that a high-ranking US senator would know better, but then again, this is Dickie Durbin we're talking about. It's not really that surprising when you consider the source.

Durbin's Nazi-Soviet-Khmer-Rouge ramble was probably only tossed out as a bit of red meat (or perhaps deep-fried Vegan tofu) for the MooreOn donations crowd. I've no doubt that he and the DSCC have been raking in leftie money over the last couple of days. They'll need it--since what Durbin's dumb rant really accomplished was demonstrating to everybody else just how unserious the Democratic Party is when it comes to dealing with terrorism.

As Patrick Ruffini noted, it does seem strange that the left are chosing to argue from a position of weakness. However, like the already detracted "Piss Koran" story in Newsweek, what matters less is how it's playing in America, versus the damage that all of this is causing via the Middle East press.

Last year, when I visited New Orleans, I picked up a copy of the second volume of Ian Kershaw's mammoth two-part biography of Adolf Hitler, which covers from 1936 to 1945 (they didn't have volume one for sale, in case you're wondering) at the National D-Day Museum. Kershaw writes that it was during the battle of Stalingrad, which killed well over 300,000 German soldiers, that the first signs of Germany's discontent with Hitler were spotted. Here's how the Nazis handled that rebellion:

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In an interesting comparison between two superstar legal battles separated by over a century of time, Scott McLemee in The New Partisan examines the Oscar Wilde and Michael Jackson trials.

John Hawkins has "A List Of Some Of The Most Embarrassing Quotes To The MSM".

The last one is a doozy, incidentally.

Jonah Goldberg wonders why during the current hysteria over Guantanamo Bay, no one has brought up the names of Louis Pepe or Mamdouh Mahmud Salim:

Salim, a reputed top lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, was being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a high security federal jail in lower Manhattan. Pepe was a guard there. On November 1, 2000, Salim plunged a sharpened comb into Pepe's left eye and three inches into his brain. Salim and a compatriot also beat Pepe savagely, in their effort to get the guard's keys and orchestrate an escape for himself and two fellow terrorists awaiting trial. Believing Pepe was dead, the attackers used his own blood to paint a Christian cross on his torso. Pepe was an experienced correctional officer, a member of the elite MCC Enforcers Disturbance Control, and he weighed in at 300 pounds. He survived the attack with brain damage, crippling disabilities, and an unending stream of surgeries.

The reason Pepe and Salim are relevant should be obvious. There are good guys and bad guys in this story, and as much as it pains some to hear it, we are the good guys. We are not talking about confused teenagers caught up in events larger than themselves. We aren't talking about mistaken identities. We're talking about the cream of our enemy's crop in the war on terror.

Meanwhile, via VodkaPundit, Rusty Shackleford has a graphic reminder--and it is very graphic--of what real torture looks like. Hint: it doesn't involve air conditioners or Christina Aguilera songs.

Maybe somebody should email that link to Dick Durbin's office.

Update: Speaking of Durbin, Hugh Hewitt's producer Duane Patterson writes:

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Betsy Newmark gives us a sneak preview of how the media would treat a Mitt Romney presidential candidacy:

No one would attack him explicitly on his religion. That would be too crass. Instead, the media would run human interest stories on the history of the Mormon church, warts and all. We'd read again about Joseph Smith getting the word from the Angel Maroni with the Book of Mormon on golden plates. We'd learn about the persecution suffered by the early Mormons and the assassination of Joseph Smith and how Brigham Young led the Mormons across the country to Utah. Vivid stories of the Mountain Meadow Massacre would appear on the History Channel. The history of Mormons and polygamy would be introduced in segments on the evening news as well as the fact that the Mormons allowed black ministers only in 1978 and women in 1984. Newsweek and Time would have cover stories looking at the tenets of the Mormon religion with special attention to baptism of dead ancestors, their lack of belief in the Trinity, their conviction that God has a physical body, and their condemnation of homosexuality. All this will be presented in the same self-satisfied anthropological tone that the MSM uses to talk about most religious people today. And then every time Romney goes on a Sunday talk show like Meet the Press, he'll get a series of questions asking him to defend the history of the Mormon Church and whether or not he believes in every controversial tenet of the religion. He'll get questions that no one would ever ask an Orthodox Jew like Joe Lieberman or a Catholic like John Kerry or a Protestant like Gore, Clinton, or Bush.

Then the media will have their own navel-gazing shows on CNN and Fox or in self-examining symposia on C-Span and ask if it's "really appropriate" for the media to be questioning a political candidate on his religious beliefs. They'll make disapproving noises, condemn themselves, but ultimately, they'll go on doing the same thing. Just like they tut-tut their coverage of the Michael Jackson trial, but just can't stop themselves from doing it night after night. Because, they'll say "you know, his religion really is a political issue." After all, if it weren't a political issue, the media wouldn't be talking about it, would they? The circularity of this argument will elude them.

Read the rest--most of what she's predicting is, sadly, a pretty safe bet.

If you haven't seen Triumph before, he's got Groucho's cigar, Chico's voice, and Rowlf the Muppet's looks. He's not very family-friendly in his language, but very, very funny as he meets and abuses Michael Jackson's supporters standing outside the courthouse. And God knows they deserve it.

(Via The Corner.)

Update: "Poll: Most Say Stars Make Poor Role Models".

I need a poll to tell me this?

At the beginning of last August, with the presidential race in full swing--and about to go into hyperdrive beginning in the following month, we wrote:

'conservative' Republicans, beginning with the Gipper in 1980, and continuing with George W. Bush became the party of dynamic change, and 'liberal' Democrats the keepers of the old order.

No better highlight of this is in the latest Drudge flash, which highlights Speaker of the House Denny Hastert's new book, and his push for the elimination of IRS".

President Bush is going to have lots of fun campaigning in the fall--and it will be equally fun watching Kerry trying to defend the IRS--or adopt a "me too" position--"I'd do it, but I'd do it this way".

At the time, Drudge quoted Hastert as saying:

“If you own property, stock, or, say, one hundred acres of farmland and tax time is approaching, you don’t want to make a mistake, so you’re almost obliged to go to a certified public accountant, tax preparer, or tax attorney to help you file a correct return. That costs a lot of money. Now multiply the amount you have to pay by the total number of people who are in the same boat. You can’t. No one can because precise numbers don’t exist. But we can stipulate that we’re talking about a huge amount. Now consider that a flat tax, national sales tax, or VAT would not only eliminate the need to do this, it could also eliminate the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) itself and make the process of paying taxes much easier."

"By adopting a VAT, sales tax, or some other alternative, we could begin to change productivity. If you can do that, you can change gross national product and start growing the economy. You could double the economy over the next fifteen years. All of a sudden, the problem of what future generations owe in Social Security and Medicare won’t be so daunting anymore. The answer is to grow the economy, and the key to doing that is making sure we have a tax system that attracts capital and builds incentives to keep it here instead of forcing it out to other nations."

Today, the Wall Street Journal notes that Hastert and Dubya weren't kidding about replacing the current tax code:

The next test of whether the party of Nancy Pelosi and Ted Kennedy is capable of anything but obstructionism will come later this summer on tax reform. The President's bipartisan tax reform panel, chaired by former Senators Connie Mack and Mr. Breaux, is expected to launch the debate by proposing some form of flat tax.

Democrats may again try to tar and feather this plan as a giveaway to the rich. But polls show over and over that the broad middle class wants tax simplification and pro-growth reform. And in the past a form of the flat tax was endorsed by such Democratic leaders as Dick Gephardt, Bill Bradley, Jerry Brown and Leon Panetta. They didn't believe the flat tax was such a radical idea. Will the enlightened Democrats sit this debate out too?

Yes--if recent history is any indication.

Like last fall, this coming autumn promises not to be boring for Washington watchers.

John Hawkins has spotted a really interesting trendline in the recent history of the Senate. This Wall Street Journal editorial also helps to explain this trend.

To paraphrase 20th century British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, James Lileks discovers that the Blogosphere is not only stranger than we imagine--it is stranger than we can imagine.

Update: Speaking of a fellow who's stranger than we can possibly imagine, here's Lileks' take on the Michael Jackson verdict and its implications for the rest of the world.

Cassandra of Villainous Company explains "Why I Am A South Park Conservative".

