For New Orleans residents, the plight of their football team is the absolute least of their worries. However, nationally, they'll receive quite a bit of attention this fall: as ambassadors for their devastated city, their presence on television this season could do quite a bit to keep the city in the spotlight--and additional relief funds coming in from both viewers at home, and those who attend their games in person. However, where the Saints will play their home games is still very much up in the air:

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Michelle Malkin writes that "The World Comes Around (Sort Of)" to helping rebuild the Gulf Coast, although England--with notable individual exceptions--sounds like it's taking its characteristic reserve and understatement just a little too seriously.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds has a list of charities you can contribute to.

In August of 2001, when I was writing pieces for the newly launched National Review Online Financial section, I naturally did an article on the state of the dot.com industry, which was then just recovering from a series of spectacular dot.busts. The consensus of the folks that I interviewed for the article was the obvious exception to the Silicon Valley wreckage was eBay, which looked like it had a strong future ahead of it.

Well, as the late George Allen was fond of saying when he coached the Washington Redskins, the future is now. So let's flash-forward four years to today: James Glassman writes that not only is eBay doing well itself, it's also become a haven for budding entrepreneurs:

A remarkable new survey by ACNielsen International Research finds that 724,000 Americans use eBay, the online auctioneer and general marketplace, for their primary or secondary income. That figure is up from 430,000 in a similar 2004 survey. In other words, about 300,000 people have started businesses on eBay in the past year. So eBay can properly be viewed as America's No. 1 generator of, not just businesses, but jobs.

As David Faber of CNBC said recently, "If eBay employed the . . . people who earn an income selling on its site, it would be the nation's No. 2 private employer, behind Wal-Mart."

But the point is that eBay doesn't employ them. They employ themselves. Their own cash and reputations are on the line. They innovate, they compete, they work hard. What eBay and other online sites provide is the platform: a storefront that's electronic, not brick and mortar; a market of 157 million registered users worldwide; plus help in expediting payments, shipping packages and detecting fraud.

Marketplace sites -- and eBay, with $83,000 worth of goods traded every minute, is the largest -- offer a simple way, not just to sell the occasional used tie or baseball trading card, but to start and maintain a small business, allowing the entrepreneurs themselves to concentrate on the important stuff: merchandizing and marketing.

Consider Sarah Davis of San Antonio, who graduated from the University of Maryland Law School and passed the Texas bar exam but then began having children (three now) and wanted to be with them. "I started selling on eBay about six years ago with one Louis Vuitton purse and a dream," she says.

Her business of selling high-end purses became so successful that she moved into office space and hired three employees.

Davis is a typical American entrepreneur. An extensive government study, released by the Census Bureau in July and covering 2002 data, found that small businesses owned by women rose 20 percent over five years while the number of all U.S. businesses rose by 10 percent. Black-owned businesses were up by 45 percent, Hispanic-owned by 31 percent.

Small businesses produce a little more than half of all U.S. employment and sales of goods and services. More important, these businesses now account for virtually all the net new jobs created by the economy and, says the White House, "are most likely to generate jobs for young workers, older workers and women." In addition, the Disabled Businessman's Association estimates that 40 percent of home-based businesses are operated by people with disabilities.

These trends can only intensify with the growth of the online marketplace and the spread of Internet connections throughout the world. The Federal Reserve reports that the majority of small businesses are based in the home. All you need is a desk, a computer, a connection to the greater wired world and a place to store your inventory.

Online entrepreneurship is so attractive that 14 percent of eBay sellers are people who retired early or quit their jobs to sell full-time on eBay, and another 12 percent are considering doing so.

eBay is also fueling a trend that Glenn Reynolds recently wrote about: new ruralism, rural gentrification, and homesourcing.

Jonah Goldberg looks 21st century Hollywood's moral relativism:

How’s this for a plot? There’s this international conspiracy to acquire nuclear weapons and kill millions of Americans. The conspirators act with the aid of various governments, some of which pretend to be our friends. Some of these governments are ruled by medieval tyrants who keep many wives (and even more concubines), rule by fiat, and crush, behead, hang, or otherwise mutilate dissidents, free thinkers, Christians, Jews, homosexuals, and other inconvenient souls. Other governments are ruled by fascist dictators who invade their neighbors, subvert democracy, fund terrorists, collude with Western powers in criminal schemes, illegally smuggle nuclear materials, and jail, starve, imprison, and murder children while living high on the hog.

All the while, these conspirators commit countless grievous acts of cruelty and barbarism. Though they may be savages, they’re not mindless ones. They hatch brilliantly audacious schemes to bring down skyscrapers with hijacked planes. They attack naval ships with speedboats. They manipulate the Internet, the international press, and various Western governments.

Now, call me crazy, but somewhere in there I think there’s enough material for Hollywood to “rip from the headlines” (as they say on Law and Order) some plausible bad guys and pretty good plot ideas.

Apparently I’m missing something.

Consider, for example, the last big movie of August: The Constant Gardener. Now, I haven’t seen it yet, so I’m not offering a review of the movie. Besides, from what I hear it’s a pretty good flick based on a pretty good novel by John Carré. The plot of both involves an elaborate conspiracy of Western governments and pharmaceutical companies that assassinate anyone who tries to uncover their fiendish plot to experiment on poor Africans for the benefit of rich Westerners. A trailer for the film declares that pharmaceutical companies are no better than arms dealers, preying on African poverty. The film’s director told National Public Radio that the drug companies are the “perfect bad guys.”

Now, notwithstanding the mistakes of major pharmaceutical companies, I think it’s fair to say, without fear of contradiction, “Are you on crack?!”

Nahh--just on the left. Speaking of Hollywood and moral relativism, the Libertas film blog looks at Sin City, recently issued on DVD, which Libertas describes as epitomizing "everything wrong with contemporary Hollywood":

Yes, yes, the city is a violent jungle of dripping alleys and sewers, yes, yes, human nature is bestial and sadistic, yes, yes, our social institutions are predatory and corrupt, yes, yes, the sun has been banished by perpetual symbolic darkness. There is a morality of sorts at work here, but it is so grimly existential that one can hardly tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys – they equally take for granted the meaninglessness of the universe; they are equally driven by instinct and impulse; they are equally capable of sadistic glee. All of this must seem pretty damn strange from the perspective of Des Moines or Salt Lake City or Biloxi, where the hours are not perpetually shrouded in a darkness and by no conceivable stretch of the imagination do human beings belly-creep through alleys like rats.

Too bad Hollywood seems to have given up on viewers in Des Moines, Salt Lake City, Biloxi and the rest of middle America.

It really is fascinating to compare Katrina with the December tsunami. In terms of media coverage, they've been disappointingly similar. But so far, in terms of corporate and celebrity relief, they've just been disappointing. Michelle Malkin wonders why Amazon.com hasn't posted any sort of announcement of support or relief:

Just saw this on Information Week. Amazon.com says it doesn't plan on helping with the Katrina relief efforts. The article notes that other tech companies are not jumping in to help:

[M]ainstream Web sites that had jumped to pull in money for the tsunami victims showed no evidence of repeating it here in the U.S. for Katrina's. Amazon.com, which raised more than $14 million for the American Red Cross in January via a donation link on its home page, didn't have one as of mid-day Monday. Nor did Google, Yahoo, MSN, or eBay, all of which hustled earlier in the year to put up donation links on their portals. (Google slapped up an "Information about Hurricane Katrina" link on its Spartan home page, but that led to news sources and stories.)

An Amazon spokesperson said that the online retailer had no plans to post a donation link on its site. "Each case is different," she said. "The Red Cross has essentially given over its entire site to donations. The tsunami came out of the blue, so it was an 'all hands on deck' situation, but the Red Cross has been getting ready for this and getting its message out there for several days."

2pm EDT update: Yahoo! posted this relief link. Reader/blogger Scott G. says Cisco is helping and passes along this info from the company's Intranet site...

"The recovery effort to aid communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina is growing and the response from Cisco started as news of the disaster began reaching employees. Volunteer teams in RTP and San Jose formed and will receive specialized training before they travel to the affected area. The volunteers will receive assignments and begin recovery work when they reach the site.

All donations from regular employees made to the American Red Cross in I-Give will be matched by the Cisco Systems Foundation up to US$10,000 per employee. The minimum individual employee gift is $50.00 in order to receive a match from the Cisco Foundation.Donation will be focused on immediate humanitarian relief efforts to assist local victims of the disaster."

Elsewhere, Michelle writes:

Question on many readers' minds:

Where are Hollywood and the Live Aid people?

Well, at least NBC is stepping up to the plate.

Update (5:08 PM PST): Amazon finally has a button on their homepage linking to the Red Cross.

Echoing the sentiments of one of our posts yesterday, James K. Glassman looks like the exploitation of Katrina by Gaia-worshipers:

Giant hurricanes are rare, but they are not new. And they are not increasing. To the contrary. Just go to the website of the National Hurricane Center and check out a table that lists hurricanes by category and decade. The peak for major hurricanes (categories 3,4,5) came in the decades of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when such storms averaged 9 per year. In the 1960s, there were 6 such storms; in the 1970s, 4; in the 1980s, 5; in the 1990s, 5; and for 2001-04, there were 3. Category 4 and 5 storms were also more prevalent in the past than they are now. As for Category 5 storms, there have been only three since the 1850s: in the decades of the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s.

But that doesn't stop an enviro-predator like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from writing on the Huffingtonpost website: "Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and - now -- Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children."

Or consider Jurgen Tritten, Germany's environmental minister, in an op-ed in the Frankfurter Rundschau. He wrote (according to a translation prepared for me): "By neglecting environmental protection, America's president shuts his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes like Katrina inflect on his country and the world's economy."

The bright side of Katrina, concludes Tritten, is that it will force President Bush to face facts. "When reason finally pays a visit to climate-polluter headquarters, the international community has to be prepared to hand America a worked-out proposal for the future of international climate protection."

He goes on, "There is only one possible route of action. Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced, and it has to happen worldwide." In other words, thanks to Katrina, we'll finally get Kyoto enforced. (He might start at home, by the way. Europe is not anywhere close to reducing CO2 to Kyoto standards. In fact, the U.S. is doing much better than many Kyoto ratifiers.)

Ross Gelbspan, in a particularly egregious, almost giddy piece in the Boston Globe that was reprinted in the International Herald Tribune, wrote that the hurricane was "nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service Katrina, [but] its real name was global warming." He also finds global warming responsible for droughts in the Midwest, strong winds in Scandinavia and heavy rain in Dubai. The reason for all this devastation, of course, is that the Bush Administration is controlled by coal and oil interests.

And the Independent, a widely read British newspaper, reported today that "Sir David King, the British Government's chief scientific adviser, has warned that global warming may be responsible for the devastation reaped by Hurricane Katrina." King contended that "the increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming."

The Kyoto advocates point to warmer ocean temperatures, but they ought to read their own favorite newspaper, The New York Times, which reported yesterday:

"Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming. But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught 'is very much natural,' said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season.'"

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt writes that Katrina shouldn't be exploited by ratings-worshipers either.

Update: Geez, speaking of exploiting Katrina...

There's an absolutely horrific-sounding thread on Free Republic.com tonight, which begins with this post:

It is with heavy heart I write this...

I have finally reconnected with my best friend who is a paramedic who was sent from Georgia 2 days ago to Gulf Port, Mississippi before the hurricane hit.

He just reached me within the last 10 mins via emergency cell phone to tell me he was alive.

Thousands of bodies have been discovered throughout Mississippi in Gulf Port, Waveland,Hancock County,Bay of St.Louis.

They are hanging in trees and they are pulling them out 30 at a time. Entire families found drowned in their homes and washing up on shore.

The stories he could tell me were brief. National Guard is on the scene and arresting anyone seen on the streets.

The numbers are staggering and what I have been told tonight will shake people to their foundation as the numbers will be coming out in the next 24-hours of just how many people have actually perished in these and 3 other beach communities.

More to follow....

Hopefully, regular readers here know that I'm not someone who believes in Salinger's Law--"if it's on the Internet, it must be true!"--and that's one post I hope is as wrong as humanly possible.

Sadly though, that may not be the case. South Mississippi's Sun Herald reports, "Hundreds feared dead" in Biloxi. Haley Barbour, a man I've never noticed to be a big fan of hyperbole, had this to say:

After touring the destruction by air, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said it is not of case of homes being severely damaged, “they’re simply not there...I can only imagine that this is what Hiroshima looked like 60 years ago.”

Meanwhile, New Orleans' mayor is indirectly quoted as saying, ala this article's headline, "Entire City Will Soon Be Underwater".

Even allowing for the media's "Hurricane Porn"-style hype, this is terrible news coming out of the Gulf Coast.

Glenn Reynolds has a list of charities involved in Katrina-related relief efforts.

Give whatever you can.

James Glassman, Tech Central Station's publisher (and prior to that, The New Republic's), has a warts and all look at Jude Wanniski, who, as we noted earlier, died today:

Eventually, as Bloomberg.com noted in an obituary on Tuesday, Wanniski persuaded "then-California Gov. Reagan to make supply-side economics the centerpiece of his 1980 campaign for the presidency." Today, classical or supply-side ideas are taken for granted, even by economists and politicians on the left.

One of the reasons I was drawn to Wanniski was his faith in the innate intelligence of average citizens, both American and otherwise. Here too, he was ahead of his time. The left wing, which has turned more and more elitist, now rejects ideas like Social Security personal accounts because, it believes, most people won't be able to invest reasonably.

By contrast, Wanniski understood that common folks comprise an army of capitalists. He started Chapter 4 of his book [The Way The World Works] this way:

"The global electorate is, and always has been, striving toward an ideal system of political economics that can maximize welfare for all its component parts. More specifically, the driving force of civilization is a quest for a system that will maximize capital, for only when capital is maximized can welfare be maximized."

Another of Wanniski's accomplishments was to highlight the role played by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. Now, it is widely believed that the tariff, which touched off a trade war that throttled commerce among nations, at the very least prolonged the global Depression.

Read the rest, particularly the cautionary message that was Wanniski's later career.

Daniel Drezner looks at "Helicopter Parents"--sort of like show biz parents, except they hover close to their kids' academic careers.

The mainstream media are of course totally objective and without bias or ideology. Just ask Jack Cafferty of CNN, who had this snarky exchange with Wolf Blitzer:

WB: It's...what can I say. It's a horrible situation. Did you ever think in our lifetime a major American city like New Orleans, population a half a million, could be in a disaster situation like this?

JC: No, you don't think of it. But then, if you look back at the history, Wolf, I guess in a way, they were sort of were living on borrowed time. 1965 was the last big hurricane. The Army Corps of Engineers went in and built those levees to withstand a Category 3 storm. Apparently, that was all the technology and/or the budget would allow at the time. And Category is not as strong as it gets. And one day, two days ago, the unthinkable happened. And you know, like I said, they've been living on borrowed time. You have to wonder, watching these pictures and listening to these accounts, if we'll ever see the City of New Orleans as we all remember the Big Easy. And where's President Bush? Is he still on vacation?

WB: He's cut short his vacation. He's coming back to Washington tomorrow.

JC: Oh, that'd be a good idea. He was out in San Diego, I think at a Naval Air Station, giving a speech on Japan and the war in Iraq today. Based on his approval rating in the latest polls, my guess is getting back to work might not be a terrible idea. That's not the question of this hour, however.

Duane Peterson has an audio clip of the exchange, and comments:

What an insufferable jerk. First of all, today is also the 60th anniversary of V-J day. The speech obviously got upstaged today by events in the Gulf Coast, but the speech was a really important one, linking the resolve to re-build Japan with the resolve necessary to rebuild Iraq into its own version of a freedom-loving democracy. Bush wasn't on vacation today, and Cafferty knows it.

Second, when Bush is on "vacation," that doesn't mean it's like a vacation you or I take. He still gets briefings all through the day every day. He still has to make decisions every day. Cafferty either knows it and took a cheap political shot in the wake of a catastrophe, or he's an idiot.

Third, Bush had already declared the areas hit as disaster areas before the storm ever got there. Once it was determined that the storm was going to be a monster and strike near New Orleans, Bush made the decision so that the relief dollars and federal assistance, including FEMA, was in the pipeline by the time the storm was happening. Once again, Cafferty's cheap shot was really low, because Bush did as much as he could do, short of issuing an executive order outlawing the storm from arriving.

Fourth, if Bush was in Washington, would that make life any easier for the people affected by the storm? What if Bush came to down to see for himself. Would that help in the relief effort underway? Is Bush supposed to drop down the line of the Coast Guard helicopters and help pluck roof-bound refugees to safety himself?

Nice going, Jack. You're the first moron in the media that supposedly has credibility to inject politics into what could turn out to the be greatest natural disaster this country has faced, and you did it while the disaster is still unfolding.

Ironically, the media has the all-too-recent Indian Ocean tsumani as a template for their coverage. And once again, they're making the same mistakes they did nine months ago.

Incidentally, Matt Drudge is reporting that the Navy's been called into help. How long before there's a repeat of this classic groaner?

Update: Ed Morrissey observes Old Europe acting as equally reactionary as old media. Frank Martin's response?

Over the history of the United States our answer to the needs of the people of other countries as they face natural and man made disasters is “how can we help”.

The European answer is a shrug, the words "you deserve it" and a giggle.

And that my friends, is what makes us who we are and who they are.

Exactly.

The folks at JP Tools contacted me and asked if I'd be interested in reviewing their Journeyman Guitar Tool, a sort of Swiss Army Knife for guitarists, making it relatively painless to change a string during a gig. The result of that exchange is online at Blogcritics.org.

James Panero of The New Criterion writes that the New York Times is keeping their photo captions sleek, short and streamlined--lest they actually properly label a photo of a looter wading through the aftermath of Katrina.

"Top Scientists Warn: Fire Make Sea Gods Angry!" was the title of a satiric post by Iowahawk written shortly after the global warming ghouls came out to Monday morning quarterback the causes of the horrific Christmas tsunami last year. And James Taranto notes today that they're at it again with Katrina.

As Duane Patterson, Hugh Hewitt's Generalissimo wrote last December:

You'll forgive me if I and the family and friends of the victims of this disaster don't want to subscribe to agenda-driven eco-political junk science right now. If the Earth's temperature were one degree cooler at the poles, and the ice caps were a foot thicker, this earthquake would still have happened. The tsunami would still have been just as deadly.

These people need prayer, aid, and comfort right now. They don't need to hear about fluorocarbons and CO2 levels could possibly, maybe, if the trends continue, make the effects of something this catastrophic even worse.

I'm beginning to think these eco-freaks are not even human anymore. They're robotic. It doesn't matter who lives or who dies. Whatever happens in the world, they must spin it into a way that suits their agenda, which is Earth-worship.

Reuters, shame on you...Again.

This time it's the Boston Globe and the Huffington Post, but we certainly concur with the rest of Duane's sentiments.

Update: In a post titled, "The Reactionary Party", David Cohen writes:

The cold winter and spring of 2005-2005 was obviously problematic for global warming enthusiasts. The answer the crafted was that global warming causes cooling, too. So, if it's hot: global warming. If it's cold: global warming. The left has truly become the reactionary party: any change is bad. Of course, static weather over the long-term could only result from human interference in the environment, but that would be good interference.

I have to admit, though, that my weather-cynicism, finely honed by years of the local news spending days covering blizzards that never happen, let me down this time. New Orleans and Mississippi seem to have suffered a tragedy as bad as the worst projections of the tv weather ghouls. This Wiki page, found via Michelle Malkin, offers links to aid agencies and fundraising events.

Don Singleton has some related thoughts and links.

Jude Wanniski, a Wall Street Journal associate editor in the 1970s, who coined the phrase "Supply-Side Economics", and then wrote an eminently readable (and modestly-titled) book on the subject, The Way The World Works, died of a heart attack yesterday at age 69.

As the late Robert Bartley of the Journal (who released a very good book of his own on the subject) wrote in 1989:

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I have a short primer on blogs in the September/October issue of TechLiving magazine that you might enjoy--it should be arriving at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble shortly. I think the text is onnly available online to subscribers; if that changes, I'll let you know.

Will Collier has some thoughts on Hurricane Katrina's immediate aftermath, and the dangers of snap judgements:

As the storm moved north yesterday, a number of commentators, both online and in the major media, were already starting to yowl that the pre-storm predictions of mass destruction were overblown and unwarranted. After all, they said, the thing went through New Orleans, and look--the city's still there. There's no 'giant bowl of toxic gumbo' (to paraphrase many, many comments). Heck, I can see the Superdome on CNN, and it's beat up, but it's not an island or anything!

With one of the major levees failing this morning, several parishes under water (few of which could be reached by people with cameras yesterday), an entirely unknown death toll, hundreds of people trapped by flooding, and untold devestation on the Mississippi and Alabama Gulf coasts, it's starting to look like the instant post-storm criticism was itself premature.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune has, for the first time in its history, published an electronic-only edition today--a notably ironic achievement, since almost nobody in the city has electricity, much less internet access. It's in .pdf format, and it's heartbreaking.

He's got several links in his original post, so click over to read it.

Michelle Malkin has been doing an incredible job blogging Katrina. This post, which contains many links, has a gut-wrenching overhead view of an extremely flooded New Orleans. In its follow-up, Michelle explains that the military is stepping in to help.

Meanwhile, California Yankee has a list of ways you can help Katrina's victims.

Daniel Drezner and Michele Catalano each look at what happens when television news lets its emotions get the best of itself and substitutes hyperbole for serious coverage of hurricanes. TV of course, is built on such emotionalism, but as Glenn Reynolds writes, decades of hype has its price:

God supposedly looks after fools and drunkards, and after watching some of the coverage from Bourbon Street, I'd say He will have his hands full tomorrow. But though some people might want to, in the words of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, "think of it as evolution in action," I think there's another issue here: The wages of hurricane hype.

News outlets generally, and cable news channels in particular, tend to overhype hurricanes. But while I hope that this will just be another case of media hysteria, I can't help feel that the previous wolf-crying played a major role in people's complacency.

If things turn out as badly as feared, complacency won't be a problem for a while. But I hope that people in the press will remember the wages of crying wolf in other contexts. Too much hype, and people tune out.

That's a cautionary note for other media to remember as well, of course.

Update: Welcome, Daou Report readers.

As we've mentioned before, Hugh Hewitt has adopted quite an interesting strategy for interviews with the mainstream media--he plays the interviews on the air, and lets his audience hear the dialogue and read its transcript, which allows them to compare the initial conversation with the finished product.

Earlier today, Hugh ran his taped interview with L.A. Times columnist Tim Rutten, designed to coincide with the publication of Rutten's article. Of the interview, and Rutten's take on the media world, Carol Platt Liebau, a frequent guesthost of the show, writes:

What's most striking about the entire interview is Rutten's myopia. He reminds me of many of the people with whom I attended college and law school -- people who have lived so steeped in liberalism that they don't even realize that their world view is inevitably infected with it. Obviously, people like Rutten would believe that someone who was raised in the Bible Belt, attended Bob Jones or Liberty University, and then went to work for a religious publication would be biased, albeit perhaps unintentionally. Why can't he (and other journalists) acknowledge that, conversely, people who are raised in liberal strongholds, attend an Ivy League (or some other thoroughly secular) school, and then work for an a- or even anti-religious publication likewise are biased?

Here's a theory about why journalists are so deeply invested in the myth of complete objectivity: It's a marker of professionalism, in their eyes. Journalists believe they are smart, they believe they are performing a high order public service -- yet they're underpaid and underappreciated. And there is no particular degree or certification required to do their jobs. So the only way they can manifest their "professionalism" is through adhering to certain conventions.

But as soon as they admit that true "objectivity" doesn't exist, in their own minds, they've lost any claim to professional status -- because then they're just guys with opinions . . . like everyone else.

Even so, there's no disputing that the LA Times is infused with a liberal bias that's all the stronger for its refusal or inability to detect it. Exhibit A is this piece from last weekend's Magazine. It's a serious Q & A with a retired Claremont professor of theology who believes that the United States government perpetrated 9/11. What's the motivation? Global domination. Please. This is wing-nut weirdness.

If some retired professor believed that the government was placing fluoride in the water to facilitate mind control for nefarious left-wing purposes, surely The Times wouldn't give them the time of day. Yet they print this. But there's no bias. No, sireee.

Well, to be fair, these days, the fellow ranting about the evils of fluoride would probably be Ralph Nader--and him, they'd print.

Seriously though, what I find interesting is the split that's appeared in journalism since the Blogosphere took off: while the vast majority of newspaper and TV journalists still use the "we're not biased--we're totally objective!" cant, a growing number are now willing to admit to some form of bias, if it's safe for them to do so--in other words, if they're very secure in their jobs, or approaching retirement.

In a typically thought provoking post, Neo-Neocon begins by posting a question from one her readers:

I've always wondered why AIDS is such a "hip" and "cool" cause. Malaria kills 3 times as many and there are very effective ways to prevent and cure it. I hear nothing but crickets chirping when mentioned as number 4 on the list of "worlds deadliest killer". So pardon my skepticism at the tears shed for AIDS victims. It has nothing to do with caring. I guess Bono or Elizabeth Taylor don't have friends with malaria.

10,700,000 children died in the world last year and 57% were from causes incident to malaria. That's just the children.

She replies:

I haven't checked on anonymous's statistics, but it's my impression that the general point he/she is making is correct: fighting the scourge of malaria is not particularly chic or popular in this country as compared to combatting AIDS. So, what goes on here?

I'll take a stab at an answer. My take on it is that a new disease will always gets more attention than an old one because people are accustomed to the latter, and the new one grabs their interest at first merely because it is new. And I am in agreement that a disease that affects the US and western Europe instead of mainly Africa or other third-world countries (AIDS, as opposed to malaria) will definitely provoke more interest, because in the case of the former, "the bell tolls for thee." It is just human nature to be more upset about something that can potentially affect you and your loved ones rather than strangers in a far-off place.

I think there's something else going on as well. The idea of a disease spread by the type of sexual behavior that was championed during the sexual revolution of the 60s is particularly threatening to the generation that grew up during that time. There was supposed to be no downside to such liberation, and it's a bitter and difficult pill to swallow when the dreams of the 60s die (sometimes it seems as though there are no dreams of the 60s that haven't died). The fact that AIDS first appeared, at least in the western world, in the gay male population--which had so recently undergone its own liberation--was also highly ironic and difficult for those who had championed that cause. So it's no surprise that the anti-AIDS campaign would be especially well-supported among people who believe in those other causes.

Read the rest, as well as the comments, which are spot-on, including this one:

The sovereign treatment for malaria is DDT, which is worse than plutonium or something, according to the Silent Spring school of environmental wonderfulness.

Talking about malaria and the zillions of death since Rachel Carson wrote her book would point a finger at those who are, although impossible to embarrass, interested in avoiding blame.

I concur.

Ever since DVD took off as a format, the clock has been ticking on the lifespan of VHS, which is has been around for at least 25 years. The Digital Bits reports that it's just been dealt another blow--20th Century Fox will not be releasing Revenge of the Sith onto videotape:

Finally this morning (our last news item), there's confirmation from 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm that the release of Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, certain to be one of the biggest sellers of the year, will be DVD only. There will be no VHS version released. You can read more at Video Business. It's just one more sign that VHS is soon to be an ex-format.

Considering what a wonderfully flexible format DVD is--both recordable DVD and its older, pre-recorded cousin--it can't happen quickly enough.

Last week, we linked to Mark Steyn's piece on Israel's pullout from Gaza, in which he wrote:

It was my National Review colleague David Frum who came up with the clearest assessment to date of the Israeli strategy: “Could it be that Sharon is calling the bluff of Western governments and the Arab states? By creating the very Palestinian state that those governments and those states pretend to want but actually dread Sharon is forcing them to end their pretense and acknowledge the truth.”

This week, Steyn posted a brilliant letter from one of his readers, Simon Brockwell, from Sydney, Australia, on the origins of the Palestinian movement:

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The California state government has misplaced a few of its vehicles: 30,000 of them, to be exact:

An examination of California's inventory has revealed that almost of half of the state's cars and trucks are unaccounted for.

The study concluded that 30,000 of the states 70,000 vehicles are missing -- everything from Caltrans trucks, to CHP cars, to fire rigs, to prison vehicles. The audit of state-owned property was ordered by Governor Schwarzenegger, and found state agencies had no idea what they owned.

"It was very bad," said Fred Aguiar, head of the State and Consumer Services Agency. "We were amazed at how inadequate the information was. The data coming from departments and agencies was terrible."

It was so terrible, in fact, the state found that one agency had recently purchased $4 million in new vehicles but had no record of where it bought them.

Assemblyman Joe Nation, D-San Rafael, thinks -- or hopes, we should say -- that the lost autos may be unaccounted for older cars and trucks.

"Caltrans probably has the largest fleet in the state," said Nation. "I would bet there are a lot of old Caltrans trucks sitting in yards that just aren't being used because they don't run well anymore. Still, not an excuse."

The state has since changed the rules on record-keeping, but for now California's missing cars and trucks may simply be a lost cause.

Via Betsy Newmark.

Via PoliPundit, the American Prowler notes that Warren Buffett bet against America--and it cost him:

Warren Buffett is bearish on the United States, and he's bullish on Europe. For the first time in his life, starting in 2002, Mr. Buffett entered the foreign exchange markets and shorted the dollar. This rare macro-economic bet was based on a belief that U.S. consumers and the U.S. government were spending beyond their means, and that the trade deficit was a sign of economic weakness.

While his short position was profitable in 2004, he has lost more than half a billion dollars so far in 2005. Some Wall Street sources suggest that his breakeven exchange rate is $1.22/euro, so with the euro trading near $1.21 in mid-June, his short position was seriously in the red.

Buffett's anti-American investment sentiment has cost Berkshire Hathaway shareholders dearly. During the 12 months ending in mid-June, his stock price was down roughly 7 percent, while the S&P 500 was up 5 percent. The stock market voted "non" on this Berkshire investment strategy, just like the French and Dutch voted against the European constitution.

And, of course, these two developments are inextricably linked. The French voted against the constitution because they are afraid it will force them to give up their 35-hour workweek and generous social welfare system. This system forces French taxpayers to support an unemployed contingent that has reached 10 percent of the labor force.

It's hard to figure out why Warren Buffett is so down on the U.S. economy and so enthusiastic about Europe's. But gloom and doom forecasts about the U.S. economy are a dime-a-dozen these days. It's as if we rolled back the clock 20 years and it's the early 1980s all over again.

Then, it was President Reagan's tough stance against Communism, large budget deficits, growing trade deficits, Germany, and Japan that were bothering so many pundits. Today, it is President Bush's tough stance against terrorism, trade and budget deficits, China, and India that stir fear in the hearts of the doomsters.

The gloom and doom of the early 1980s proved to be nonsense, just as the current pessimism will prove wrong as well. Corporate profits have climbed to an all-time record high, the U.S. stock market is more undervalued than it has ever been, and the unemployment rate has fallen back to 5.1 percent.