For our interview with South Park Conservatives' author Brian Anderson, click here. For our profile of his book, click here. And for the case against, read Michelle Malkin's piece on whe she isn't a South Park Conservative.

As a follow-up to our post earlier today, to really drive home how things have changed since the 1970s, compare the Bad Old Days with what the average man can easily purchase today.

I review a new biography of Billy Joel over at Blogcritics. Not a great book, but not a bad one either, especially if you're a Joel fan.

During Blogcritics' freewheeling first days, I wrote a piece reviewing Steven Hayward's first volume of The Age of Reagan. Hayward's book focused not as much on Reagan's days prior to the presidency as it did on the state of America in the 1960s and '70s. To sum it up the rough shape that America and its economy was in during that period, I titled my review "The Bad Old Days, Revisited".

But England was in even worse shape during that period, as Mark Steyn describes in his obituary for "Sunny" James Callaghan, Britain's Prime Minister during the late 1970s:

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Actually, it was the trifecta of smears for Senator Dick Durbin (D-Il): not just the now usual complaints from the left that Americans are Nazis, but also Communists as well:

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

Charles Johnson has more details and additional links.

We posted some thoughts by Patrick Ruffini and Jim Geraghty yesterday at who actually is arguing from a position of weakness employing this sort of rhetoric.

I wonder how this Gitmo=Gulag silliness is all playing in the Middle East. Perhaps Al Qaeda and their brethren are that much more scared of actually ending up there. Or maybe they more than anybody can see how idiotic complaints such as these are.

There's big changes afoot in terms of network NFL coverage starting next year: ABC's Monday Night Football will be going to cable's ESPN; NBC returns to broadcasting the NFL with a Sunday night football package, which of course, used to be the exclusive domain of ESPN (and TNT prior to that). It sounds like ESPN may be using their existing Sunday night crew for Monday Night Football--because John Madden is jumping ship to NBC, thanks to what is presumably, a lucrative new contract:

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Stephen Schwartz, who once spent a decade at the San Francisco Chronicle, explains how Senn Penn recently ended up in its pages, "reporting" from Iran:

The first matter worthy of interest was the report that the actor Sean Penn, who has specialized in playing brain-dead stoners, death row convicts, and similar dead-end characters in movies, had been sent to Iran, to "report" -- i.e. journalistically -- on the elections there, for none other than my old paper, the Chronicle.

Well, it turned out that exercise in nonsense was even less significant than it first appeared. According to my sources in the Chronicle newsroom, Phil "I Kick Butt" Bronstein, the paper's cowboy-boot wearing Editor, issued a memo this week assuring his staff that Penn would not be employed as a Chronicle correspondent. Rather, the actor was provided a general credential letter as a potential freelancer, and was encouraged to write diary-style stories that would be carefully evaluated for possible publication. Bronstein, formerly known as "Mr. Sharon Stone," told his staff that Penn, formerly "Mr. Madonna," who made a fool of himself by stumbling around Iraq before the commencement of its liberation, would not be paid a retainer, and that the paper was not looking for political comment from the actor.

This stance was seemingly cautious for the hotheaded Bronstein, best remembered in San Francisco for a donnybrook on the premises of his former newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, in which he broke the foot of a political consultant, Clint Reilly. But Bronstein's efforts to legitimize Penn's adventures are nothing new. The actor returned to Baghdad in 2004, filing dull jottings to the Chronicle describing his progress through various airports and offering fervent endorsements of Medea Benjamin, the long-serving anti-American agitator who heads Global Exchange, a propaganda front for the Castro dictatorship and similar obnoxious regimes. Penn's prose was padded with pedestrian observations about wartorn Iraq. On that occasion also, the inarticulate actor's experiment in journalism benefited from the patronage of Bronstein. But the Chronicle editor, whose chief reportorial achievement was his discovery of her closet full of shoes after Imelda Marcos's husband Ferdy fell from power, apparently came under criticism from the real reporters who work for him, when Penn set off for Iran claiming to represent the paper.

Well that's good to hear. On the opposite coast, I wonder how Andres "Piss Christ" Serrano went over with the reporters for the New York Times when he supplied photos for a story on Abu Ghraib last week--coming after the Times had already run 34 consecutive front cover stories on the topic, ending late in the prior month.

Matt Drudge currently has an above the masthead link to information about a 7.0 earthquake which occurred 90 miles off the coast, near the border between California and Oregon. He seems to be updating his homepage regularly, so click over for more details.

We're close to San Jose, (450 miles south), and needless to say, didn't feel anything. There was a tsunami warning, but it's been canceled.

A sightseeing helicopter crashed into New York's East River today, injuring all seven people onboard. The Gothamist blog has more details, and a scare-inducing photo.

Jim Geraghty and Patrick Ruffini have a great take on the Guantanamo narrative. Patrick writes on who it favors:

Camp X-Ray is about detaining terrorists who want to kill Americans — the al Qaeda kind of terrorists, the September 11th kind of terrorists, the comrades of Atta. Some on the left would like to dismantle Camp X-Ray over some perceived injustices. The injustices? Placing the Koran on top of a television set. (Pity the poor little terrorists.) And what do they propose we do with the friends of Atta? They won't say. Have we forgotten that we are at war with these people? ...

We shouldn't be afraid of making the argument, even when it sounds rough, even when it sounds impolitic, in ways that connect directly to the security of you and your family. That's how you approach debates like Guantanamo and Bolton. The moment you get bogged down in arcane procedural minutae (Is it or is it not a filibuster?) you make it something less than what it is: a referendum on strength or weakness in the war on terror.

With rare exception, Democrats have taken the position of weakness. Oh sure, they can call it what they want: conciliation, negotiation, nuance, understanding, but their basic position is something the public pretty plainly understands and clearly rejected in the elections of 2002 and 2004. As such, we don't need to win the argument all over again when trying to mobilize people over al Qaeda detainees and Bolton: just connect these issues to the narrative of strength and weakness people already feel in their gut.

Meanwhile, Jim Geraghty wonders when--and if--the GOP will have the guts to deploy this argument. The fact that Dick Cheney has already said that Gitmo will remain open seems to be an indication that some variant of it coming eventually.

Incidentally, Ruffini sums up where all this began perfectly:

It's the revenge of Newsweek: from phony story to manufactured crisis, all in less than a few weeks.

All courtesy of the "neutral" legacy media.

Update: Betsy Newmark has some thoughts and additional links.

The original Michael Newdow wanted to take "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance; James Lileks vigorously fisks an equally fatuous fellow who wants to go one better: take the flag out of it as well.

Guitarists unite! I have a review of Peterson's new StroboSoft PC/Mac-based guitar tuner over at Blogcritics.

James Taranto is really on a roll today. Just keep scrolling.

In our piece on the Internet's Long Tail for Tech Central Station, we quoted a pretty nifty line from Jeff Jarvis about Johnny Carson, who had then recently passed away:

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

Hugh Hewitt writes that the breakup of the mass media-dominated culture is only continuing to accelerate:

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It's a schizophrenic life I lead. Also in the mail was a copy of Steven Malanga's The New New Left : How American Politics Works Today:

A new dynamic has sprung up in American politics today: the contest between those who benefit from an ever-expanding public sector and those who pay for this bigger government—in other words, it’s the tax eaters vs. the taxpayers.

Steven Malanga shows how coalitions of public employee unions, workers at government-funded social service organizations, and recipients of government benefits have seized control of the politics of the big cities that make up the heart of Blue America. In New York City, this coalition has helped roll back some of the reforms of the Giuliani years. In California cities and towns, it is thwarting the expansion of private businesses. In nearly 100 municipalities, it has imposed higher costs on tens of thousands of firms by passing "living-wage" laws. Whereas the New Left of the 1960s believed—idealistically, if somewhat naively—that government could solve the biggest problems of our times, this New New Left is much more narrowly and cynically focused on expanding government programs to increase its own power, pay, and perks. And, as Malanga shows, the New New Left is emerging as the most powerful element of the national Democratic Party coalition.

Steve Malanga is a contributing editor of City Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He writes about the intersection of urban economies, business communities, and public policy. Prior to joining City Journal, Malanga was executive editor of Crain’s New York Business for seven years, serving on the publication’s editorial board and writing a weekly column. He also supervised special projects, including investigative stories. Before that, Malanga served for seven years as managing editor of Crain’s.