Incidentally, back in 2003, Andy Kessler of Tech Central Station had an interesting look at Buffett with the serene title of "Warren Buffett Hates Your Guts".

Charles Johnson writes:

Excuse me for a minute. Something seems to have happened to my LGF Irony Meter; the little needle is pegged up against the end pin and it’s not budging.

Oh! Never mind; I’ve discovered the reason: Che Guevara’s family to fight use of famed photo.

Who'd have thought that Latin American communism would eventually boil down to T-shirts and royality checks? (Oh, and movie rights, of course.)

(Well, probably these guys...)

Michelle Malkin has another post on Hurricane Katrina that's loaded with linkage. It's titled, "The Destruction Begins", but ends on a reassuring note:

Fox News Channel's Shep Smith reports from the scene that "The French Quarter looks very good...New Orleans got lucky again..."

But not that lucky--portions of the roof have blown off the Superdome.

Via Betsy Newmark, Peter Bronson of the Cincinnati Enquirer looks at the media's forcefield--something I observed on maximum strength last week, as I spent more time watching cable TV news (and consequently less time in the Blogosphere) at my parents' house than I had in ages:

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Will Collier updated his post on Hurricane Katrina (which we linked to earlier today) to include a National Weather Service forecast. I don't think I've ever read a more frightening forecast in my life--it sounds akin to waiting for an atomic bomb to drop. Will describes it as "very grim reading", which if anything, is an understatement:

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Pay no attention to the dozens of cameramen behind the curtain...

Update: Dave Kopel has some related thoughts.

Samizdata's blogger's glossary credits James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal for inventing the term "Dowdified":

Dowdification

Used as noun or verb. The willful omission of one or more words so the meaning of the statement is no longer understood but that the statement suits the needs of the writer in launching an ad hominem attack whether or not the construction is truthful or grammatically complete.

Named after Maureen Dowd, based on her manufacture of a quote attributed to President Bush in her May 14, 2003 column (as first reported by Robert Cox on TheNationalDebate.com).

The latest victim of the Times' Dowdification machine? Condoleeza Rice.

Makes you wonder how many quotes the media invented, distorted, and altered, prior to the Blogosphere, huh?

I'm happy to be back in California today. But Ilya Shapiro is still in the "New Jersey State of Mind", over at Tech Central Station.

When Nina and I visited New Orleans last year and drove around the surrounding Louisiana countryside (sampling the odd drive-through daiquiri bar along the way...), we noted several roads with signs indicating that they're Hurricane Escape Routes.

They're getting used this weekend, Will Collier writes:

If you're in the area, get out, and do it now. This is not just another hurricane that might turn away and hit Galveston or Mobile instead. You can't afford to take that chance this time.

For everybody else, get ready to help. I don't mean to be a harbinger of doom here, and I'm certainly hoping that Katrina fizzles out, a la Dennis, but there's a very real possibility that this could be our tsunami.

Glenn Reynolds has more; and these guys are probably getting a workout today as well.

The memory hole was George Orwell's negative image of a mid-20th century office building's pneumatic tube system in 1984. Documents with facts that no longer fit Oceania's meme of the day were simply tossed into it, where they would be instantly incinerated by scalding flames. It was based on the old adage, "In the Soviet Union, the future is known; it's the past which is always changing."

Since 9/11, the memory hole has gotten quite a workout by the mainstream media, as any connection between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and terrorism has gone up in smoke, but fortunately, the Blogosphere isn't quite as forgetful. We posted some examples last year of the press in the Clinton-era 1990s discussing Osama bin Laden's connections with Saddam Hussein, and Christopher Hitchens has noted two more terrorists that Saddam gleefully sponsored--one of whom was the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Fritz Hollings, the recently retired Democrat senator from South Carolina, entered yet another example into the Congressional record on September 12, 2002. Didn't hear about it until Captain's Quarters rediscovered it today? You're not alone, despite its ready access via Google.

Update: Curt of Flopping Aces notes:

According those on the left Saddam never would have helped Osama. Here we have a editorial by Saddam's own newspaper, which you know would never have been printed if Saddam disapproved, telling the world about Osama's plan...and gleeful about it.

But still you will hear the left screaming, "there is no proof!"

Be sure to check out the other posts in his Connections series.

Also via the latest Carnival of the Classiness, Dean Esmay has a simple idea whose time has come--thanks to the technology that allows you to read this (and/or start a blog of your own):

I say that having a pack of baying jackals in your basement who pound you and your staff every day with a ridiculous set of hypercritical and often shallow second-guessing "questions" has probably done more to make Presidents feel isolated than any other force in modern life. I know that if I were President, I'd feel more worried about that gaggle of hostile monkeys and my supposed need to appease them than I would be about assassination attempts.

We, the people, do not need any self-appointed "interlocutor" to the President. The White House can issue its statements, and the Congress can issue its statements, and the people can weigh them. When the next election comes around, we will make our choice at the ballot box.

I for one would find it enormously refreshing if the entire White House press corps was summarily ejected en masse. The White House can issue daily briefs over the internet, and perhaps hold a small--emphasis on small--press conference once or twice a month, with a handful of seasoned, respected and respectful reporters who get to ask the press secretary a few salient questions. When the President felt he (or she) needed to address the public directly, he could do so as he already does, via speeches. If he occasionally felt the need to talk the press, he could do so at the times of his choosing, to members of the press of his choosing.

All of this would not make the President more isolated. It would make him more able to do the job he was elected to do without the constant distraction that the feces-flinging monkey corps--I mean, the White House press corps--creates.

You want "someone" to ask harsh questions of the President? I think the leaders of the opposition party in Congress are more than capable of doing that. I also think that the President is as capable of reading the paper and watching the news as I am, and that neither the President nor the public has any pressing need for instantanteous responses to publicly-aired questions.

I note again, by the way, that I do not mean this President. I mean any President, of any party. I utterly despise the self-appointed "interlocutor" press corps. When I don't just despise them, I outright hate them. And I don't care if I hate whoever's President, because I hate the feces-flinging monkey corps even more.

We the people do not need the press to be our stand-in. Indeed, the very notion represents everything I hate about journalism as it has functioned since the Nixon years. Which is part of why I cheer whenever I notice these people being bypassed.

Exactly.

Mister Snitch writes about a Republican president who was:

Accused of changing the rationale for 'his' war, and hounded for mismanaging it. Mocked for his public speaking. Ridiculed as an idiot. Blamed for dividing the nation. Charged with incompetence in his administration. Accused of trampling on the Constitution. Engaged in censorship of the press. Pressured to demand a key Cabinet Advisor's resignation.

It's not who you think it is...

Hugh Hewitt has some thoughts on new media and old.

I'd like to share a belated (for reasons discussed here) welcome to readers of Will Franklin's more or less eponymously-titled Willisms, as this post of ours on the horrors of modern architecture was nominated to be part of his latest "Carnival of the Classiness". He's got a great list of posts--be sure to click on over and read them all, including #19, a three word review of Oliver Stone's Alexander that's no doubt entirely correct in its assumptions.

(And greetings from the Chicago American Airlines Admirals Club, where I'm between flights back to the West Coast.)

Like Mr. E. Blair, his hero and inspiration, Christopher Hitchens is that rare man of the left who truly understands the evils of totalitarianism, no matter what its source:

I have a ready answer to those who accuse me of being an agent and tool of the Bush-Cheney administration (which is the nicest thing that my enemies can find to say). Attempting a little levity, I respond that I could stay at home if the authorities could bother to make their own case, but that I meanwhile am a prisoner of what I actually do know about the permanent hell, and the permanent threat, of the Saddam regime. However, having debated almost all of the spokespeople for the antiwar faction, both the sane and the deranged, I was recently asked a question that I was temporarily unable to answer. "If what you claim is true," the honest citizen at this meeting politely asked me, "how come the White House hasn't told us?"

I do in fact know the answer to this question. So deep and bitter is the split within official Washington, most especially between the Defense Department and the CIA, that any claim made by the former has been undermined by leaks from the latter. (The latter being those who maintained, with a combination of dogmatism and cowardice not seen since Lincoln had to fire General McClellan, that Saddam Hussein was both a "secular" actor and--this is the really rich bit--a rational and calculating one.)

There's no cure for that illusion, but the resulting bureaucratic chaos and unease has cornered the president into his current fallback upon platitude and hollowness. It has also induced him to give hostages to fortune. The claim that if we fight fundamentalism "over there" we won't have to confront it "over here" is not just a standing invitation for disproof by the next suicide-maniac in London or Chicago, but a coded appeal to provincial and isolationist opinion in the United States. Surely the elementary lesson of the grim anniversary that will shortly be upon us is that American civilians are as near to the front line as American soldiers.

It is exactly this point that makes nonsense of the sob-sister tripe pumped out by the Cindy Sheehan circus and its surrogates. But in reply, why bother to call a struggle "global" if you then try to localize it? Just say plainly that we shall fight them everywhere they show themselves, and fight them on principle as well as in practice, and get ready to warn people that Nigeria is very probably the next target of the jihadists. The peaceniks love to ask: When and where will it all end? The answer is easy: It will end with the surrender or defeat of one of the contending parties. Should I add that I am certain which party that ought to be? Defeat is just about imaginable, though the mathematics and the algebra tell heavily against the holy warriors. Surrender to such a foe, after only four years of combat, is not even worthy of consideration.

You know what to do next.

President Bush has long been known as a keen poker player, who's uses his skills at the game as a part of his "strategery". But Mark Steyn notes that Ariel Sharon is another leader who sounds quite comfortable around the circular green felt table:

It was my National Review colleague David Frum who came up with the clearest assessment to date of the Israeli strategy: “Could it be that Sharon is calling the bluff of Western governments and the Arab states? By creating the very Palestinian state that those governments and those states pretend to want but actually dread Sharon is forcing them to end their pretense and acknowledge the truth.”

The Frum thesis sounds right to me. In Britain since July 7th, political figures have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to explain how suicide bombers in London are somehow different from suicide bombers in Tel Aviv – unwilling, even as the double-deckers are exploding across Bloomsbury, to abandon their fetishization of the Palestinian cause, and unable to see that in an ever more Islamified continent the Europeans are the new Jews. Maybe an Islamist statelet on the Mediterranean will concentrate even European minds.

This then is the audacious gamble of the Gaza withdrawal: the best way to demonstrate that the Palestinians are undeserving of a state is to force one upon them. It’s a dangerous move, but in a tough neighborhood there aren’t any other kinds.

Victor Davis Hanson has some very much related thoughts.

"The co-founders will say only that there will be a significant unveiling in the fall of 2005." That's from the About Us page of the new--and very temporary--Pajamas Media site, and it's safe to say they mean it. But it's great to see the first phases of their Web site up. Click on over to read it.

(Might as well bookmark it now--you'll be there a lot in the coming months.)

Update: Charles Johnson has some additional thoughts and background material on his own Little Green Footballs site.

Well that was fun.

A few hours after I posted my brief post eulogizing the death of Bob Moog on Monday, my Weblog died in a sense as well. The speed required to log on had gotten progressively longer, and longer, and after complaining several times to my Website’s hosting company, they did what any responsible company would do.

They turned off my site’s CGI, completely stranding me. The site was still readable, but I couldn’t post to it, and the site’s search function was disabled.

I think it was variation on one of the laws of Star Trek: the CGI of the many sites on one shared webhost outweigh the needs of one blogger to update his site.

This all happened on Monday. On Tuesday, I flew out to New Jersey, to visit my parents. In between spending time with my parents, I spent a frenzied couple of days trying to find a tech support firm that specializes in Movable Type. (I tried contacting Stacy Tabb, who redesigned this site last year, but for the past few weeks, she hasn’t been answering emails. I can only assume she’s on some sort of extended hiatus.)

After a few false tries, I found Bona Fide Style.com, via their ad on Ed Morrissey’s Captain’s Quarters site. Mel from BFS returned my email, and seems to have fixed things.

Unfortunately, trackbacks have been disabled. They seem to be the cause of the much of the problems, and I had gotten increasingly inundated by "Texas Hold 'Em Poker" style spam trackbacks. It’s a shame that these spam artists are quickly ruining trackbacks for legit blogs, but certainly the handwriting has been on the wall for quite some time.

So, minus trackbacks, we’re back! Watch for regular posting to begin again shortly.

Via Roger L. Simon and Atlas Shrugged, another member of Hollywood bravely risks ostracism and career suicide by coming out of the closet; Emmy-winning screenwriter Robert J. Avrech:

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With the 2008 Olympics in Beijing only a few years away, graphic artists are getting busy planning logos for the event. This one, found via The Corner, seems particularly appropriate.

As spotted by James Taranto:

"Sheehan Gets Surprise Visit From Woodstock Artists"--headline, ScrappleFace.com, Aug. 17

"They Are Stardust, and in Texas: At the Crawford Protest Camp, Growing Echoes of Woodstock"--headline and subheadline, Washington Post, Aug. 22

One of those performing at Camp Casey was Joan Baez, whom Norm Geras has a rejoinder to.

Meanwhile, Ann Althouse asks:

Should Democrats bring back the Vietnam era anti-war imagery, with folksinging gatherings and get-out-now rhetoric? I can understand wanting to express yourself that way if that's what you feel, but you know it didn't win elections back then. There were some intense events, like the Democratic Convention of 1968, but then Nixon got elected.

Nostalgie De La Left is a topic we've explored a few times around here.

Interesting convergence of posts today by Ed Morrissey and Charles Johnson.

A friend in Manhattan sent me a link to this BBC article; Bob Moog was one of the great pioneers of musical synthesizers. Indeed; for much of the 1970s, his last name was synonymous with synthesizers, the same way that in the 1950s and '60s, saying the words "Fender Bass" to any musician caused instant recognition of a new type of instrument and its inventor.

In the 1980s, synthesizers seemed to usurp the electric guitar as the dominant instrument in popular music, becoming more wildly popular than Moog could have possibly imagined. It was for very much the same reason as the electric guitar became possible: it was relatively easy to learn how to play competently, and was capable of a universe of cool sounds.

These days, both instruments share the stage with a sort of wary respect, and a large degree of cross-over is possible. Beginning in his Jeff Beck and Miami Vice days, Jan Hammer used a MiniMoog through a guitar amp to create an amazingly convincing electric guitar sound, and guitarists can play synthesizers themselves, with the right sort of interface.

Moog's instruments of the '70s, particularly the MiniMoog, remain popular with musicians such as Hammer, who incorporate them into their line-ups of more advanced instruments in the same sort of way guitarists covet electric guitars from the 1950s: these early devices, while outpaced by newer synths with many more features, are still capable of some pretty nifty sounds.

These days, software-based synthesizers are the rage--allowing a computer to store literally thousands of different sounds. And yet, many of these 21st century programs contain instruments patterned after Dr. Moog's.

Not a bad legacy for any musician or inventor.

(Also on Blogcritics, with some Amazon links to Moog-related books and even a documentary DVD.)

Michael Barone compares the conventional wisdom going into the 2004 presidential election with the actual results, and finds some surprising discrepancies between perception and reality:

• While both the Bush and Kerry campaigns concentrated on turning out the maximum number of the party faithful, the Bush campaign "created an organization unlike any seen before, a networking organization that far surpassed what the Democrats were doing." During the fall of 2003, for example, the news media marveled at Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean's list of 600,000 e-mail addresses. Virtually unreported, however, was the fact that the Bush campaign had collected six million e-mail addresses. For the general election campaign, compared to the 233,000 volunteers assembled by the Democratic National Committee, the Bush campaign recruited six times as many, or an unprecedented 1.4 million. Thus, the Democratic turnout effort mostly "depended on paid workers persuading strangers to get out and vote." The 1.4 million GOP volunteers, however, were deployed through sophisticated networks that enabled them to use tailored messages in their contacts with prospective voters who had much in common with themselves. Boy Scout leaders, for example, were dispatched to contact other Boy Scout volunteers.

• Contrary to conventional wisdom, which held that Democrats would benefit from a very high turnout in 2004, President Bush won an election that included a historic increase in turnout. Not only did total turnout increase by 16 percent in 2004, but turnout as a percentage of eligible voters soared from 51 percent to 61 percent. Even though John Kerry received eight million more votes in 2004 than Al Gore got in 2000, Mr. Kerry's 59-million total, which was the second-highest in history, still fell three million short of Mr. Bush's all-time record of 62 million votes, which represented a stunning 23 percent increase over 2000.

• Excluding the 1916-1928 period, when women entered the electorate in large numbers, turnout during the 110 years preceding 2004 increased by more than 14 percent only four times: 1896, 1936, 1952 and 1992. Both the 1896 election, when Republican William McKinley won the presidency, and the 1936 election, when President Roosevelt won re-election in a landslide, led to national majorities that lasted more than 30 years. Noting that President Eisenhower apparently had no inclination to build a lasting GOP majority and observing (no fewer than three times) that Bill Clinton "failed" to build a lasting coalition after his 1992 triumph, Mr. Barone reveals that President Bush's 23 percent vote increase in 2004 approximated the 22 percent vote increase achieved by Roosevelt in 1936. While the Bush 51 percent majority in 2004 was much smaller than Roosevelt's 61 percent in 1936, the results of the intervening midterm congressional elections were similar. Prior to the Republican successes in 2002, Mr. Barone reports, "[n]o incumbent president's party had increased its number of seats in both houses [of Congress] in an off-year election since Roosevelt's Democratic Party in 1934."

• Recalling that his post-2000 commentary described America as "the 49-percent nation," evenly split between the two parties, Mr. Barone today concludes that "America is now, perhaps momentarily, or perhaps at the beginning of a long period, a 51-percent nation, a majority -- a narrow majority -- Republican nation." Exit polling last year revealed party identification at 37 percent for both Republicans and Democrats, making 2004 "the first election in which Republicans achieved parity in party identification since the invention of random-sampling polling in the 1930s."

• In the safe Bush states (213 electoral votes) and the safe Kerry states (179 electoral votes), a similar pattern prevailed. In both sets of states, Mr. Bush increased his vote share by more than Mr. Kerry did, prompting Mr. Barone to observe: "The 2004 results showed the red states getting redder and the blue states getting less blue."

• Religion once again proved to be one of the demographic variables correlating most directly with voter behavior. Mr. Bush received 78 percent of the vote of white evangelical Protestants, who comprised 23 percent of the electorate. Raising his share by 5 percentage points, the president managed to capture 52 percent of the Catholic vote "against the first Catholic nominee since 1960."

• Mr. Bush also benefited from a huge "marriage gap -- a gap that is far wider than the oft-touted gender gap." Married people, who comprised 63 percent of the electorate, voted 57-42 for Mr. Bush.

• Conventional wisdom held that Republicans would raise much more money than Democrats, but that, too, was disproved. The Kerry campaign, the DNC and the Democratic 527 organizations spent $344 million on ads during the campaign. That was more than $55 million above what the pro-Bush forces spent. George Soros and the other wealthy contributors who were so instrumental in funding the Democratic 527s underwrote a TV campaign that "seethed with Bush hatred." According to post-election surveys, however, the TV assault turned out not to be very persuasive overall. While the anti-Bush ads did connect with the Bush haters, "[a]n enduring problem for the Democratic Party," Mr. Barone observed, could be the fact that "George W. Bush will not be on the ballot again."

Read the whole thing, as all the cool kids say.

Diana West writes:

It's time to get back to basics. And by basics, I mean getting back to First Term W., back to when the president's strategy to defend and protect the United States was to take military action against terrorists and the nations that sponsor them. By unfortunate contrast, the security strategy of Second Term W. is best described as bringing universal suffrage to these same terrorists and the nations that sponsor them. Getting back to Bush basics requires a re-reckoning of what and why we fight -- and, just as important, for what and why we don't fight.

Do we fight to spread democracy? Or do we fight to stop jihad? Far better to fight to stop jihad. Second Term W. believes democratic principles will neutralize jihad -- a.k.a. "extremism" in the strangled parlance of political correctness. It may not be polite to notice, but the nasty reality is that jihad is neutralizing democratic principles. The fact the administration must reckon with is that the concept of human rights -- the ideals of liberty and justice for all -- isn't a natural by-product of majority rule. Islamic terrorists still support Islamic terrorism, even when, as in the Palestinian Authority or Lebanon, they are democratically elected; and sharia erodes human rights even when, as in Afghanistan and likely Iraq, it is implicitly mandated by a constitution.

It's time for the administration to consider the possibility that the democratic process alone -- constitutions, legislatures, ballot boxes -- doesn't result in Jeffersonian democracy. Such a re-reckoning doesn't mean abandoning Iraq. But it does mean reordering our goals. Forget the Iraqi constitution for now. More important is a single-minded effort to eradicate the death squads that destabilize the country and threaten to exhaust our staying power. Getting back to Bush basics, that means taking action against the nations that sponsor these terrorists: Iran, for instance.

Read the rest.

Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do! We do!
Who leaves Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the martians under wraps?
We do! We do!
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
We do! We do!
Who robs the cave fish of their sight?
Who rigs every Oscars night?
We do! We do!

Speaking of the Times, Hugh Hewitt looks at the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy that was Harvard in the 1980s.

Update: Betsy Newmark also has some thoughts on Hugh's post.

Last year, Robert Spencer wrote of the left, journalism and the War On Terror:

Here’s a new slogan for the zeitgeist: stay quiet and you’ll be OK. This was the message, according to the tapes released last week, that Muhammad Atta gave to the passengers on the ill-fated airplane that he and his fellow terrorists had commandeered.

Stay quiet and you’ll be OK. Don’t mention that a Saudi imam who spoke at the opening of a large new Islamic center in London once preached a sermon in which he called Jews “evil offspring, infidels, distorters of [others’] words, calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers, prophecy-deniers... the scum of the human race ‘whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs,” and “an ongoing continuum of deceit, obstinacy, licentiousness, evil, and corruption.” AP noted that in London he said that Islam’s history was “the best testament to how different communities can live together in peace and harmony.” The BBC called him “one of Islam’s most renowned Imams” and reported his praise for British Muslims for having “taken great steps towards achieving community cohesion.” Neither said anything about his hate speech.

Stay quiet and you’ll be OK.

That also seems to be the motto at the New York Times, even as their stock price has dropped 40 percent since 2002. After Judge Richard Posner wrote an op-ed late last month that repeated what about half the Blogosphere had been saying about the Times since about 9/12, (sit tight for this one) the Times' editor Bill Keller wrote a letter to the editor explaining that as the editor of the Times he was angry with Posner's column.

Meanwhile, the Times' Frank Rich looks at criticism of Cindy Sheehan and dubs it, "The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan". And no, ironically, he didn't intend it as the compliment it actually is. Ed Morrissey writes:

Two points have to be made here. First of all, if one wants to decry character assassination, perhaps one should not engage in it. Unfortunately, that would leave the serially dishonest Mr. Rich out of a job. Second, the transformation of Swift Boat into a verb implies that the 250+ veterans of the Viet Nam war lied about their testimony regarding the in-country and post-war behavior of John Kerry. If Rich wants to get back into that debate, he's welcome to it, because the Swift Boat vets have not been disproven in any of their major allegations -- while Kerry was forced to retract his Christmas in Cambodia tale, the arrogation of Tedd Peck's service record on PCF 94, the battle stories including David Alston as a member of his Silver Star engagement, and so on and so forth.

Besides, if Rich wants to argue that this country cannot abide any criticism of the political rants of a Gold Star Mom, how can he tar these men who actually served in battle as liars? Does that make any sense to anyone at all? Why not just address the criticisms themselves?

And Morrissey proceeds to do just that. Sheehan's worst rhetoric--which she herself has uttered in speeches and put up on the Internet--is absolutely self-destructive to her cause, which is why the press has gone to great lengths to bottle it up.

Once upon a time, long before there was a Blogosphere, the press attempted to portray itself as non-biased and objective. But these days, even as its staffed by men whose motto was "Question Authority" in the 1970s, these days, their slogans really do seem to alternate between "stay quiet and you'll be OK", and "don't question our authority", as the laces on the cocoon are pulled ever-tighter.

In the Weekly Standard, Noemie Emery looks at "the Grief-Based Community", the left's tactic of attempting to short-circuit logic and debate by taking victim status to its zenith. Emery writes that it began at the memorial-cum-pep rally after Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone's death in a 2002 plane crash:

In translation, this is the unspoken theme of grief-centered politics: We are suffering, so you owe it to us to give us what we ask for. This is the claim of Cindy Sheehan and the Jersey Girls, and it carries with it an implied accusation: If you don't do what we ask you, you don't care that our loved one is dead. But no one had ever heard it stated so baldly or bluntly as at the Wellstone service, and the bluntness repelled. "The late senator was treated as little more than one broken egg in a great get-out-the-vote omelet," wrote Christopher Caldwell in these pages. "The pilots and aides who died with him were barely treated at all." People stalked out. People complained. Floods of cash poured into Norm Coleman's campaign, which found itself suddenly energized. The scandal had not only dissipated the aura of reverence, it gave Coleman permission to run hard against Mondale. He did. Not only did he win, but the riptide seemed to extend to neighboring states, helping pull in Jim Talent, who edged past Jean Carnahan, who had been comparing the Wellstone disaster to her own husband's death. Lesson to liberals: Grief-centered politics has to be subtle. It's a lesson they haven't quite learned.

Emery concludes:

Political cut and thrust does not go well with the etiquette of bereavement, which tends to short-circuit all argument, which of course is the point. It inhibits argument, makes response awkward, and sometimes can stop it completely, putting an opponent in the position of Norm Coleman before the Wellstone Memorial fracas, in which Democrats were free to seek votes based on sentiment, while anything Coleman tried to say about Wellstone's replacement was called an insult to the dead. People who put mourners up front on policy issues are like robbers leaving a bank with a hostage between themselves and police fire. To do this on purpose, to drive an agenda, is beneath all contempt.

Here is a message for our friends in the grief-based community: Really, you must cut this out. We are tired of having our emotions worked on and worked over; tired of the matched sets of dueling relatives, tired of all of these claims on our sympathy, that at the same time defy common sense. The heart breaks for everyone who lost relatives and friends on September 11, as it does for the relatives of the war dead and wounded, as it does for the sons of Paul Wellstone. It does not break for MoveOn.org, Maureen Dowd, and Gail Sheehy, who have not been heartbroken, except by a string of election reverses, and are using the anguish of other people in an effort to turn them around. Especially, it does not break for George Soros, who, after squandering millions on the Kerry campaign, is now using poor Cindy Sheehan to get back in the action, and it does not break for political operative Joe Trippi, late of the Howard Dean meltdown, who is trying to do the same thing. She is now the vehicle for a collection of losers, who will use her, and then toss her over and out once she has served their purposes, or more likely failed to do so. Her family has broken up under the effects of this circus; she has now lost her husband, as well as her son. Please, send her back to her therapist, and what is now left of her broken-up family. And please--do not try this again.

He's got to be kidding; of course they'll be another variation on this technique. But as Victor Davis Hanson recently noted, these days, largely thanks to the Blogosphere and other new media, it comes with a price--"The Biteback Effect" is what Hanson calls it.

Jonah Goldberg has lots of fun with the ultimate not-in-my-backyard folks:

The basic situation is that some environmentalists and a company called Cape Wind want to build 130 windmills way out in the ocean to help offset energy costs in the region — and to satisfy all those demands that we find substitutes for evil fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, other environmentalists and conservationists are eager to stop the wind farm from being built, largely because it will mar the view from their extravagant coastal homes. Leading this charge is Sen. Ted Kennedy, whose famous compound would have a nice view of the turbines. (To be fair, though most people say the turbines would be hard to see except on very clear days, and even then they'd be tiny blips on the horizon.)

But Ted wants no such thing spoiling cocktail hour on the veranda. So he drafted his famously green nephew Robert to join the fight — even though Robert is a senior lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which strongly backs the project.

Obviously, the reason this is so much fun is that the stakes are so small for everybody except a handful of people who deserve to lose. Personally, I couldn't really care one way or the other. I think the aesthetic arguments have some merit, but I also think wind power has more potential than most of its critics claim. The windmills would ultimately provide about 75 percent of the energy used by Cape Cod and the surrounding islands, including Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard — in a clean, renewable form that, unlike older technologies, wouldn't kill birds in an avian frappe. Seventy-five percent of the area's power needs may be a rounding error when discussing America's total energy consumption, but that's a lot for any specific community.

But why get distracted by the merits of the issue when the real fun is to take a Nestea Plunge into the swirling waters of limousine liberalism.

A very quick search of the LexisNexis news database reveals that Senator Kennedy has called for more "sacrifice" from the wealthy roughly eight kabillion-jamillion-gazillion times during George W. Bush's presidency (and forget about during Ronald Reagan's!). He's excoriated Bush's tax cuts, the war, healthcare policies, and just about everything else for not demanding the rich share more in the "national sacrifice."

Well, here's their chance. This is not some symbolic hybrid car you park next to your Hummer. Recall Arianna Huffington's passionate campaign against SUVs? She made great sacrifices to rid the world of those guzzlers as she flew around the country in a private jet.

Well, here is something concrete the rich and famous can sacrifice for the little guy and for the environment: their views.

And, let's be honest, it's not a huge sacrifice. If Teddy really thinks his fat — or, if you prefer, "phat" — crib on the beach will be ruined by the prospect of having to look at some windmills 5-13 miles offshore, he can swap pads with me.

The opponents of the project have made every ludicrous claim in the book, proving that environmentalists will even lie to other environmentalists. The windmills will kill whales, cause oil spills, ruin fishing, etc. None of these things are true, and the honest opponents know it. This is simply NIMBY politics pure and simple.

Read the rest.

It's interesting to track the changing face of war veterans. When they returned home from World Wars I, II and Korea, the were young, brave professional men who served when their country needed them.

In the seventies, after Senator Kerry's "Winter Soldier" speech, the left defined them as war criminals who:

personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

And now? According to Hollywood, they're children. Check out the messages on the signs carried by Hollywood celebrities protesting in Crawford last week in these photos: "Bring Our Children Home" and "'Before One More Mother's Child Is Lost'--Cindy Sheehan".

To understand what a radical transformation this is for Hollywood, consider how the sixties, that most golden of decade for the left, fetishized youth culture. 1967's Wild In The Streets promulgated the notion of a 24-year old rock star millionaire who gets elected after first securing the vote for 15 year olds.

Well, 15 year olds still can't vote, but 18 year olds can, thanks to the 26th Amendment, signed into law in 1971. In 1966, Time magazine named those "25 And Under" as its "Man of the Year". "Don't Trust Anyone Over 30" was a cliché of the era, and heck, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson's original 1967 novel of Logan's Run envisioned a whole society where the maximum age that could be reached was 21.

But that was then. These days, as Mark Steyn wrote this past week, America's left views teenagers as children again. Or at least they do when infantilisation suits their purposes:

Whenever I’m on a radio show these days, someone calls in and demands to know whether my children are in Iraq. Well, not right now. They range in age from five to nine, and though that’s plenty old enough to sign up for the jihad and toddle into an Israeli pizza parlour wearing a suicide-bomb, in most advanced societies’ armed forces they prefer to use grown-ups.