Cakewalk sent me a review copy of the new Z3TA+ (prounced Zeta) software synthesizer, which was designed by RGC Audio, and is being distributed by Cakewalk. As I did recently with Reason and Project5, I'll try to post a much more detailed review on Blogcritics. Currently, I've only briefly had a chance to play with it, but there are some great sounds here--and tons and tons of nifty sequencer lines that can be enabled. It's very much a "play one note, get ten" sort of instrument.

The Associated Press and Canada's CBC news team up for a great moment in journalism in this article's lead paragraph:

Jackson lawyer says pop star
will no longer share his bed with young boys

04:19 PM EDT Jun 14
TIM MOLLOY

SANTA MARIA, Calif. (AP) - Michael Jackson's website trumpeted his courtroom vindication Tuesday, linking it with such historic events as the birth of Martin Luther King, while his lawyer vowed his client will stop sharing his bed with young boys.

My God.

Ever since I was a teenager living in the Philadelphia suburbs, I always had an affinity for "Dr. J", the great Julius Erving, who was a superstar with the 76ers. In an essay in the Wall Street Journal, the Doctor has high praise for another basketball superstar: Magic Johnson.

Orrin Judd links to a profile that appears in The Australian of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, who have a new history of Mao Tsetung coming out this fall:

"I wanted to get inside his head and understand him because he dominated my life and ruined things for a quarter of the world's population," [Chung] says.

"We thought it would take about two years but as we dug deeper -- like a pair of detectives -- we discovered more and more. We were so constantly surprised [that] we kept going. He killed more people than anyone in history and was as evil as Hitler or Stalin, yet it is astonishing how little the world knows about him."

Mao's portrait still hangs over Tiananmen Square in Beijing, where government leaders proudly present themselves as his heirs, and Western politicians, from Kissinger to former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam, who were so thrilled to visit Mao, have still failed to understand his ghastly nature, she says.

"This is the greatest mass murderer in history, a man we calculate killed at least 70 million people and was prepared to let many, many more die if necessary to pursue his mad policies."

But. You just know the B-word is coming. And sure enough, it appears in a defense of Mao, later in the article:

Philip Short, a British author and journalist who published a book on Mao in 1999, says that Chang and Halliday have come close to a hatchet job. Speaking by telephone from northeastern China, where he is lecturing and conducting further research on Mao, Short says it does nobody any good to exaggerate the obvious monstrosities of Mao.

"I fear this is a case of writing history to fit their own views; doing what the Chinese call cutting the feet to fit the shoes," Short says.

"Mao was ruthless and tyrannical enough in real life that there's no need to reduce him to a cardboard cut-out of Satan. Do we really gain in understanding by denying his complexity, his perversity, his genius and reducing him to a one-dimensional caricature?

"Mao was a tyrant, but [also] much more than that. He was the reverse of a one-dimensional man. He was a great poet, a visionary and, I would argue, a military strategist of genius. He had great skills and enormous failings. Let's not oversimplify and pretend he was just a monster.

As Orrin sardonically writes, "Surely we can all agree that his poetry redeems him. Just like with Hitler’s paintings".

This part of Short's defense of Mao is particularly amusing in a grim sort of way:

The handling of the Great Famine was atrocious but it was not just Mao who cooked it up; almost every other Chinese leader was enthusiastically involved in it. It was not just one man who caused all this pain.

Get that? It's a weird inversion of the Nazis' "I was just following orders" defense at Nuremberg. Mao was giving the orders--but hey, so many others were following them. It was the law of the land, the conventional wisdom. And that makes it OK, right? Who are we to judge?!

Let's reword Short's defense of Mao to see how it would look with a more occidental flavor:

The Final Solution was atrocious but it was not just Hitler who cooked it up; almost every other German leader was enthusiastically involved in it. It was not just one man who caused all this pain.

Or, let's take it to the Russian T-for-terror room:

The handling of the Great Famine was atrocious but it was not just Stalin who cooked it up; almost every other Soviet leader was enthusiastically involved in it. It was not just one man who caused all this pain.

Doesn't quite fly, does it? Hitler and Stalin are seen by most civilized people as the pair of 20th century monsters they were. Hopefully Chang and Halliday's book will help cement Mao's atrocities into most people's minds as equally well.

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When the New York Times isn't hiring a photographer who dips crucifixes into urine to undermine Christianity to illustrate its stories, it's busy trying to undermine those who seek to put fluids of an entirely different sort into your car. Based on a post that first appeared on Will Franklin's Willisms blog, Stephen Spruiell of National Review's new media blog writes:

Times editorial writer Adam Cohen, on assignment to write about “security holes at chemical facilities” for the Times editorial series “An Insecure Nation,” traveled to an ExxonMobil refinery in Chalmette, LA. Cohen wrote that the security holes at this “time bomb” are “glaringly obvious.” As proof, Cohen offered up the following:

On a recent visit to Chalmette Refining, a Times editorial writer had no trouble standing in the nearby park for 15 minutes with a large knapsack.

Cohen neglected to mention that during the 15 minutes he stood around in the nearby park, the refinery’s security personnel and employees had him under surveillance, taking pictures of him with a hand-held camera, and that as Cohen started to leave, a security guard approached Cohen, told him that security had observed him and that he was causing concern. After Cohen told the security guard he was working on a story for the Times, the guard continued to watch Cohen until he drove away.

According to a series of e-mails provided by ExxonMobil spokesman Tom Cirigliano, an ExxonMobil employee wrote to Cohen after the editorial was published and asked him why he had not included these facts in his account.

After a few emails back and forth, the employee finally asked Cohen:

Adam, I am attaching pictures taken in real time during the period that you assumed you were not being observed. While I clearly understand that this was an editorial that ran in your opinion pages, don't facts count in an editorial? Given that the photos (attached below) prove that we observed you within your 15 minute deadline, and that you were directly approached and questioned by our Security Manager, don’t we and your readers deserve a correction/clarification of this report/editorial (emphasis added)?

Spruiell concludes:

Cohen was under observation during his time in the park. Had he started taking pot shots at chemical tanks or trying to climb the fence into the facility, personnel could have seen him and acted.

It would have been easy to include these details in the editorial but it would have weakened the Times’s argument. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that for that reason, and not because the facts were irrelevant, they were omitted.

Since 9/11, the Times (which sets the tone for much of the rest of the MSM) increasingly seems to operating under the Liberty Valance rule of journalism: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend".

Update: Spruiell has since posted photos of Cohen and his satchel or backpack from Exxon's security cameras.

"How angry must Martha Stewart be? She's less likeable than MJ, Robert Blake, and OJ? Or is it just California? Duane suggests that Saddam may be seeking a venue switch to the Golden State."

--Hugh Hewitt on the Michael Jackson verdict.

Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal looks at "Myth and Reality in the EU"--and writes that Europe is better off now that it's rejected the European Union. (Well, at least its voters have rejected it. That doesn't mean that the EU is actually DOA of course, given its Night of the Living Beaurocrats-like refusal to die.)

Insert near daily "Mark Steyn has a terrific piece on..." boilerplate here: this time, it's on the claims that the 21st century will be "The Chinese Century". (Hey, I can remember 15 years ago, when it was supposed to be the Japanese Century. And 10 years prior to that it was going to be the Soviet Century.)

Steyn's title says it all: "Who can stop the rise and rise of China? The communists, of course":

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Daniel Okrent certainly knows when to make an exit. The Times' former ombudsman left just before having to deal with the ramifications of this.

What on earth has gotten into the MSM lately? First the Newsweek Koran in urine fabrication, and then Sean Penn is hired by the San Francisco Chronicle to "report" on Iraq. (I guess Leonardo DiCaprio was still under contract to report for ABC.) And now the New York Times has hired the "artist" responsible for the infamous Piss Christ to illustrate an article on Abu Ghraib and the US military.

So much for big media being more responsible than the Blogosphere. I know all wars are supposed to be Vietnam for the left, but I don't remember reading about the press doing anything like that in the late '60s and early '70s.

The Professor's was spot-on when he said: President Bush's ability to "drive his opponents stark, raving bonkers is almost supernatural".