That seems to be difficult for the Left to grasp. Ever since America’s all-adult, all-volunteer army went into Iraq, the anti-war crowd have made a sustained effort to characterise them as ‘children’. If a 13-year-old wants to have an abortion, that’s her decision and her parents shouldn’t get a look-in. If a 21-year-old wants to drop to the Oval Office shagpile and chow down on Bill Clinton, she’s a grown woman and free to do what she wants. But, if a 22- or 25- or 37-year old is serving his country overseas, he’s a wee ‘child’ who isn’t really old enough to know what he’s doing.

I get many emails from soldiers in Iraq, and they sound a lot more grown-up than most Ivy League professors and certainly than Maureen Dowd, who writes as if she’s auditioning for a minor supporting role in Sex and the City. The infantilisation of the military promoted by the Left is deeply insulting to America’s warriors but it suits the anti-war crowd’s purposes. It enables them to drone ceaselessly that ‘of course’ they ‘support our troops’, because they want to stop these poor confused moppets from being exploited by the Bush war machine.

In the sixties, Hollywood sought to empower youth; well, a soldier who volunteers to serve his country, and in the process learns a battery of skills ranging from operating or repairing high tech machinery to operating weaponry the very thought of which would cause an NRA-hating actor to loosen his bowels is pretty darn empowered.

Too bad Hollywood can't see that. By the way, now that they're children again, shouldn't we raise the voting age? The driving age? Change the NC-17 rating to NC-25?

Update: Somewhat related thoughts on the cyclical nature of protests by from Neo-Neocon.

We were permalinked yesterday by Hugh Hewitt, and wanted to thank him publicly.

Incidentally, here's our profile of his Blog book in Tech Central Station, and also in TCS, our look at the Long Tail of the Internet, with Hugh's thoughts on how it impacts the Blogosphere. In the photo above, the owner of the New York Inquirer is giving copies to his employees to explore ways his network of newspapers can compete in the 21st century.

(Naturally, given the family nature of his radio show, I promised Hugh in an email that we'd steer clear of hot Hummel on Hummel action.)

Related thoughts, here.

Mark Steyn has another great essay today, this time in England's Spectator about Cindy Sheehan. Here's but an excerpt:

Whenever I’m on a radio show these days, someone calls in and demands to know whether my children are in Iraq. Well, not right now. They range in age from five to nine, and though that’s plenty old enough to sign up for the jihad and toddle into an Israeli pizza parlour wearing a suicide-bomb, in most advanced societies’ armed forces they prefer to use grown-ups.

That seems to be difficult for the Left to grasp. Ever since America’s all-adult, all-volunteer army went into Iraq, the anti-war crowd have made a sustained effort to characterise them as ‘children’. If a 13-year-old wants to have an abortion, that’s her decision and her parents shouldn’t get a look-in. If a 21-year-old wants to drop to the Oval Office shagpile and chow down on Bill Clinton, she’s a grown woman and free to do what she wants. But, if a 22- or 25- or 37-year old is serving his country overseas, he’s a wee ‘child’ who isn’t really old enough to know what he’s doing.

I get many emails from soldiers in Iraq, and they sound a lot more grown-up than most Ivy League professors and certainly than Maureen Dowd, who writes as if she’s auditioning for a minor supporting role in Sex and the City. The infantilisation of the military promoted by the Left is deeply insulting to America’s warriors but it suits the anti-war crowd’s purposes. It enables them to drone ceaselessly that ‘of course’ they ‘support our troops’, because they want to stop these poor confused moppets from being exploited by the Bush war machine.

On his show today, Hugh Hewitt had Steyn on and said to him:

HH: Let's turn to Crawford, Texas. I have not said much about Cindy Sheehan in the couple of days that I was back on Monday and Tuesday, because I kind of give her the complete pardon, because she's lost her son. But the media vampires surrounding her, Mark Steyn, are utterly without ethic.

MS: Well, I agree with you. I don't even like talking about this, because I think this woman has become unhinged by the terrible thing that has happened to her. We now learn that her mother apparently has had a stroke. She and her husband are divorcing. The family is split up, and you know, she says...her argument is that liberating Iraq, liberating Afghanistan...she opposes the Afghan War, that none of this is worth any American's life. And yet I think you have to ask the other question. Is this insane Bush hatred, and the opportunism that the left has used her for, is that worth destroying her marriage and her family over? I think this woman will look back at these few weeks she's been in the public limelight, in a couple of years time, and feel ashamed of herself, and feel ashamed at the way she allowed herself to be used, and her son's death to be dishonored in this way. I think it's a terrible, terrible thing, but you know, in the end, this war is about bigger things than the death of any individual.

I rarely disagree with Mark Steyn, and hopefully time will prove him right, and myself wrong, but when he says that she'll look back in a couple of years and feel ashamed, I sincerely doubt it. Yesterday, James Taranto compared her Crawford media circus this year to the very similar frenzy spearheaded by Senator Kerry last August during his presidential run. With almost 35 years to ponder his actions whilst still in the Naval Reserves (His The New Soldier book with its upside down flag cover; calling American soldiers war criminals in front of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations; throwing away his medals in a Washington protest, etc.), has Kerry ever admitted any sort of remorse? I think for most people, once their emotions drive them to any far-extreme worldview, the rest of their brain compensates by finding an endless amount of ways to justify their actions.

There are certainly exceptions (David Horowitz has written extensively about coming to grips with his involvement in Radical Chic politics in the early 1970s, and in England, Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen have both written about leaving the far left), but something tells me she won't be one of them.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago:

Maps of the Middle East are surprisingly fluid: Mercedes and BMW "accidently" forget to include a country on their maps of Middle Eastern dealers, despite the fact that it's existed since 1948. Meanwhile, Tony Blair mentions a country in his latest speech that doesn't.

Now you see 'em, now you don't!

Google's been having a somewhat similar problem, Oddly Enough!, as Reuters might say.

Glenn Reynolds notes that between its news and editorial sections, the Times can't come to a conclusion on the health of the American economy. (The news section reports that it is; naturally, the Times' editorial section disagrees.)

Meanwhile, the Times still can't decide whether or not it wants to admit that it's biased, and is retreating to its Howell Raines-ish ways, despite former ombudsman Daniel Okrent's efforts to drag the paper up off its feet. As we observed last year, in an Insta-Power-Line-lanched post:

Howell Raines, February 20, 2003:

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

Daniel Okrent, July 25, 2004:

Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?

Of course it is.

Gee, that only took 70 years to admit.

Apparently, as Mediacrity observes (found via Michelle Malkin), their current ombudsman, Barney Calame, never got the memo. Of the Air America scandal (where reporting by blogs such as Malkin's and Brian Maloney's Radio Equalizer are running rings around the Times), Calame writes:

There's another reason to get to the bottom of the [Air America] scandal. It's the perception problem — a perception of liberal bias for which I haven't found any evidence after checking with editors at the paper.

For an ombudsman to say with a straight face that he doesn't know the ideology of his newspaper is just staggering. And there's no way, after Okrent's admission last year, and the numerous examples of the Times' involvement in Senator Kerry's presidential campaign for him to claim that his paper has no bias.

Indeed, one of the great byproducts of last year's presidential race, was that virtually all big city newspapers let their partisanship fly, for all of their readers to see. The damage that most news organizations did to their credibility was staggering, but ironically, the end result was actually a healthy thing in perverse way: last year marked the end of feigning objectivity. It's now pretty obvious to most readers who care, what the ideology of the local paper is. And the Blogosphere makes it a breeze for readers to find news sources more in-tune with theirs.

As Howard Fineman of Newsweek wrote shortly after the election:

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

Despite all that, apparently, the Times would like to shove Okrent's essay down the memory hole, and assume that nobody will remember it, and return to their Pinch-driven Rainesian hyperpartisanship, all the while denying any bias. But that's a lot harder to do with a growing number of Weblogs looking on, archiving their excesses, and illuminating them for their readers.

Update: Related thoughts from Betsy Newmark.

I haven't seen it yet, but Betsy Newmark has a lengthy review of this apprently well produced, but underperforming movie.

In his syndicated Newhouse column, James Lileks writes:

The hard left in America needs to realize a bald, cruel fact: Anyone who sees no moral distinction between Israel and the mullahs of Iran, or sees the U.S. attempt to set up a constitutional republic in Iraq as equivalent to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, suffers from incurable moral cretinism. The more the fervent anti-war base embraces these ideas, the more they ensure that no one will trust the left with national security. Ever.

Will they learn the lesson? Even money says Sheehan will be sitting in the Michael Moore seat next to Jimmy Carter at the '08 Democratic convention.

If the left remembers her three years from now.

Incidentally, who is this Michael Moore fellow that James speaks of?

Update: Related thoughts from George Neumayr.

"Well sir, I'd tell you, if I got my news from the newspapers I'd be pretty depressed as well."

--Captain Sherman Powell, serving in Iraq, talking to Matt Lauer of The Today Show.

In related posts from the Blogosphere, Frank Martin celebrates his blog's one year anniversary. And Dean Barnett has invaluable advice about tone, that naturally, will go unheeded by the bloggers who need it the most.

Update: Speaking of tone-deaf newspapers...

As Terrell Owens deigns the Eagles with his presence at training camp today, Max Boot ponders why so many talented wide receivers are such malcontents, and then contrasts them to the anti-Terrell. Who--probably not coincidentally--has four Super Bowl visits, from which he's earned three very heavy diamond-encrusted gold rings, during his amazingly long career.

Steve Green has the words; Charles Johnson and Karol Sheinen have the photos.

What will pulling out of Gaza provide? Steve makes a great observation (as usual):

Israelis won't have to deal with 1.5 million Palestinians who, by and large it seems, want them dead. The security situation might degrade ever-so-slightly, but the Excedrin Factor just dropped several notches. And that's no small something for a country that's been at war for virtually all of its 58-year existence.

The other thing Sharon has accomplished is to maybe, just maybe, force some of the Palestinian leadership to act like grownups. The PA – or Hamas, or whoever – now finds itself in the uncomfortable position of providing water, filling potholes, solving crimes, putting out fires – all the little tiny basic things local government is supposed to do.

And when the PA can't or won't provide those things? Then maybe, just maybe, the propaganda-driven death cult Arafat created will die, and the Palestinian people will start acting like grownups, too.

Meanwhile James Lileks looks at the Cindy Sheehan Spectacle and its relationship with Israel and the Palestinians.

James Taranto compares to Cindy Sheehan's Crawford media spectacle to the Crawford media spectacle last year:

There's plenty of blame to go around for the appalling spectacle of Sheehanoia, but one name that hasn't been mentioned is that of John Kerry. Kerry might have invented, and he certainly pioneered, the tactic being employed by those who are exploiting Cindy Sheehan to further their political agenda. As he explained to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971:

"I called the media. . . . I said, 'If I take some crippled veterans down to the White House and we chain ourselves to the gates, will we get coverage?' 'Oh, yes, we will cover that.' "

Do you remember the media spectacle in Crawford, Texas, a year ago? It was precisely the crippled-vet ploy. Kerry sent triple amputee Max Cleland, who had been defeated in his 2002 Senate re-election bid, to deliver a letter to President Bush demanding that the president denounce the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. This move was stunning in its audacity, though not its effectiveness: Here was Kerry, staking his campaign on his authority as a Vietnam veteran, appealing to the authority of another Vietnam veteran in an effort to silence Vietnam veterans who opposed him.

The media love this sort of story because of its man-bites-dog nature: Vietnam veteran says fellow vets are war criminals! Sept. 11 widows blame Bush for their husbands' deaths! Gold Star Mother says son died in vain! But isn't the shtick getting a little old by now?

In any case, because of this man-bites-dog quality the stories are ultimately meaningless. John Kerry did not actually speak for Vietnam veterans, most of whom thought their service was honorable. The "Jersey girls" do not actually speak for Sept. 11 widows, most of whom understand that Islamist terrorists, not the president, murdered their husbands. And Cindy Sheehan does not actually speak for Gold Star Mothers, most of whom remember their children as heroes, not dupes; and hardly any of whom agree with Sheehan that "this country is not worth dying for."

Sheehanoia is a sign of the desperation, not the strength, of the left in America. Publicity stunts are no substitute for an actual political program. Joan Walsh writes in Salon:

Even as Sheehan's public relations victories give people reason to be optimistic about the administration's unraveling in Iraq, liberals and war opponents have to be careful not to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Rooting for "the administration's unraveling in Iraq"--that is, for America's defeat in the central antiterror battleground--is not what we'd call a political program.

Unless you're the Washington Post, of course.

Mark Steyn has an extensive update on the UN's oil for food scandal and concludes by asking:

How do we know all the above? We only know because the US invaded Iraq and the Baathists skedaddled out of town leaving copious amounts of paperwork relating to the Baghdad end of Oil-for-Fraud, since when Claudia Rosett and a few other dogged journalists have been systematically unstitching the intricate web of family and business relationships around the UN's operations.

You'd think that by now respect for the UN would be plummeting faster than Benon Sevan's auntie down that lift shaft. After all, these aren't peripheral figures or minor departments. They reach right into the heart of UN policy on two of the critical issues of the day - Iraq and North Korea - or four, if you're one of those Guardian types who's hot for Kyoto and peacekeeping. Most of the Ghanaian diplomatic corps and their progeny seem to have directorships at companies with UN contracts and/or Saddamite oil options. I had no idea being a Ghanaian ambassador's son opened so many doors, and nor did they till Kofi ascended to his present eminence.

The other day I sat behind a car from Massachusetts bearing the bumper-sticker "War is Never the Answer". Well, it depends on the question. In this case, without the war, we wouldn't even be asking the questions. Without the paper trail in Baghdad, who would have mustered the will to look into Oil-for-Food and see it through to the point where it's brought down a clutch of career UN bigwigs? They're no great loss to humanity: Mr Strong's "legacy", the Kyoto treaty, is already seen as a joke that's likely to crash the economies of those few countries who've made the mistake of taking it seriously (New Zealand), and, as for his North Korean outreach, we should be grateful it ended before a full-fledged Kim Jong-Il Nukes-for-Food programme was up and running.

But this is how the transnational jet set works, and those sensitive flowers who don't have the stomach to look under the rock could at least do us the favour of ceasing to bleat about, in Clare Short's marvellously loopy phrase, the UN's "moral authority". In The Times the other day, Matthew Parris demanded to know whether I could now admit the Iraq war had been a mistake. No. I'm still in favour of it 100 per cent - and these rare shafts of light on the sewers of transnationalism are merely one more benefit.

Needless to say, read the rest.

Betsy Newmark has some thoughts on Truman's decision to drop the atom bomb on Japan and how it's being described in the textbooks of the classes she teaches.

Jonah Goldberg's long promised-book is currently scheduled to debut next April, according to Amazon:

Since the rise and fall of the Nazis in the midtwentieth century, fascism has been seen as an extreme right-wing phenomenon. Liberals have kept that assumption alive, hurling accusations of fascism at their conservative opponents. LIBERAL FASCISM offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg shows that the original fascists were really on the Left and that liberals, from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton, have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler’s National Socialism.

Goldberg draws striking parallels between historic fascism and contemporary liberal doctrines. He argues that “political correctness” on campuses and calls for campaign finance reform echo the Nazis' suppression of free speech; and that liberals, like their fascist forebears, dismiss the democratic process when it yields results they dislike, insist on the centralization of economic decision-making, and seek to insert the authority of the state in our private lives–from bans on smoking to gun control. Covering such hot issues as morality, anti-Semitism, science versus religion, health care, and cultural values, he boldly illustrates the resemblances between the opinions advanced by Hitler and Mussolini and the current views of the Left.