Update: Hugh Hewitt writes that the MSM would much rather focus on Sean Penn's comings and goings in Iran, than a major religious conference discussing the return of anti-Semitism to Europe.

One of my favorite scenes in 1982's Airplane II: The Sequel starred Lloyd Bridges and Stephen Stucker, who delivered a classic piece of insanity, playing off Bridges' straight-arrow Steve McCroskey character:

McCroskey: Jacobs, I want to know absolutely everything that's happened up till now.

Jacobs: Well, let's see. First the earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came, but they got too big and fat, so they all died and they turned into oil. And then the Arabs came and they bought Mercedes Benzes. And Prince Charles started wearing all of Lady Di's clothes. I couldn't believe it.

This Beautiful Atrocities "Root Causes of Terrorism Timeline" feels like Stucker's riff.

Only now with two-thirds more Liza Minnelli!

Yesterday, we wrote of Nancy Pelosi, "nice use of the leftwing echo chamber...to pour new gasoline on a theme whose origins have already been disowned by Newsweek (at least in the US)--but the repercussions of which continue to reverberate."

Today, Heather MacDonald explains how that echo chamber works:

This recent campaign for shuttering Guantanamo, which has been joined by former president Jimmy Carter and Senator Joe Biden [and now Rep. Pelosi--Ed], began with a column by New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman on May 27, “Just Shut It Down.”

Read the rest; MacDonald believes the media is being waaay too modest in not taking credit for their role in trashing America's reputation overseas.

Meanwhile, James Robbins reminds us what a real Gulag looks like--North Korea's system of concentration camps, the Kwan-li-co:

An estimated 200,000 people are being held in the Kwan-li-co and related systems, in conditions of unspeakable brutality. Accounts of life (such as it is) in the camps remind one of Solzhenitsyn’s narratives, or Primo Levi’s, or other firsthand confirmation of the cruelty and viciousness of the total state in dealing with those it has rendered helpless. How many ways can a person be tortured? How many ways can someone be killed? Is no offense against totalitarian order too small to be overlooked? Are there no limits to the depravity of man? Read some of these accounts and compare. To the average North Korean prisoner, Guantanamo, with its wholesome food, hygienic sanitation, medical care, regular religious services, fresh clothes, forgiving climate, trained personnel, and periodic Red Cross visits would be an astonishing land of plenty. The same goes for the average North Korean citizen.

Wonder if The L.A. Times knows that?

In The Weekly Standard, Stephen Schwartz writes:

ON TUESDAY, June 7, Sen. Arlen Specter took an action that may substantially improve the difficult--some might say despicable--state of U.S.-Saudi relations. Specter dropped the Saudi Arabia Accountability Act of 2005 into the hopper; the text was designated Senate bill 1171. Its cosponsors, so far, are Sens. Evan Bayh, Susan Collins, Tim Johnson, Patty Murray, Russ Feingold, and Ron Wyden.

The legislation is concise. The bill's text stands as an indictment of Saudi Arabia, since it is mainly an inventory of evidence against the kingdom and the role of its rulers in enabling terrorism. S. 1171 summons the rulers of the Saudi kingdom to comply with United Nations resolution 1373, calling on states to refrain from supporting terrorism, to combat terrorism, and to deny safe haven to financiers and planners of terrorism. As the home of Wahhabism, the state cult and Islamist ideology underpinning al Qaeda and its allies, Saudi territory is a rich field of targets for serious counter-terrorism.

Sounds like a good idea for a bill to me. I wonder if Jerry Brown's suggestion will eventually be taken up as well.

Earlier today, in a post titled, "The Hysteria Spreads", Glenn Reynolds wrote that Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) compared President Bush's foreign policy to the Holocaust. (And that's after George Galloway (Baathist-UK) recently made similar Godwin's Law-violating statements on Al Jazeera). Glenn Wrote that "Bush's ability to drive his opponents stark, raving bonkers is almost supernatural".

Like the Bush Derangement Syndrome that dominated in the months prior to the election, this new strain is spreading.

September will be the fourth anniversary of 9/11, and it's only about three months away. But 9/11 was only one of several attacks on this country whose origins were in the Middle East. Today, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the minority leader of the house, say that she thinks--(strike that, thinking is the wrong word, for it implies reason)--feels that we need to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center in order to give America "a clean slate in the Muslim world."

Paul Mirengoff responds:

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Perhaps he's a little late to the party, but why quibble? James Lileks has a superb review of the highs and the lows of ST III: ROTS that's well worth your time.

Besides, it...is...your...well, you know.

Stop the presses! In a staggering moment of man-bites-rainforest, The L.A. Times reports:

The death of a myth begins with stinging eyes and heaving chests here on the edge of the Amazon rain forest.

Every year, fire envelops the jungle, throwing up inky billows of smoke that blot out the sun. Animals flee. Residents for miles around cry and wheeze, while the weak and unlucky develop serious respiratory problems.

When the burning season strikes, life and health in the Amazon falter, and color drains out of the riotous green landscape as great swaths of majestic trees, creeping vines, delicate bromeliads and hardy ferns are reduced to blackened stubble.

But more than just the land, these annual blazes also lay waste to a cherished notion that has roosted in the popular mind for decades: the idea of the rain forest as the "lungs of the world."

Ever since saving the Amazon became a fashionable cause in the 1980s, championed by Madonna, Sting and other celebrities, the jungle has consistently been likened to an enormous recycling plant that slurps up carbon dioxide and pumps out oxygen for us all to breathe, from Los Angeles to London to Lusaka.

Think again, scientists say.

Far from cleaning up the atmosphere, the Amazon is now a major source for pollution.

Glenn Dryfoos writes, "The Gipper was on to those trees twenty-five years ago". And Eric Theodore Cartman was onto to them six years ago, as well.

Glenn Reynolds links to a great post by Matt Welch on the blindness of tourists to death, decay and starvation in Cuba:

this common sentiment has always irritated the hell out of me. Oh, the crumbling, no-longer-beautiful houses! Ah, the lovely two-feet-deep potholes, and rickety Chinese bicycles (because the 50-year-old Chevys and 30-year-old Ladas don't work, and at any rate there's no gas). How people can derive pleasure from evidence of the suffering of innocents is beyond me, and few sights are more unseemly to my eyes than seeing a Lonely Planet-waving travel snob whine about how some current or formerly misgoverned hellhole has been "ruined" by all that yucky reconstruction, material success, and (worst of all!) tourism. Oh how pretty! The baseball players make $20 a month, and they live on a prison, but at least there's no annoying electronic scoreboard!

But hey, at least they've got free healthcare!

The left complains endlessly about the US's prisoner of war camp at Guantanamo, even as they're gleefully ignoring the rest of the island, which is itself one giant prison with Castro as the warden. Val Prieto dubs it a case of OTS--short for "Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome".

My review of Taschen's tremendous new Stanley Kubrick Archives is now up on Blogcritics.

We didn't get a chance to comment on Kerry's college grades yesterday, although lots of others in the Blogosphere did. Of course, we generally don't lose a whole lot of sleep over the varying degrees of intelligence of political candidates. And as Orrin Judd wrote yesterday, "it's wise of Mr. Kerry to play up his own scholastic mediocity if he plans to run in '08. The candidate perceived as smarter has never won an open presidential race in at least modern times. Americans despise intellectuals."

Certainly as potential presidents. Along those lines, James Taranto writes:

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Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair has a recent column titled "No Jokes Please, We're Liberal". Not surprisingly, these are trends we've been looking at since this blog started. Wolff writes:

Not to put too fine a point on it, but liberals, in their desperate quest to be taken seriously, are the new conservatives.

I know--Radley Balko had that meme a year and a half ago. And Jonah Goldberg was riffing on it long before that.

Wolff continues:

Conservative opinionists in the burgeoning right-wing media—from Fox to talk radio to Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard to the Wall Street Journal editorial page—are, on the other hand, often facile, funny, irreverent, eccentric, jaunty, pithy, as well as aggressive and wrongheaded (that improbable creature Ann Coulter is all those things), as well as operatic (Terri Schiavo was an opera). As well as, on occasion, inebriated. (The character note of a liberal these days is sobriety—no drinks, no carbs, no jokes. The conservatives run amok while the liberals are corporatized.)

Heck, you might even say that the left are the New Puritans. Back to Wolff:

Obviously, conservatives have reason to enjoy themselves, while liberals do not. But then, too, it may reasonably be the conservatives' sense of verbal sport, of going too far, of showing off, that's helped get them into their catbird seat.

Going too far? Thank God the head of the DNC never has to worry about that.

And, conversely, the liberals' dullness and depressiveness—"little constipated souls," in the recent description by Ben Bradlee, who is from the liberal media's jaunty age—that's contributed to their fate.

So why no oomph? No joy? No jokes?

Because political correctness kills comedy.

So much of the left has become a religion of their own. Years ago, Tom Wolfe (and this isn't an exact quote) described what made Radical Chic and The Painted Word get so far under the skin of New York intellectuals. "It was like talking out of turn in church".

At a conference on global warming, the late economist Julian Simon once began a speech like this:

“How many people here believe that the earth is increasingly polluted and that our natural resources are being exhausted?” Naturally, every hand shot up. He said, “Is there any evidence that could dissuade you?” Nothing. Again: “Is there any evidence I could give you — anything at all — that would lead you to reconsider these assumptions?” Not a stir. Simon then said, “Well, excuse me, I’m not dressed for church.”

Apparently, neither is Michael Wolff. In an article in the New Partisan, Russ Smith writes that Wolff's apostasy has turned him into a Manhattan pariah--which also isn't all that surprising. As Glenn Reynolds wrote three years ago:

As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they're looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don't. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.

So what's the alternative for those looking for humor? Joe Katzman of Winds of Change, linking to our Tech Central Station piece on Brian Anderson's South Park Conservatives, writes that the new generation of conservatives are "people who looked and sounded nothing like Bill Buckley--and nothing like the New York Times either":

A generation raised on South Park's wicked skewering of political correctness and idiocy isn't going to. A generation with more media choices than ever doesn't have to. And the market will correct the problem, given time. Hence the trends described in Anderson's book.

Vive le media libre.

It's like a reformation or something!

Update: Orrin Judd writes, "You used to at least get an argument when you made the point that all comedy is conservative."

Another Update: Welcome Winds of Change readers!

Joel Schwartz of Tech Central Station writes that with his latest initiative, Governor Schwarzenegger is "Terminating Prosperity".

Well, a scream waiting to happen again at least. In the latest of his controversial (to say the least) utterings, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean said in San Francisco this week:

Republicans are "a pretty monolithic party. They all behave the same. They all look the same. It's pretty much a white Christian party."

Patrick Ruffini notes that part of the problem is that Dean alone isn't the same man who had a powerful team of old DNC pros handling his campaign in 2003, and made it appear much more influential then it actually was (hence its implosion and the classic Dean scream):

Four months of Dean have made it abundantly clear that DFA's initial success organizationally was due to the brilliance and tech-savvy of Joe Trippi, Mathew Gross, Zephyr Teachout, et al. They are the ones who constructed this narrative of a grassroots movement, of a community more important than the candidate, and in the process-driven, fundraising-mad pre-primary period, it was enough to deflect attention away from Dr. Dean's fatal personality flaws. Simply by running the first four miles of the campaign marathon as a sprint, they appeared to be far ahead of everyone else; what they actually did – and this was brilliant while it lasted – is simply fast-forward the process, while the other candidates were playing the inside game of fundraising and endorsements, Dean was playing the crowds as you would in late October, and this made it seem like he was playing on a bigger stage.

Dean at the DNC is Dean without Trippi, Dean without the 15,000 person crowds (who can normally be counted upon to drown out the errant shriek), Dean minus the Movement. As it turned out, Dean was perfectly programmed to succeed in that in-between period (2003) where the activists are paying attention, but when the general public has yet to tune in. Once they did tune in, and the focus turned to personality over process, Dean flopped. The Dean chairmanship now is effectively the bookend to the Dean Scream. Now, virtually no one is tuned in – a development aided by keeping Dean in hiding for most of his chairmanship – which means that not even the activists feel vested in his leadership or committed to supporting him when he screws up.

Dean is also a victim of his own success. When he first arrived on the scene, leading Democrats were falling over each other to support the Iraq war, which made Dean's appeal unique. (His "What I want to know" DNC remarks in February '03 left me swearing he'd be the frontrunner before this was all over.) Today, every Democrat is anti-Iraq, and even Joe Biden is sounding like Dean. And when everyone is Howard Dean, the original doesn't seem all that necessary or appealing anymore.

Exactly--and not all that surprising, of course.

Update: No screaming, but here's a screed from James Lileks on his new "ScreedBlog" (hopefully permalinks are coming soon):

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British MP George Galloway appeared recently on the Arab world's Al Jazeera TV network to utter this staggering quote, amongst others:

Bush, and Blair, and the prime minister of Japan, and Berlusconi, these people are criminals, and they are responsible for mass murder in the world, for the war, and for the occupation, through their support for Israel, and through their support for a globalized capitalist economic system, which is the biggest killer the world has ever known. It has killed far more people than Adolph Hitler. It has killed far more people than George Bush. The economic system which these people support, which leaves most of the people in the world hungry, and without clean water to drink. So we’re going to put them on trial, the leaders, when they come. They think they’re coming for a holiday in a beautiful country called Scotland; in fact, they’re coming to their trial.

Charles Johnson aptly describes Galloway as "The 21st Century Lord Haw Haw".

Taschen was gracious enough to send me a review copy of their new book The Stanley Kubrick Archives. I'll have a detailed review online in the not too distant future, but in the meantime, you can get a sense of it from the Taschen Website, as well as this Newsweek piece.

It's a physically huge book--19 x 13 inches in size, and three inches thick. Amazon describes its shipping weight as being nearly 15 pounds and that sounds just about right. In other words, this isn't a book you casually carry into the smallest room of your house, if you know what I mean.

Along with 544 pages containing thousands of photographs--many never before seen--there's a six inch long 70mm clip of frames from 2001, and more interesting, a DVD-ROM with an audio recording of Kubrick done for a 1966 New Yorker interviewer (portions of which were excerpted in Jerome Agel's McLuhanesque The Making of 2001 from 1968). By time I became a fan of his work, Kubrick had grown his thick famous beard, which along with his piercing stare, gave him a powerful, somewhat menacing look. It's difficult to reconcile that visual image with the thin, slightly nasal Bronx voice on the DVD-ROM. (If you can recall Peter Sellers' Stevenson-spoofing President Muffley in Dr. Strangelove, he sounds very much like he's doing a slightly less Bronxian impersonation of Kubrick--certainly a similar timbre at least.)

But who cares what he sounded like? The man was a staggering filmmaker, and this book will be a feast to his many fans. Much more on it later.

Update: Review's now online, at Blogcritics.

Ever wonder why--at least until recently--you never heard a discouraging word from the press about a celebrity like Tom Cruise? Jonathan Leaf of The New Partisan looks at "The Protection Racket " that has insulated many Hollywood celebrities from press criticism, and explains why "Cruise and [Katie] Holmes are fair game" now.

A lot's happened on this date in history; PoliPundit has an interesting round-up of events.

What's happening right now? This looks like the big issue of the day.

PC World has some nifty suggestions on how to tweak your TiVo system.

When James Lileks begins his syndicated column like this...

He swore at subordinates. He chased after women, used bad language to underlings, cooked the data to get the results he wanted, and alienated as many people as he attracted. So much for his U.N. ambassadorship, eh? So let's hear no more about giving Bill Clinton that job.

...You know he's come to bury the UN--not to praise it. So click on over and read the rest.

Bob Geldof is planning another Live Aid concert, only this time the purpose is to raise funds to pay off the Third World's debt. (For our thoughts on the first Live Aid, here's a link to our Weekly Standard.com story from December.) Anarchists, however, are complaining that Geldof's choice of superstar musicians for the concert line-up is "too white", according to Britain's Independent.

George Lucas has professed that in the original Star Wars, Emperor Palpatine was a Nixon stand-in, the evil Galactic Empire was America, and the good guy Rebels were symbolic of the communist Vietcong. In other words, it's a Vietnam War allegory, with America as the bad guys, and the Vietcong as the good guys. Does it get any more leftwing than that? Yet the loonier members of the modern left considered Lucas's second batch of trilogies to be racist, because of silly-voiced alien characters like Jar-Jar Binks. (God know what the far left thinks of the whacky menagerie voiced by Mel Blanc in Warner's Loony Toons of the 1930s and '40s.)