Impeccably researched and persuasively argued, LIBERAL FASCISM will elicit howls of indignation from the liberal establishment–and rousing cheers from the Right.

That sounds about right, but I suspect the former will be greater than the latter, through no fault of Jonah's. There's a pretty fair amount of writing on the right from Paul Johnson to F.A. Hayek and John Lukacs that supports Jonah's thesis (as does this recent online piece by David Ramsay Steele) but much of it may come as a shock to those who've been unexposed to it.

Update: Looks like the publication date has been pushed back to August of 2006.

Libertas looks at Tom Sizemore and reported claims of his "sexual addiction" and writes, "File This One Under 'Really Weird'".

Fair enough.

Update: It gets weirder; file this one under "Down The Memory Hole", as Libertas deleted the post.

An article that I wrote last summer for the Unique Homes real estate magazine on high-end home theater is now online.

Eric Olsen's Blogcritics is celebrating its third anniversary--I was honored to have been there at the beginning ("Since before the beginning, young man" as Mr. Bernstein said in Citizen Kane), and continue to post reviews there from time to time.

Nick Cohen of England's Guardian explains why he's leaving the left:

I'm sure that any halfway competent political philosopher could rip the assumptions of modern middle-class left-wingery apart. Why is it right to support a free market in sexual relationships but oppose free-market economics, for instance? But his criticisms would have little impact. It's like a religion: the contradictions are obvious to outsiders but don't disturb the faithful. You believe when you're in its warm embrace. Alas, I'm out. Last week, after 44 years of regular church-going, the bell tolled, the book was closed and the candle was extinguished. I was excommunicated.

Read the rest--and be sure to read this Belmont Club post on Cohen's article, and the rest of their September 2003 post that they quote an excerpt from.

We haven't blogged much about Cindy Sheehan, tempting though it was at times over the weekend. But James Taranto has a long update on her, in a post titled, "The Sorrow and the Pity".

Back in April, we linked to a Mark Steyn piece which described how multiculturalism has had exactly the opposite impact on culture from its presumed original intentions.

In a typically brilliant parody, Scott Ott of Scrappleface makes a serious point: the recent efforts by the NCAA attempting to outlaw American Indian names from college sports teams will have a similar impact as well.

The Muslim Council of Britain declares that the BBC is "Pro-Israel".

Suuuuuuure they are.

Shades of the left's "conservative media bias" mantra, after losing the 2002 mid-term elections.

The Brothers Judd link to to this story, whose headline reads, "Historian links Germany's new Left Party to Nazis":

BERLIN - Germany's new Left Party, which polls show will win 12 per cent next month's general election, draws on a concept of 'National Socialism' from the Nazi era, a prominent German historian alleged on Wednesday.

"This is not an accident - it's intentional," said Goetz Aly who recently published a book arguing that Hitler's Nazis won allegiance by creating a huge social welfare state funded by property stolen from the Jews and people in Third Reich-occupied Europe.

A leader of the Left Party, a rebel former Social Democratic (SPD) chairman Oscar Lafontaine, said in a speech last month that German workers had to be protected to prevent foreigners stealing their jobs.

"The state is obligated to prevent family fathers and women from becoming unemployed because 'Fremdarbeiter' (foreign workers) are taking away their jobs by working for low wages," said Lafontaine at a rally in the eastern German city of Chemnitz near the Czech border.

Germany's Brockhaus dictionary says the term 'Fremdarbeiter' is a Nazi expression used to describe foreign and often slave labour brought to Germany during World War II.

"In Lafontaine's propaganda of the past weeks, elements of the National Socialist concept can very clearly be recognised," said Aly in a Handelsblatt newspaper interview.

Color me unsurprised.

The New York Sun now has a Weblog. Click on over; there are several interesting posts to kick it off, and as New York elections heating up for 2006 (Bloomberg, Hillary, Spitzer, et al), it could be a regular read for many.

Betsy Newmark links to this fascinating blog featuring individual posts devoted to analyzing historic Time and Newsweek covers and highlighting the content inside. You can learn a lot about the transformation of modern liberalism, and how it impacted journalism, by going back into the past and reading how magazines like Time and Newsweek, and newspapers such as the New York Times viewed the world, versus their current slant.

And you can learn much about society at large. Perhaps the most interesting cover that the blog studies is this one, Newsweek's look at the Beatles' invasion of America in 1964. Like most adults who came of age in the Depression and World War II, my father, who grew up in a musical universe built around big bands, Bing Crosby, and Nat "King" Cole would have probably concurred instantly with Newsweek's initial take:

"Visually they are a nightmare: tight, dandified, Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically they are a near-disaster: guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony, and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of "yeah, yeah, yeah!") are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments."

Even a fellow product of the British Invasion of the 1960s would say that year, "My dear girl, there are some things that just aren't done, such as drinking Dom Perignon '53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. That's just as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs!"

How such comments appear in retrospect (both 007's and Newsweek's) show how much pop culture has changed--and how much the Beatles changed it--although as David Frum noted, the decade that most transformed America would the one that followed their break-up.

This is great to hear:

When I first put this site up in early 2002, I included a short piece I wrote in 1998 on the early history of the online world as filler to flesh out the then-meager content. (Before adding 7,500 or so blog posts...)

My timeline ran through the late-1980s. (In retrospect, at least to me, it's pretty crude looking in comparison to my current output. On the other hand, I'd be pretty disappointed if I looked back on something I wrote seven years ago and thought, "man, I was really dynamite back then. What happened!? Just like playing a musical keyboard, constantly hacking away at the computer keyboard hopefully improves one's chops in the long run. Hopefully...)

Whoops--sorry for the digression. Back to the topic at hand.

In a recent post, Patrick Ruffini brings the history of the 'Net up to the present day. He calls it "A Wild Ten Year Ride", which if anything, an understates how crazy the last decade of online development has been. Why? This may be the key paragraph, which Patrick quotes from Wired magazine's Kevin Kelly:

What we all failed to see was how much of this new world would be manufactured by users, not corporate interests. Amazon.com customers rushed with surprising speed and intelligence to write the reviews that made the site's long-tail selection usable. Owners of Adobe, Apple, and most major software products offer help and advice on the developer's forum Web pages, serving as high-quality customer support for new buyers. And in the greatest leverage of the common user, Google turns traffic and link patterns generated by 2 billion searches a month into the organizing intelligence for a new economy. This bottom-up takeover was not in anyone's 10-year vision.

Well, except for all the folks who actually went out and did it, of course.

Clive Davis writes that Mrs. Miniver is dead:

For the benefit of TCS readers under the age of 40, I should explain that Mrs. M -- played by Greer Garson in the Hollywood film -- represented all that was best about war-time Britain -- or more precisely that strawberries-and-cream realm known as Middle England. For most of the Cold War, her demure image still cast its spell over the custodians of the Special Relationship.

The world moves on. Britain is a very different place now, although this may come as news to all those people who - until the recent terror attacks anyway -- based their perceptions of this country on bland, air-brushed movies such as "Notting Hill" and "Love, Actually". Sure, London does look very attractive as a backdrop to the foppish Hugh Grant. What Americans miss amidst the soft-focus photography and the vistas of immaculate west London town-houses (which usually only foreign bankers can afford) is the changing face of the country at large -- and of Middle England in particular.

Immediately after 9/11, much was made of such ceremonial gestures as the playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the Changing of the Guard. Dig a little deeper, though, and there's no mistaking the hostility to American values among large sections of the British population. Conservative commentators in the US have got plenty of mileage out of jibes at French anti-Americanism; the unpleasant truth is that Britain is home to a similar phenomenon. Last October an ICM opinion survey registered a sharp increase in hostility to the US. A startling 73% of British voters felt that the US exercised too much influence around the globe. As the Guardian reported at the time: "A majority in Britain also believe that US democracy is no longer a model for others. But perhaps a more startling finding from the Guardian/ICM poll is that a majority of British voters -- 51% -- say that they believe that American culture is threatening our own culture."

Where has this hostility come from? Well, to some extent, it was always there. Even at the height of WW2, while Mrs. Miniver was pruning roses as Spitfires flew overhead, attitudes to Americans were decidedly mixed. Hence that famous catch-phrase about US servicemen: "over-paid, over-sexed, and over here". Angus Calder's vivid account of the wartime UK, "The People's War", points to the result of a popularity poll conducted in 1943. Americans were well down the list of admired allies: "After Mussolini's fall in the summer of that year," writes Calder, "they were actually less well spoken of than the Italians..."

There's no question that media bias plays a major part in skewing public perceptions. The BBC, which once brought us that epic TV series "Alistair Cooke's America", seldom misses an opportunity to portray the States as violent, dysfunctional and imperialist. A left-liberal mind-set is de rigueur at Broadcasting House, tarnishing what is still, in many ways, a great institution. In this closed world neocons, not Islamists, are regarded as the great threat to democracy. Unfortunately, even in these days of multi-channel broadcast, the Corporation's huge resources and its immense cultural reach mean that it still sets the agenda. While the national press is slightly less shrill, pro-American commentators are very much a minority. When the first bouts of hysteria erupted over Guantanamo Bay, it was the Mail on Sunday -- regarded as the voice of Middle England -- which published some of the shrillest commentary.

Perhaps as a consequence of all those hours spent sighing over Hugh Grant, Americans tend to assume that British are much more worldly and sophisticated than they really are. The truth is, when it comes to knowledge of American history and institutions, the Brits are woefully uninformed. What they are familiar with is American popular culture, which is -- as I don't need to remind you -- a different thing all together. The result of that false sense of familiarity is a toxic combination of ignorance and arrogance. Besides, the British middle classes (like many of their counterparts in the US) do not necessarily see American popular culture as an unmitigated force for good. As the cultural critic Martha Bayles observes in an essay on public diplomacy in the latest edition of the Wilson Quarterly: "Popular culture is no longer 'America's secret weapon.' On the contrary, it is a tsunami by which others feel engulfed. "

That last item is, of course, yet another biproduct of modern Hollywood.

(What's a Chav, you ask? Click here for all you need to know.)

Roger L. Simon looks at two sad Hollywood events, the death of actress Barbara Bel Geddes, and the end of hand-drawn animation at Disney:

DisneyToon Studios Australia, its last bastion, will be shutting down next year. For most of us, it's not to difficult to see the difference between digital work, terrific as it can be in films like The Incredibles, and the hand-drawn leaves of Bambi. This is one of the reasons some of us are so in awe of artists like Miyakzaki who are carrying on this tradition. On my most recent trip to Japan, I accidentally visited a small museum where his individual animation drawings for Spirited Away were displayed in giant stacks. It's hard to conceive one human being could accomplish so much (maybe his day lasts sixty hours).

Why is this related to Bel Geddes? Of course there are many reasons for the cinema's decline, but sometimes I worry that, for all its vaunted ease of use and accessibility, the digital revolution isn't a part of the increasing disappearance of film as an art or even as a significant cultural institution. Others vastly more accomplished evidently have the same fear. John Canemaker concluded his WSJ article this way:

As Disney's great admirer Steven Spielberg recently said, "If storytelling becomes a byproduct of the digital revolution, then the medium itself is corrupted."

There's a curious give and take these days between high-tech and pop culture. I can speak best about it in terms of music, where I've seen the tools of major recording studios filter down into the hands of anybody who can afford it, including such technology as digital recording, musical loops, pitch correction, software-based synthesizers, and remarkably powerful digital effects.

No doubt, there's some remarkable music being made by everyday folks, and I've certainly spent an enjoyable four years or so learning how to use PC-based technology to record my own material. Similarly, just as 35 years ago, computers were once solely the province of big business, today, the newspaper industry has given up an enormous amount of ground to empowered amateurs armed with little more than a PC, a broadband connection and a Weblog.

But you would think that big media would benefit the most from this technology, whether it's Hollywood, the recording industry or what we frequently abbreviate as "the MSM". And yet, is there anybody would argue that today's movies, as a whole, are better than Hollywood's product of 25, 35, or especially 50 or 60 years ago? Is there anybody who would turn on a rock & roll or pop station and describe its current offerings as better than the days of the British Invasion and Motown, both of whose offerings were recorded on equipment that was laughably crude compared to the way that a modern recording studio is kitted out?

Technology has done wonders to empower individuals. But it's very strange how it's done little to better the product created by commercial industries that were once the best at what they did.

The quote that Roger includes by Steven Spielberg is key, I think, to what has happened to both Hollywood and the music industry:

"If storytelling becomes a byproduct of the digital revolution, then the medium itself is corrupted."

If we use storytelling as shorthand for the craft of entertaining in general, then it's safe to say that in both music and film, that's already happened to a great extent. The music industry's desire to find the latest sex bomb diva or Jagger-wannabe has result in a dearth of entertainers hired far more for their looks than for their talent. Technology wasn't quite there 15 years ago, so when Frank Farian, the German-based record producer hired Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan to be the frontmen for Milli Vanilli, he had to rely on much more polished but far less photogenic performers to sing on his record. Today, he would have simply hired Rob and Fab, and then run their vocals through a battery of effects to correct their pitch, reshape their timbre, and perfect their phrasing.

My wife frequently bemoans the thin, breathy vocals to today's pop divas, but it's as much more of a visual trend than it is a stylistic one, as the video, the steamy pin-up poster, and hot chatroom-traded jpegs of this week's diva du jour are far more important to the boys in the PR department, than any sort of singing or musical talent appears to be. (I predicted the logical outcome of where all of this is going in a Tech Central Station piece last year.)

A similar trend is happening in Hollywood, as big budget film after big budget film junks writing and cogent storytelling for zillion dollar effects budgets, in the hopes of blowing the audience out of its seats, rather than telling them a story.

Well you know what? I've been blown out of my seat enough times. I don't mind movies as roller-coaster rides, when the plot flows logically into a climactic orgy of bullets and shards of plate glass (or lasers and exploding spaceships and planets), but too often, modern films are written solely to kill time in-between the two or three hellzapoppin' special effects sequences.

Back in 2001, John Podhoretz wrote a nifty history of Hollywood and its storytelling techniques that ultimately noted, just before its conclusion:

Movies today are awful because Hollywood no longer knows what a good plot is, what an interesting character is, or what genuine conviction is when it comes to telling a story.

But hey, how 'bout those bitchin' lightsaber battles and pod races!

In March of last year, Terrell Owens was traded first to the Baltimore Ravens, but then decided he'd rather be with the more competitive Philadelphia Eagles. Skip Bayless, then still with The San Jose Mercury (he's now with ESPN) had covered Owens' hijinks with the 49ers. (Which included the Sharpie Incident, the Pom-Pom Incident, the dancing on the Dallas Cowboys' Star Logo at Center Field Incident, etc.) He predicted that that Terrell would cause a fair amount of headaches and sleepless nights for Eagles head coach Andy Reid:

Shortly into a Tuesday news conference that felt more like a Super Bowl celebration, Philadelphia Eagles Coach Andy Reid made the mistake of calling his new savior Ter-RELL.

Sitting next to Reid, perhaps for the last time, Terrell Owens interrupted his new scapegoat -- sorry, coach. ``It's TERR-ell,'' said Owens, playfully slapping Reid on his back.

As tough a disciplinarian as Reid is, the man has no idea what he has gotten himself into. Neither, for that matter, does his ``savior.''

Be careful what you wish for, Philadelphia. You, too, T.O.

Bayless was right on both counts, but a season too soon. After a relatively benign first year that saw Owens become QB Donovan McNabb's primary target, Owens has demanded that his contract be reworked.

Why? For his family, which seems like a rather odd argument (but definitely of the moment, as S. T. Karnick recently noted). Owens and his family currently live in the attractive south Jersey suburb of Moorestown. It's a nice era (and an old stomping ground of mine), but it's a safe bet that the average working man can eke by there on $49 million (which includes a $7.5 million roster bonus that kicks in next off-season) that Owens will receive under his current contract with the Eagles.

So should he get a raise? Right now, the Eagles, who have become the dominant team in the NFC thanks to their shrewd handling of the salary cap, are having none of it. As Rick Gosselin of The Dallas Morning News wrote in late July (subscription may be required):

If the Eagles redo Owens, what’s to stop Donovan McNabb from marching in and demanding that his contract be reworked? Then Jevon Kearse? Then Brian Dawkins? If you renegotiate the contract of one unhappy star, you’ll soon have a bunch of unhappy stars on your team who are going to want their contracts redone as well.

That’s why the Eagles are drawing the line with Owens. He agreed to a seven-year contract last summer and received $9.16 million from the Eagles in 2004 in salary, signing bonus and roster bonus. There are no such bonuses in Year 2 of his contract, so he stands to receive just his base salary of $3.25 million in 2005.

Owens liked playing football a lot more when he was receiving $9 million a year. Who wouldn’t? But Owens knew the terms of the contract when he signed. He knew there’d be less money in the second year. If he wasn’t prepared to live up to the terms of the contract, why sign it?

The Eagles didn’t win a Super Bowl before Owens arrived. And they didn’t win one last year with him. In fact, the Eagles won two playoff games to reach the Super Bowl without Owens. The Eagles were a good team before Owens arrived and they’ll be a good team after he’s gone.

This is a franchise that knows how to run a successful business. There’s no one better at the salary cap than Joe Banner, and Philadelphia does a great job of drafting to keep young players stacked in the queue.

The Eagles allowed four Pro Bowl players to leave in the last three years: pass rusher Hugh Douglas, cornerbacks Troy Vincent and Bobby Taylor and guard Jermane Mayberry. They had one thing in common: all were over the age of 30. That’s Salary Cap 101 – do not pay age. Owens turns 32 this season. So don’t look for the Eagles to back down on this one.

As a result, Owens has been, needless to say, a tremendous distraction to the Eagles in training camp this year. How bad? Well, in the story's latest twist, Reid sent him home for a week yesterday, as Charles Robinson of Yahoo Sports writes:

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As we've noted before, James Lileks once dubbed Hollywood's post-9/11 output as "the golden era of beating around the bush".

We may very well look back on it as a golden era of sorts, as Jason Apuzzo writes a disturbing sounding essay on Tinseltown's next phase. Needless to say, the successors to Bogie and Jimmy Stewart are nowhere to be find.

On Tuesday, Chris Muir of the "Day By Day" cartoon strip asked us, and several other bloggers, to post this cartoon and a link to the American Cancer Ablation site, as they're treating Chris's sister. Here's the result:

Keep up the good work--as we said on Tuesday, click here early and often:

In an item titled "Academentia Watch", James Taranto begins his daily "Best of the Web" column by noting:

The American Political Science Association is holding its annual convention Labor Day weekend in Washington, and it features a panel discussion on the subject "Is It Time to Call It Fascism"?

No. This is when it's time to call it fascism.

No, that's not secret code from a 1960s spy thriller. But it does involve the FBI and the Defense Department. Ed Morrissey, Jim Geraghty and other bloggers have some thoughts on what Geraghty says could be "one of the biggest stories to come down the pike in a while". Geraghty's post is a great way to get up to speed quickly on the topic. He concludes:

Somebody's lyin.

If this checks out, a lot of folks left, right and center are going to have to ask hard questions about what the heck Jamie Gorelick was doing on that Commission instead of answering questions to it. The whole, "well, both administrations were to blame, let's move on" conventional wisdom regarding 9/11 could be shot to hell, if it turns out the U.S. military intelligence had these guys identified and located within NYC and an effort to capture them was vetoed. Over a legal argument that seems flat-out wrong. Atta wasn't a U.S. citizen; none of these guys were.

The Sandy Berger stuffing his socks has always looked like a deliberate coverup, but now that slap on the wrist sentence he recieved looks truly outrageous. And the defense of him from President Clinton — something along the lines of, "oh, that's just absent-minded Sandy, we always laughed about him walking off with papers" becomes supremely implausible. No, if Weldon's account is accurate, this entire thing smells of a stunningly brazen coverup.

Meanwhile, Morrissey writes:

Able Danger proved that at least some of the intelligence work done by the US provided the information that could have helped prevent or at least reduce the attacks on 9/11. They had identified the ringleader of the conspiracy as a terrorist agent, even if they didn't know what mission he had at the time.

What does that mean for the Commission's findings? It meant that the cornerstone of their conclusions no longer fit the facts. Able Danger showed that the US had enough intelligence to take action -- if the government had allowed law enforcement and intelligence operations to cooperate with each other. It also showed that data mining could effectively identify terrorist agents.

So what did the Commission do? It ignored those facts which did not fit within its predetermined conclusions. It never bothered to mention Able Danger even one time in its final report, even though that absolutely refuted the notion that the government had no awareness that Atta constituted a terrorist threat. It endorsed the idea of data mining (which would die in Congress as the Total Information Awareness program) without ever explaining why. And while the Clinton policy of enforcing a quarantine between law enforcement and intelligence operations came under general criticism, their report never included the fact that the "wall" for which Commission member Jamie S. Gorelick had so much responsibility specifically contributed to Atta's ability to come and go as he pleased, building the teams that would kill almost 3,000 Americans.

And when confronted with this revelation this week, the Commission lied about their knowledge of the program and attempted to impugn Rep. Curt Weldon's integrity instead. Here's what Lee Hamilton, one of the Commission's co-chairs, had to say just yesterday on the topic:

"The Sept. 11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell," said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "Had we learned of it obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."

The Able Danger project team tried three times, Fox reports, to give the information on Atta to the FBI in 2000. Each time, administration attorneys blocked their efforts.

Meanwhile, via The Anchoress, Dr. Sanity looks at a possible connection between this, Sandy Berger, and his pants.

Jeff Goldstein has some thoughts that dovetail remarkably well with the topics of our two previous posts.

Back in February of last year, we looked at items by Radley Balko and Jonah Goldberg on what they dubbed "the conservative left", and how it's adopted much of William F. Buckley's old motto of "standing athwart history, yelling stop!"

A hallmark of the pre-Buckley American conservatism of the first half of the twentieth century was isolationism. Ironically though, that impulse was largely eradicated by the events of December 7th, 1941, and modern conservatism was defined by a willingness to fight the Cold War head on. It was something they shared with most mainstream American liberals, prior to what we've referred to a couple of times as "the class of '72".

But in contrast, the events of 9/11, Harry Hatchett writes, fueled a powerful impulse towards isolationism on the left:

This is the curious thing about the past few years – a large part of the anti-war left has effectively substituted for the isolationist right. People who would proudly describe themselves as ‘internationalists’ have found themselves muttering about meddling and puffing indignantly about the rights of ‘sovereign states’.

The best example of this came when Gore Vidal was asked about how else the Iraqi people could be freed from Saddam’s terror state and replied: “Don't you think that's their problem? That's not your problem and that's not my problem.”

So, I shouldn’t really have been surprised when I was canvassing in Bethnal Green and a man who declared himself a “lifelong Tory” and who was voting Conservative told me that he had been on his first demonstration of his life on February 15, 2003 when he marched behind the banners of the SWP and listened to the speeches of Tariq Ali and George Galloway. When I suggested that Iraqis were glad to be rid of Saddam his reply was “They may well be but it was none of our business was it?”

So when my critical friend asked as to why on this blog we don’t deal with right-wing arguments against the Iraq war and the broader issues perhaps I should have replied: “But we do”.

Exactly. The remaining strain of isolationism on the right are paleoconservatives, of which Pat Buchanan is the most prominent example--and it's not surprising that in the effort to prop up his isolationist beliefs, he's been more than willing to come full circle with the left himself.

Not too surprisingly, in their obituary for Peter Jennings, The Washington Post is waxing nostalgic for the days of what it calls "Jovian Authority":

"Cable, satellite networks and the vast, chattering online universe [that has] gone far to create a world in which no three men will ever again deliver the news to an entire nation with such Jovian authority."

Oxblog replies:

Well you know what? Jovian authority sucks. Jovian authority is what gave us Jayson Blair and CBS's forged documents about Bush and the National Guard.

But what's really ironic here is that journalists should be the first ones to remind us that Jovian authority sucks. In the crucible of modern American journalism known as Vietnam, correspondents earned their stripes by pulling back the curtain that protected the Jovian authority with which President Johnson and his generals declared the war effort to be a great success.

Then, in the aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam, America found itself in a situation where the network anchormen, and not the president of the United States, enjoyed the benefits of Jovian authority. Unsurprisingly, this imbalance of power is what has led the editors of the Times and the Post, along with the rest of the embattled media, to wax nostalgic for days gone by.

And they've been doing it for nearly a decade--arguably for 25 years, even knowing that technology was reshaping how the public received its news and opinion.

But then nostalgia isn't all that unknown in the newsroom these days.

Mr. Sun has the scientifical explanation!

Jonah Goldberg notes how CNN and other TV networks typically pair opinion journalists such as Bob Novak, Tucker Carlson and Goldberg himself, with "'political consultants' — i.e., party mouthpieces and activists":

I hate the practice because it makes it almost impossible to argue in good faith. I disagree with the Bush administration on a wide number of issues — from immigration policy and “compassionate conservatism” to its grotesque overspending. But it’s very hard to offer a balanced defense when your opponent is shouting that you’re a whore to the GOP and that Bush is a liar with his pants on fire.

Take, for example, what was once CNN’s flagship political program. From 2000 until its recent demise, Crossfire featured Novak and Tucker Carlson on the right vs. Paul Begala and Carville (and before that it was Bill Press, a former Democratic Party operative). You don’t have to be fans of Novak and Carlson to see that they have jobs and backgrounds different from Begala’s and Carville’s. Both Novak and Carlson are journalists — opinion journalists, to be sure, but journalists nonetheless. They speak for nobody but themselves and they have a long-term interest in maintaining their credibility. Obviously, they have views more amenable to conservatives and Republicans, but that’s different from being on the payroll of the Republican party. For example, Novak never supported the Iraq war and Carlson doesn’t now.

Carville and Begala, meanwhile, are party operatives and always have been. They were even advisers to the Kerry campaign while still keeping their “analyst” jobs at CNN.

Crossfire was cancelled by CNN’s new president, Jonathan Klein, because he thought it was just “a bunch of guys screaming at each other” and did “nothing to illuminate the issues of the day.” Klein was right, but whose fault was that?

In the fallout of the Novak outburst, Klein defended Carville’s jibes at Novak, saying they were completely within bounds. That’s all too true. But guess who defines the bounds?

This is a bipartisan point. CNN and the other networks pair GOP hacks and mouthpieces against liberal journalists all the time, too. As I was told more than once, one of the chief complaints producers had when they put conservative and liberal journalists on was that there was “too much agreement.”

Of course, there are plenty of pundits who are in the tank for the Republicans or the Democrats. But as a general rule, the pundits tend to believe they’re doing their jobs by offering their views in good faith. Party flacks by definition define a job well done as making their boss’s case.

If it was outrageous — and it was — for Armstrong Williams to take money from the administration in exchange for offering his opinions, why isn’t it just a little outrageous for the news networks to blur deliberately the difference between opinion journalists and party hacks? That’s the real B.S., and I hate it.

But just as with the guests of The Jerry Springer Show (and before him Mort Downey) throwing chairs across the set, it makes for great TV, and that's all that matters in the producers' eyes.

Fortunately, there's an alternative these days.

Chris Muir, the artist behind the wonderful "Day By Day" cartoon, emailed us today with the following cartoon and link:

(Blogging will continue in its usual sporadic fashion tonight, below this post.)

After a post as depressing as that last one, let's try to go out on something infinitely more fun--a really, really, really badly subtitled version of Star Wars: Episode III.

And remember, "Our dichotomy opens the combat!"

(And also remember, please click on this post's link, early and often.)

While I was looking up links for the post below, I came across this item from The Belmont Club's Wretchard, who looks at what he calls Stalin's "final, Final Solution", his proposed destruction of Russia's Jews in the early 1950s:

Though the Great Terror of the late 1930s is widely viewed as the height of Stalin's purges, the number of arrests actually peaked in the early 1950s, and Stalin was planning hundreds of thousands more on the eve of his death in 1953. These arrests were spurred by the "doctors' plot," a supposed conspiracy among Jewish doctors to kill members of the government and destroy the U.S.S.R. at the behest of the Americans. Brent, the editorial director of Yale University Press, and Naumov, executive secretary of Russia's Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Repressed Persons, trace how Stalin himself put together ... (a plan) ... to accomplish several goals: to purge his Ministry of Security and upper ranks of government; to defuse the potential threat posed by Soviet Jews, many of whom had ties to the U.S. and the new state of Israel; and to provide fuel for an armed conflict with the U.S.

Fortunately, Stalin's stroke and death soon afterwards put a stop to it, but not before four large prison camps in Kazakhstan, Siberia and the Arctic north were built. And not before all of Stalin's other monstrous crimes had occurred during his long, bloody reign. As Wretchard writes, "This was pretty heavy stuff, but then Stalin had the dubious distinction of killing many more people than Adolph Hitler".

(Via Willisms.)

In the Wall Street Journal, Salil Tripathi notes that England's multicultural novelists predicted the mindset of the London 7/7 subway bombers a decade ago:

Several British Asian novelists have been writing about the turbulence within Britain's Muslim community. But while they have been honored, their warnings have gone unheeded. Mr. Kureishi has won the Whitbread Award for "The Buddha of Suburbia." Many of Mr. Rushdie's novels have been nominated for the Booker Prize, which he won in 1982 for "Midnight's Children." Monica Ali was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2003, for "Brick Lane." Nadeem Aslam won the Encore Award this year in London for "Maps for Lost Lovers." (In June he also won an American award, the Kiriyama Prize, which is given to enhance the West's understanding of the East.)

If those novels were read carefully, then the composite picture that emerges today--of disaffected youth finding a new meaning through faith, joining religious groups and following foreign-born preachers, as well as of subterranean misogyny and ostracizing, and even killing those who leave the community by marrying outside the faith--should not have surprised anyone.

Britain's multiculturalism rests on political correctness. This means the mediator becomes more important than the message. Minority writers get a disproportionate amount of space on the bookshelves, but what is being said is seemingly willfully neglected. That partly explains why so many--including their neighbors and much of the British establishment--were surprised to find that three homegrown British Pakistanis became suicide bombers. Many in Britain think--smugly--that they know how to handle multiethnic relations. After all, chicken tikka masala had been crowned the country's favorite dish; the whole of Britain cheered when boxer Amir Khan won a silver medal at the Athens Olympics in 2004; until recently Nasser Hussain led the English cricket team; and British courts had allowed Muslim schoolgirls not only the right to wear headscarves, but also the jilbab, an outfit that covers their entire body. How could things go wrong?

Read the fictional characters at the beginning of the article. While they're all young English immigrants in stories conceived a decade ago by the authors that Tripathi mentions, several of their elements also struck me as being remarkably similar to that of America's own John Walker Lindh in their desire to opt out of the complexity of modern society in return for the opportunity to immanentize the eschaton.

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Speaking of Jeff and Steve, whom I met at last year's RMBB, there will be another munch for Denver-era bloggers (and those who wish to stop by the neighborhood, as I did) on August 20th. Sadly, I doubt I can make that one, but click on the above link if you'd like to meet some of the best Bloggers on the 'Net.