This might be the strangest example of the circular firing squad in action: as a result of criticism in films like Hollywood Shuffle, Robert Townsend's 1987 breakthrough directorial debut, Tinseltown greatly reduced the casting of black actors as hoods and thugs, and created more positive cinematic images of African-Americans. But it's a can't win proposition: now Hollywood is condemned by liberal critics for creating too many "Magic Negro" characters, a phrase apparently created by a Time magazine columnist, and repeated in this this Washington Post article:

Much more common are the "salvation" roles in which black characters exist to provide moral, spiritual or even supernatural guidance to white characters. It's been called the "Magic Negro" syndrome (a term I first encountered in a Time magazine column by my friend Jack White). Think Whoopi Goldberg as the medium in "Ghost," reuniting Demi Moore with the deceased Patrick Swayze. Or Michael Clarke Duncan as the otherworldly giant who heals Tom Hanks's soul in "The Green Mile." Or Lawrence Fishburne as Morpheus in the "Matrix" trilogy, helping Keanu Reeves find his inner superhero.

Morgan Freeman, a great actor who received a well-deserved Oscar for best supporting actor, has been an all-purpose dispenser of salvation during his long and distinguished career. He redeemed Jessica Tandy in "Driving Miss Daisy" and Tim Robbins in "The Shawshank Redemption." He played God in "Bruce Almighty." And now he finally wins his Oscar for "Million Dollar Baby," in which--again--he is wise, compassionate, subsidiary to the main characters, and instructively moral to the bone.

I understand the left's urge to criticize the right--hey, that's politics. But I'm not sure if I get the surprisingly frequent desire to devour their own--or at least attempt to trap them inside circular, unwinnable criticism.

Update: Charles Johnson has some thoughts, and additional links concerning Geldof's new project.

Another Update: Ed Morrissey also has details.

Time Magazine saw fit to name them "Blog of the Year" in December. But six months later, the fellas at Power Line are the Bully Boys of the Blogosphere according to the New York Times!

Which explains so much about the Times: terrorists in Iraq are merely "rebels", but three conservative attorneys with a broadband connection are bullies?

Noted.

Update: Speaking of one half of the topic at hand, welcome Power Line readers!

I actually had no idea that some American colleges had separate graduation ceremonies for minority students until I read this post by Joanne Jacobs. (I definitely don't recall separate ceremonies when I graduated.) On the other hand, such practices are certainly in keeping with the thrust of Michael Graham's Redneck Nation.

UPI reports that Saddam Hussein will face 12 charges in his upcoming trial:

Baghdad, Jun. 5 (UPI) — An Iraqi government spokesman Sunday announced former dictator Saddam Hussein will face 12 charges of crimes against humanity when he goes on trial in Iraq.

Government spokesman Leith Kubba said the dozen charges of crimes against humanity were "more than sufficient to ensure he receives the maximum sentence," so the Baghdad government decided against "wasting time" with all 500 cases brought against the former president, the BBC reported.

The charges include the chemical attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988, the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the repression of Shias in 1991.

Hussein, who was captured by U.S.-led forces in December 2003, faces the death penalty if convicted.

Kubba said the Iraqi government plans to begin the trial within two months.

Chemical weapons--he had those?

In other Iraq news, who's sending weapons to the Iraqi equivalent of the Ho Chi Minh trail?

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Prelude to another Dean Scream?

In a piece titled "Tales from Dark Side don't live up to hype", Mark Steyn puts Mark Felt into context with another relic from the 1970s whose story concluded this summer as well:

''Revenge of the Sith'' is a marvel of motivational integrity compared to ''Revenge of the Felt,'' the concluding chapter in that other '70s saga, Watergate. Before the final denouement last week, there were a gazillion guesses at the identity of ''Deep Throat,'' but all subscribed to the basic contours of the Woodward and Bernstein myth: that he was someone deep in the bowels of the administration who could no longer in good conscience stand by as a corrupt president did deep damage to the nation. So Darth Throat, a fully paid-up Dark Lord of the Milhous, saved the Republic from the imperial paranoia of Chancellor Nixotine by transforming himself into Anakin Slytalker and telling what he knew to the Bradli knights of the Washington Post.

Now we learn that Deep Throat was not, in fact, Alexander Haig, David Gergen, Pat Buchanan or Len Garment, but a disaffected sidekick of J. Edgar Hoover, an old-school G-man embittered at being passed over for the director's job when the big guy keeled over after half-a-century in harness.

Hmm. Like the ''Star Wars'' wrap-up, ''How Mark Felt Became Deep Throat'' feels small and mean after three decades of the awesome dramatic burden placed upon it. The nobility of the Watergate myth -- in which media boomers and generations of journalism school ethics bores have sunk so much -- seems cheapened and tarnished by this last plot twist.

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John Hinderaker of Power Line has an interesting take on the creation of the European Union, which is looking more and more stillborn:

When American corporations have lost their way and can't figure out how to improve their market position, a common "solution" is to merge with another similarly befuddled company. This allows both companies to "grow," and permits executives to put off hard decisions for years amid talk of "synergy" and restructuring. I think a similar phenomenon has been at work in Europe, where merger via the EU has been seen as a solution to all sorts of problems that Europe's peoples and politicians lack the will to address in a more meaningful way.

If the EU is the equivalent of befuddled companies merging, it sounds like that would make it the transnational version of the old Penn Central Railroad, but with berets and Hugo Boss suits instead of conductors' uniforms.

And we all remember how well the PC worked out. Hopefully this doesn't mean that America's Congress will feel compelled to create a European version of Conrail to bail out the EU, though.

Update: Speaking of the EU, get a load of this Arthur Schlesinger-worthy quote about it from the BBC.

One year ago today, President Reagan passed away, after his decade-long struggle with Alzheimer's. For a look at what went on during the week of mourning that began on this date last year, click here and scroll down June 5th, and then just start scolling up, and following the links (not all of which will work a year later of course--but you knew that).

Perhaps Tim Graham best put the Gipper's accomplishments into perspective:

Think of everything Reagan did, and then add: He did it all before Fox News. He did it all before the Rush Limbaugh phenomenon. He did it all before the instant battle cry of his defenders could hit the Internet. He did it all before C-SPAN caught on and people could enjoy the game of watching entire speeches and debates and then observing how the network tricksters discombobulated them into liberal hatchet jobs. He did it all when (well, eventually) the only conservative regular on the big networks was ABC's George Will, and at that time Will was still fashionably fussing about Americans being "taxophobic" and spurning Reagan's "Morning in America goo."

In the prologue to his book on Reagan Dinesh D'Souza captured the flavor of how Reagan was greeted by the Washington establishment. Everything Reagan sought to accomplish seemed ludicrous and uneducated to the long-standing liberal consensus. Tax cuts would be wildly inflationary. A foreign policy based on the radical notion that Communism should be put on the ash heap of history was dismissed as a bellicose fantasy too dangerous for the nuclear age. At the end of it all, Reagan was the wise man, and all his detractors — Democrats and ersatz Republicans, political scientists and economists, "Sovietologists" and journalists — were the dummies.

The greatest of Reagan's accomplishments was of course the ushering in of the fall of the Soviet Union. As late as 1982, liberal intellectuals such as Arthur Schlesinger could say with a straight face of Moscow:

"I found more goods in the shops, more food in the markets, more cars on the street -- more of almost everything," he said, adding his contempt for "those in the U.S. who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink."

President Reagan was more than willing to test that theorem.

The result? Well, there's a piece of the Berlin Wall at the Reagan Library, which is only fitting for the man who both said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"--and set about making him do just that.

Update: Greg Hanke recalls viewing President Reagan's coffin as it laid in state at the Reagan Library.

In a piece titled, "Britain proposes end of poverty in Africa", UPI reports that England is launching a war on poverty of its own:

LONDON, Jun. 4 (UPI) — Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown has proposed a plan to tackle poverty in Africa before the G8 Summit in Scotland next month.

Brown wants to double aid from Europe by 2010, provide 100 percent debt relief, put an end to many trade subsidies and end trade-distorting support of agriculture, the BBC reported.

The chancellor wants to set up an International Finance Facility to double development aid to Africa to help fund education and medical programs such as immunization.

Because President Johnson's modest attempt to eradicate poverty in his own country worked so flawlessly.

Update: On the other hand, it's tough to argue with this assessment from Tony Blair: "Africa is worth fighting for. Europe, in its present form, is not."

In his media column in the Rocky Mountain News, Dave Kopel writes:

It would be unrealistic to expect local newspapers to be neutral about the success of hometown teams. Although sportswriters might criticize local coaches or players, the local papers are expected to hope that the local teams win. Thus, before the start of last year's professional hockey playoffs, a News headline (April 7, 2004) read "Dear Abby, can we win?"

In news stories, the papers are sometimes scrupulous about not taking sides. For example, in most of the newspaper coverage of the battle of Fallujah last November, or this month's "Operation Lightning" around Baghdad, a reader would find few, if any, hints that the writer wanted U.S. forces to beat the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi forces.

We've also noticed the huge disparity between how the sports page treats the home team and how the front page treats home.

Ed Morrissey has today's must-read post. That his topic hasn't appeared in say, Time, Newsweek, or the New York Times, tells you everything you need to know about why the Blogosphere is flourishing, and the legacy media is, well, the legacy media.

Update: Morrissey writes:

Short of ensuring that the Gitmo prisoners belong there and get treated humanely -- three hots and a cot and no abuse -- I couldn't care less about their reading material. If they get Qu'rans, fine. If not, fine. If their Qu'rans get wet, kicked, dropped, laughed at, or ignored, let the military deal with the disciplinary issues, but it isn't newsworthy. Why should we give a damn about it? What happened to our sense of priorities?

The media and the Leftist establishments such as the ACLU and Amnesty International use crap like this to set up impossible standards of behavior, then pretend that we're no better than our enemies when we fail to perfectly meet them. That's why AI used the "gulag" comparison earlier this week, and why Michael Isikoff and Newsweek decided to break the story that rampant abuse of printed material occurred at Gitmo. It's a deliberate attempt to undermine support for a war they don't like, and pathetically, Americans seem to have fallen for the hype.

There could be a pretty nifty opportunity awaiting a politician or other prominent figure who wanted to point out to the media that their hyping of Koran abuse stories is hypocrisy squared.

In other words, it's hypocrisy that hasn't been seen on this level since the left and the media (sorry to repeat myself) turned on a dime from claiming that Clarence Thomas trying to hit on Anita Hill was a Crime Against Humanity, but all of the charges that emanated from Bill Clinton's trousers was just between consenting adults.

If the media wants to claim that defacing the Koran in a POW camp full of captured terrorists is the crime of the century, then it needs to follow its own logic to its natural conclusion: no more claiming that "art" such as Piss Christ is a bold artistic statement. No more episodes like this on Law & Order and other TV shows, unless they're roundly condemned by the press. An article such as Rod Dreher's "The Godless Party" should be a multi-part investigative feature in the New York Times. There should be regular articles condemning the attacks of the ACLU against religious Christians or Christmas celebrations.

Because without a similar tone to coverage of religion in the US, Koran abuse stories at Gitmo looks exactly like it is: grandstanding hypocrisy of the worst order.

So how 'bout it, MSM? We now know how ardently you'll defend a religion which is practiced by about three million Americans according to Daniel Pipes, and roughly double that from other sources. Ready to start defending the Judeo-Christian faiths practiced by--or at a bare minimum, respected by--the other 290 million people in this country?

No? Then your vaunted claims of neutrality should require to step back a bit--maybe a couple of hundred miles--from hyping this story.

Update: Ed Morrissey also mentions that Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) has been going on Air America to refer to Christian broadcasters as "sort of our home-grown Taliban," adding, "They have a direct line to God. And if you don't tune into their line, you're obviously on Satan's line."

As I said above, if the media expects its claims of Koran abuse to be taken seriously by the American public, anti-Christian rhetoric such as Harkin's (and that of numerous other leftwing politicians) should also be equally strenuously condemned. That it's not speaks volumes of the media's duplicity.

Very Late Update (10/9/05): Welcome Instapundit readers; more on this topic, here.

In one of his typically witty "Impromptus", Jay Nordlinger writes that "you’ll never go broke proclaiming the death of classical music":

Read More »

...Windbag commencement speakers like Erica Jong, who joins PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi in this year's showing by the members of the Anti-American Commencement Speakers Bureau's Central Casting Division.

Actually though, I guess it's a tribute in a way, to how little of academia's leftist indoctrination actually sticks to most students, that speakers such as Jong and Nooyi still get noticed for their remarks.

(Even though he taped it in advance because he couldn't be present to deliver it himself, this commencement speech still ranks as the most astonishing ever allowed by a college, in my book.)

Actually, Dan Rather's bizarre comments on Larry King this week may be better proof that human hibernation is already here. Or maybe it's just permanent sleep walking by the man who makes Ted Baxter sound like Irving Kristol. As Hugh Hewitt writes:

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Joe Gandelman begins an otherwise informative look at human hibernation by quipping:

You've seen it in movies, read about it in comic books as a kid, heard about it since you were two when it comes to bears...and now scientists say humans can hibernate, too.

But wait: I thought humans could already hibernate. There's even a term for it: "attending high school."

Actually, the previous story on Bay Area sports proves that mass human hibernation has been possible ever since the Raiders muffed the Super Bowl and the Niners traded Jeff Garcia.

In a piece on the Weekly Standard's Website titled "Disaster by the Bay", Bill Whalen asks if the current moribund state of San Francisco sports is "some kind of cosmic payback":

Perhaps this is a case of Californians at long last getting what we deserve. Our fellow Americans view us as narcissism personified--a nation-state more interested in self-esteem and self-tanning than self-defense or self-sustaining economic growth. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that a me-first population does so poorly at team sports.

It makes me nostalgic for my younger days in the nation's capital, where the worst they could say about the lousy baseball team--the one that ditched us for Minnesota, before the other one that left us for Texas, before the current one that came to us from Montreal--was "first in war, first in peace, and last in the America League". Here's hoping Northern California sees a turnaround, before they start calling us "first in anti-war, and last in pretty much everything else."

Heh.

Call it Warhol's Law, I guess: Beautiful Atrocities rounds up all of the recent (and a few not so recent) violations of Godwin's law and declares that "In the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes".

Well, not everyone, of course. As Dennis Miller said in 2003:

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

Exactly.

James Lileks writes that he recently attented a party along with the parents of his daughter's classmates when the subject of J-school came up:

One mom was talking about trying to get a niece to attend the U of W at Madison. What field of study? I inquired. Journalism.

Oh. Hmm. Well – what sort? Print? You know, I’d advise against it. Better to take English classes, learn how to write, then write a lot. It’s not a profession that requires four years of college, let alone a master’s degree.

They looked at me with a certain amount of amused confusion, so I said, apologetically, that was I was actually in the business, and degrees mattered less than clips and skill. J-school taught you how to teach J-school. How to go to think tanks and peer down your nose at the messy scrum of daily papers. Not to say it was a waste of time, heavens no. But journalism per se can be mastered quite quickly, and if it can’t, you don’t have it. If you regard “journalism” to mean “colorful writing that yearns to be recognized by awards committees for its sensitive yet tough portrayal of the life of a 14 year old meth addict,” then English is still the way to go. I look back at the classic papers of the 30s in this town, and marvel; the authors weren’t college men, I suspect, but had the requisite instincts and judgments to make the front page irresistible. You can hone judgment, but you can’t teach instinct. The first question in any J-school application ought to be “do you want to change the world?” And anyone who answers yes gets kindly turned away. Your job is to describe the way the world changes. Not pretend you’re there to nudge it along towards utopia.

Don't immanentize the eschaton is especially useful advice for journalists, budding or otherwise.

In regards to marijuana, Forbes says that Milton Friedman's advice to the US government is simple: "Legalize It!"

(Why yes, that headline would have been incomprehensible before yesterday.)

David Frum has a great post on Watergate and its historical repercussions:

Now then, today's news: Deep Throat.

There should be no evasion here: Richard Nixon committed serious crimes as president, including violation of the campaign-finance laws and obstruction of justice. Under his bad example and following his perverse incentives, a whole generation of senior Republican officials marched into lawlessness.

That said, as it must be said, some additional perspective is in order as the big media descends into yet another spasm of Watergate delight ....

1) There were very few if any crimes committed under Richard Nixon that FDR, Truman, JFK, and LBJ did not also commit, from snooping on political opponents' IRS records (something that Nixon was prevented from doing but that FDR regularly did), to violating campaign laws (an LBJ speciality). Standards seem to have been a little higher under Eisenhower, but that may be a gap in the historical record. I argued in my history of the 1970s, How We Got Here that Nixon's misconduct has to be seen as an exaggerated form of the misconduct of his predecessors, and not as some unique deviation of his own.

2) One reason that Watergate memories so galvanize the press is that liberal journalists can now understand that Watergate represented the very zenith of their cultural influence. For one shining, shimmering moment, they decided who were cultural heroes and who were villains.

They could transmute a bitter old segregationist like Sam Ervin into a defender of the Constitution for standing against Nixon --and utterly destroy an innocent like former Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans for standing too close to him. There was no Fox News, no Rush Limbaugh, and barely even a Wall Street Journal editorial page as Robert Bartley would build it and we now know it.

Deep Throat is a perfect example of this. There is something disturbing is there not about a law-enforcement official becoming convinced of the guilt of his target, and leaking information against him to the media?

Didn't Clinton defenders rave against Ken Starr and his team for allegedly doing so? Isn't that the justification, to the extent that there is any justification, for Senate Democrats' unreasoning rancor against Bush judicial pick Brett Kavanaugh, a former Starr counsel?

And yet when the #2 of the FBI admits that he does so against Richard Nixon, it becomes time to pull out the block of marble and the chisels.

American liberals have lost this cultural power for good, but the memory of it remains sweet.

Found via Protein Wisdom, Joe Katzman writes that yes it does:

Over the past 4 years, an uncountable deluge of commenters have compared the war we're in, explicitly or implicitly, to Vietnam. The analogy snakes through the war like a main circuit cable, plugged straight into the New Class.

So lately, I've been thinking: What if they're right? And, more recently, "I think they are."

Just not in the way they imagine. Consider...

Read the rest, which Joe was nice enough to end with a link to my "South Park Conservatives" piece on Tech Central Station.

Joe writes:

The current war may indeed be Vietnam redux. The Left erroneously assumes that it will therefore be on the winning side.

I wouldn't be so sure.

I think it's safe to assume that Don Surber agrees with him.

God, I love the headline on this Reuters piece, found via PoliPundit:

"Europe in crisis after Dutch, French reject treaty"

There's a crisis? There are tanks rolling in the streets? Civilians being rounded up? Che-style firing squads?

While Europe's taxes and unemployment remain too high, and its business growth too low, something tells me that life is going on just fine for the vast majority of its citizens, except for the comparative handful in Belgian and French marble halls.

Update: Given his blog's name, it's somewhat ironic, but not very surprising: Compared to Reuters, Steve Green of VodkaPundit has a much more sober take on where Europe goes from here.

More: In an email we just received titled "Take that back", a Mr. S. Green of Colorado swears "to Whomever I was on my second martini when I wrote that piece".

To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, whatever Steve makes his Martinis with, somebody please send a case or twenty to Reuters!

Ed Morrissey has a very interesting look at Mark Felt's admission that he's Deep Throat--Felt tried to sell his story to People magazine three years ago, but People refused to pay him, and his family, for the scoop. But Vanity Fair did, for their upcoming July issue:

This puts an entirely different spin on Felt's admission and the hesitation of Woodward and Bernstein to confirm it. If Foster's report is correct, then Mark Felt has no capacity to make that decision for himself -- and it looks like his family engineered the admission for some financial gain. Given that Vanity Fair eventually broke the story, one has to wonder what they paid the Felt family for the exclusive.

It also becomes more understandable why the two Post reporters initially stated that they would wait until the source died to confirm the identity. Woodward had visited Felt several times over the past few years and must have known of Felt's incapacity. No doubt when he heard that Felt had announced his identity as Deep Throat, he and Bernstein must have questioned the veracity of the news, as Felt sounds incapable of making that decision, and probably the two must have known that it was out of character for a man who felt as conflicted as he reportedly did over his role.

Foster's article suggests that this revelation is nothing more than perhaps the last tawdry event in a tawdry scandal, where eventually no one was a hero and Felt's admonition to "follow the money" applied to everyone involved.

Read the rest.

Mark Steyn proves that the pen--or at least the word processor--is mightier than the light sabre, as he gleefully runs roughshod through Star Wars Episode III:

Revenge of the Sith is, so Lucas assures us, a ‘tragedy’. It might have been wise to have stationed an announcer at every movie house to announce this fact over the PA system since it eluded the audience I saw it with last weekend. When the Sith hits the fan, the fan bursts out laughing. Oh, to be sure, they were diverted by the opening dogfight and Obi-Wan Kenobi riding a wild four-legged space beast to hunt down General Grievous. But they were howling with laughter through all the so-called ‘tragic’ elements. When Senator-Queen Padmé (Natalie Portman) reveals that she’s pregnant, her secret husband Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) reacts with an eerie glassy-eyed expression as if he’s hypnotised himself trying to remember the next line. Eventually, Lucas prompts him and he utters the words, ‘I’ll have the club sandwich.’ No, wait. That’s just what it sounds like. He actually says: ‘You’re so ...beautiful.’
‘It’s only because I’m so in love,’ says Padmé tonelessly, like a spy giving the reply password.

‘No,’ says Anakin. ‘I’m so in love. With you,’ he adds helpfully, just in case Padmé figures it’s the hot-looking Wookie strolling by in the background.

At this, my fellow theatergoers exploded with guffaws of derision. May the farce be with you! The final descent of Ian McDiarmid’s Chancellor Palpatine into Darth Hammitup brought on more laffs, as did the moment when Anakin attempts to talk Padmé into joining him over on the Dark Side: ‘Together you and I can rule the galaxy,’ he snarls. Well, tries to snarl.

‘Obi-Wan was right. You’ve changed,’ says Princess Padmé. ‘I don’t know you any more.’ He used to look like Princess Di flashing those big eyes from under his hair. But suddenly he looks like Princess Di with too much kohl and in a peevish mood.

When we saw it on a midnight showing on opening night, my wife and I were the only ones we could hear laughing, surrounded in a sea of geeky Star Wars junkies in Darth Vader T-shirts--and in a couple of cases, complete Darth Vader masks and outfits. But I'm glad to see we weren't alone in our gleeful derision.

There's a good article waiting for somebody who could show how once spot-on creators of Hollywood sci-fi eventually developed a tin ear. Is it that sci-fi--or maybe Hollywood itself--is strictly a young man's game? The first season of Star Trek's original series, in which Gene Roddenberry rewrote virtually every final shooting script was its best. But twenty years later, the first two seasons of Next Generation, before health reasons caused the aged Roddenberry to step-aside were just dreadful. Similiarly, the first two Star Wars (Episodes IV and V for you die-hards) were infinitely more light on their feet than these prequels.

Nice round-up of links on Deep Throat's unmasking on Instapundit. Among them, Gregory Scoblete writes:

Maybe it's a generational thing but this Deep Throat orgy, er, extravaganza is supremely uninteresting. The Washington Post's wall-to-wall treatment smacks of self love and journalistic hero-worship - a huge media circle jerk, in keeping with the theme.

Maybe they're indulging in this unseemly spectacle because recent developments have been less kindly to the media establishment: Dan Rather, Eason Jordan, Newsweek, et. al. This is the perfect chance to relive - in Al Bundy-like fashion - the Big One.

And Bill Quick adds:

In other words, one of the most momentous political events of the American 20th century was the result of a turf war. Obviously, Mark Felt had no moral or ethical qualms about Watergate-style break-ins, per se.

Just think - he would probably have set up Watergate itself, if J. Edgar had ordered him to do it.

Exactly. The "Deep Epstein" post on Power Line yesterday was a particularly brillant reminder that President Nixon was brought down not by two intrepid reporters fighting crime like Batman and Robin with Smith-Coronas, but by Capital Hill interoffice political turf wars.