(Would they be anyplace but the 'Net?? We'll no. Except on the 20th--Ed)

Jeff Goldstein has an open letter to Cindy Sheehan.

(Found via Steve Green, who writes, "It's a great post by Jeff, but if you were hoping for dick jokes or naughty words, forget it. You know, this one time." Fair enough.)

Update: Charles Johnson has a post on Sheehan that's also well worth reading.

When I was going through my archives from last year for the Mark Steyn item to go in the post below, I noticed that today is James Lileks' birthday. He has some thoughts on birthdays, then and now, over at his (now much more readable) Bleat.

Howard Dean goes postmodern in his latest, Howard Beale-style utterance:

"What the propagandists on the right have done is make people afraid to say they are Democrats. We have to be out there. We have to be vocal. We have to be pushing our version of the facts because their version of the facts is very unfactual."

I doubt Eric Blair would have been surprised by Dean's quote, which will probably be starring in Mark Steyn's next article, just as a pair of Democrats' postmodern solipsists were, this time last year.

I caught the last quarter of the Dolphins/Bears NFL Hall of Fame Game yesterday (I TiVoed it, but I'm not sure if I'll watch the rest, as it's tough to get too worked up over preseason football). Charles Robinson of Yahoo Sports says that despite the return of Ricky Williams, and a new head coach, the Dolphins' offensive line could be keep its offense stalled this year:

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Sweet, smokin' Judas--how hard is it for the media to understand what a blog is? This TechWeb article on My Yahoo homepage starts off well, and then veers far off the tracks about halfway through:

The number of people in the United States who visited web logs in the first quarter of the year reached 50 million, and each of the top four hosting services for blogs on the Internet topped 5 million visitors, a web metrics firm said Monday.

The number of Americans visiting blogs amounted to 30 percent of the total online U.S. population, an increase of 45 percent over the same period last year, ComScore Networks said.

Other key findings in the report were that the top four hosting services for blogs had more than 5 million unique visitors. Those sites in order, starting with the largest, were Blogspot.com, Livejournal.com, Typepad.com and Xanga.com.

Blogspot.com's 19 million unique visitors amounted to more visitors than the NYTimes.com, USAToday.com and WashingtonPost.com. The numbers were "clear evidence that consumer-generated media can draw audience on par with traditional online publishers," the report said.

Five individual blogs had more than a million unique visitors. In order, starting with the largest, were FreeRepublic.com, DrudgeReport.com, Fleshbot.com, Gawker.com and Fark.com.

With the exception of the two Nick Denton-owned blogs sandwiched in the middle, (Fleshbot and Gawker), the rest of that list...aren't blogs! Fark and Free Republic are Internet forums, updated equivalents of the BBS message boards from the online days of yore, and Matt Drudge has gone out of his way to tell interviewers that he's not a blogger. And again, with the exception of the Denton sites, none of those Websites use any sort of blogging software to FTP content up--you know, like blog posts.

When it comes to "dead tree" publications, most people know instinctively what a magazine is, and how it differs from a newspaper. On TV, most people can separate a sitcom from an infomercial from the six o'clock news. Why is it so hard for the media to understand what a Weblog is, what an online forum is, and what a conventional Website is?

Iowahawk boldly goes where no school principal has gone before, and reveals once again, how useful science fiction is at shining a light back at man's own absurdities.

"Jennings' Death Ushers in Uncertain Era", AP reports, something we've discussed a few times here as well. Here's a segment from the AP copy:

The death of Peter Jennings means an era in television news has ended with stunning swiftness, giving broadcasters the challenge of reimagining the nightly news in an age of instant Internet updates.

Jennings, 67, died Sunday at his Manhattan home. He hadn't been seen by viewers of ABC's "World News Tonight" since announcing in April he had lung cancer.

For more than 20 years, many American television viewers learned the day's news at the dinner hour from either Jennings, NBC's Tom Brokaw and CBS's Dan Rather — covering the Reagan era, communism's fall, O.J. Simpson and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The triumvirate held steady as the world of news changed around them, driven by the spread of cable and the Internet. Today, people can get news headlines simply by flipping open their cell phones.

Brokaw, 65, retired from the "Nightly News" in November, and Rather, 73, signed off in March. With Jennings gone, the days of name-brand anchors serving as the public face of their news networks may be disappearing as well.

"It's a cruel twist of fate in that Jennings was suddenly going to have the network (evening) news to himself after 20 years of long service," said William Lord, a Boston University journalism professor and one of Jennings' producers in the 1980s. "This was going to be Peter's time to reclaim that No. 1 ranking."

Ironically though, as Thomas Sowell quipped last year when Tom Brokaw retired:

During his long tenure as NBC News anchorman, Tom Brokaw took that program from last place among the big three broadcast networks to first place. But he had more viewers when he was in last place, more than 20 years ago, than he had in first place this year. That is because fewer people now watch NBC, ABC, or CBS News. Good!

We concur. Ironically, the media has long known that the days of the big three national anchormen were numbered, along with the era of a single (almost always liberal) big city newspaper having a monopoly on information. Heck, Alvin Toffler predicted such developments 25 years ago in The Third Wave. But instead of planning for this transistion and how they'd play a role in it, big media has done nothing but berate each competitor as they've entered the scene. Now they face the Long Tail of Weblogs and other alternative media. As I wrote earlier this year:

[Hugh] Hewitt says, the tail of the Blogosphere is a concept that the mainstream media simply does not understand. "They've never worried about the tail, ever", he chortles. "And now they've got the tail just eating them, all day, 24/7."

Happy dining.

My review of Downfall, originally written in March when the film playing the art house circuit, is now up on Blogcritics.

The Space Shuttle lands safely in California.

And hopefully for the last time.

Al Franken looks at the real victim in the "Air Enron" scandal...Al Franken!

Forget the Dale Carnegie Method--when it comes to making new friends, let PETA show you the way!

David Frum has a nice tribute to his fellow Canadian, Peter Jennings:

National Review readers may remember Peter Jennings as the man who compared the 1994 congressional elections to a child’s temper tantrum. They may remember his ill-concealed partiality for the Arab side of the Arab-Israeli dispute. Or they may remember him as the last of the great anchormen from the now-fading days when network news reliably tilted public information in a liberal direction.

All these memories are true of course. But it was also true that Jennings was a man of consideration and gentlemanliness so exquisite it was almost shocking. His manners with women, his amusing and only-so-very-slightly indiscreet stories, his tact – talking with him was like talking to a character from another time and place.

Jennings scattered kindnesses, large and small over the landscape. He was shrewd and funny. I’d met him, if I remember right, only once or twice when he called me on the phone one day, said something nice about a television interview I had done the night before, and then added, “Oh by the way, a word of advice: never wear light-colored suits on television.” I never have.

His voice in private conversation was a tone higher than his voice on television. There was something self-invented about him – and it was perhaps in this way that he owed his success to his origins in Canada. Who after all studies American life and culture more closely than Canadians with their noses pressed to the glass? From Elizabeth Arden to Lorne Michaels, Canadians have made it their business to know their neighbors better than they know themselves. And like “Elizabeth Arden,” nee Florence Graham of Woodbridge, Ontario, they have recreated and reimagined themselves along the way.

Years ago, the New York Times ran a piece on the seemingly amazing amount of Canadian expatriates there were in American show business--and television news is certainly close enough a profession to qualify. God knows we beam bazillions of hours of American TV up to them--it certainly makes sense that they'd want to become part of our pop culture.

What of Canada herself? In the Great White North's Western Standard, Mark Steyn ponders why "one of the largest, wealthiest nations in the history of the world manages to remain entirely invisible" to both her northern neighbor, and to much of the world at large.

...By demonstrating their continuing support of a veteran actor who's views were--to say the least--slightly divergent from many in the company town he toiled in for decades.

As The Cassandra Page noted, yesterday was the seventh anniversary of the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania by al-Qaeda. Probably not coincidentally, it was 15 years ago today, Trey Jackson reminds us, that Iraq invaded Kuwait:

This was a watershed day in the Middle East. Iraq announced that it had annexed the kingdom of Kuwait -- moving over 200,000 troops into the tiny, oil-rich country. As Iraq declared Kuwait to be its 19th Province, U.S. President George Bush warned Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, “A line has been drawn in the sand,” and American forces began moving into Saudi Arabia.

Something Osama bin Laden certainly took notice of.

Trey continues:

Kuwait is free thanks to President George H.W. Bush. Iraq is now free thanks to President George W. Bush. Saddam is in an Iraqi prison today and liberals remain outraged. Go figure...

Hypocrophobia strikes deep.

The server that this site resides on apparently hiccuped earlier today. But, as you can see...we're back. Watch for more bloggidty goodness coming your way shortly.

Megan McCardle, one of the Professor's three guest hosts this week writes what a milestone Jennings' passing away represents:

Many people spent more time with Peter Jennings than with their adult children. I don't watch television news except during big disasters; I find it too shallow and graphic to be useful. But for many people, Peter Jennings was their point of contact with the wider world.

And his death represents the end of an era. No one will ever occupy the place in the world that Brokaw, Jennings, and Rather did. Americans are no longer limited to three channels, nor forced to take their news in discreet bites between 5-7. The world is probably better for it, but something--if only a connection to our past--has been lost.

Howard Kurtz wrote back in 2002 that this moment was coming, when all three of the anchors would be gone, the men who dominated the TV news during the Big Three networks' transistion from a monopoly to but one of dozens of choices viewers now have thanks to cable, satellite, and talk radio. And now, thanks to the Blogosphere, the news and opinion choices of the public are infinitely more crystalized. (As you've already discovered, if you're reading this!):

For two decades now, through war and scandal, through serious times and silly times, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw have ruled the television world from their network thrones.

Their companies were bought and sold, their audience distracted by new choices and new technology. But no one dared mess with America's anchors.

Now, with little warning, that may be changing. In an age when even Ted Koppel is deemed expendable, when ABC is willing to replace "Nightline" with funnyman David Letterman, the once-sacrosanct evening news suddenly seems vulnerable to bottom-line executives at Disney, General Electric and Viacom.

As the 70-year-old Rather, 64-year-old Jennings and 62-year-old Brokaw head into their sunset years, the programs will no longer be shielded by their prestige.

"When Brokaw, Jennings and Rather retire, it is a perfect time for these corporations to decide their newscasts are no longer worth it," said Ken Bode, a former NBC correspondent who teaches at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. "Unless something dramatic happens, inevitably, the network newscasts are gone."

If that happens, it would be the biggest change in news consumption in the half-century history of television, an erosion caused in part by the striking failure of these programs to attract viewers younger than 50. Thus, they have the same problem plaguing "Nightline" -- an aging audience that is gradually dying off.

For some thoughts on the rapidly graying demographics of TV, click here. And for some thoughts on how that will impact advertising, the mother's milk of mass media, click here.

As you probably already know, Peter Jennings died today, of lung cancer, at age 67. I'm not entirely surprised; when I attended the Media Research Center's "2004 Media Dishonors Awards" in April, Cal Thomas, the show's MC, and the other presenters verbally whacked away at Dan Rather's professional effigy like it was a piñata, and (to a much lesser extent) commented on Tom Brokaw's bias. However, they pointedly stayed away from mentioning Jennings' excesses. Midway through the presentation, Thomas announced that out of consideration for Jennings' dire condition, he and his fellow presenters would avoid any negative comments about Jennings that night, and asked for a moment of silent prayer from the audience.

Jennings was a handsome and polished news reader who once told David Letterman the he was "raised with anti-Americanism in my blood, or in my mother's milk at least", and who came equipped with a pointed bias against Israel. Israellycool and Orrin Judd look at some of the darker moments of his career.

Rather's forced-retirement from the CBS Evening News earlier this year was a time for wild glee from many--including myself, of course. This feels infinitely more somber. While my worldview is 180 degrees opposite from so much of what Jennings' was, I'm very, very sorry to hear that he's passed away at such a comparatively young age.

The Cassandra Page looks at the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania and concludes that their memory is being tossed down the memory hole by the mainstream media:

These bombings predated 9-11 by three years. At that time, there was still time to prevent 9-11. These and other bombings gave us all of the justification we needed to confront the terrorist threat head on. Clinton's response was to bomb an aspirin factory in Sudan. The Taliban remained in place in Afghanistan and Osama was free to use Afghanistan as a training base for another three years.

But the MSM/DNC, otherwise known as the Clinton Legacy Rehabilitation Project, has chosen to ignore this anniversary. Think of what you saw on the morning news programs today. Were most of the features even in the same ballpark as this item in terms of importance?

The slightest emphasis on today's anniversary would destroy the MSM/DNC meme, which blames George Bush for all terrorism. Even the slightest mention of this story would remind Americans that terrorism began BEFORE the U.S. led invasion of Iraq.

For the benefit of the left and the MSM/DNC, here is a chronology:

(1) Global terrorism occurred many times over the past thirty or more years.

(2) We began to fight back, including the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq.

(3) The MSM/DNC began a relentless campaign to reverse the order of ## 1 and 2 in the minds of the public. That is a very difficult task. Judging from the last election, this strategy has worked with only 47% of the voters.

That task requires the MSM/DNC to bury many facts down the memory hole. The victims in Nairobi and Tanzania are mere inconveniences to be forgotten in the MSM/DNC's mad rush to play politics and rewrite history.

One minor quibble--it's not all that mad of a rush: the memory hole has been lit for well over a year, if not longer. In fact, arguably since the liberation of Iraq in 2003.

Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom, and The Volokh Conspiracy's David Bernstein have some thoughts. And Andrew Sullivan's Salon article from 2002 on the same topic is also worth revisiting.

In 2003, at the height of the Jayson Blair scandal that ultimately cost Blair and his editor, Howell Raines, their jobs at the New York Times, Stanley Kurtz wrote:

Howell Raines is not the real issue, and getting rid of Raines won't solve anything. The problem is Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and he's not going away. In his wonderful book, How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace), Harry Stein lays out the disturbing facts about "Pinch" Sulzberger. (Sulzberger's father was nicknamed "Punch," and the none too flattering nickname for Junior is "Pinch.")

Pinch was a political activist in the Sixties, and was twice arrested in anti-Vietnam protests. One day, the elder Sulzberger asked his son what Pinch calls, "the dumbest question I've ever heard in my life." If an American soldier runs into a North Vietnamese soldier, which would you like to see get shot? Young Arthur answered, "I would want to see the American get shot. It's the other guy's country." Some Sixties activists have since thought better of their early enthusiasms. Pinch hasn't. [emphasis mine--Ed]

In a moment of staggering irony and hypocricy, Pinch's paper asks, "Where Are the War Heroes?":

One soldier fought off scores of elite Iraqi troops in a fierce defense of his outnumbered Army unit, saving dozens of American lives before he himself was killed. Another soldier helped lead a team that killed 27 insurgents who had ambushed her convoy. And then there was the marine who, after being shot, managed to tuck an enemy grenade under his stomach to save the men in his unit, dying in the process.

Their names are Sgt. First Class Paul R. Smith, Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester and Sgt. Rafael Peralta. If you have never heard of them, even in a week when more than 20 marines were killed in Iraq by insurgents, that might be because the military, the White House and the culture at large have not publicized their actions with the zeal that was lavished on the heroes of World War I and World War II.

Charles Johnson rhetorically asks, "Isn’t there someone missing from that list of groups that don’t publicize military heroes?"

Over to you, Pinch!

Warning! Long and rambling post with enormous swatches of quotes from articles and books about the evils of modern architecture to follow! I won't be upset if this topic bores you and you want to move along. Otherwise, grab a beer or a Coke--you'll be here a while with this one. I'll wait while you hit the fridge--and I'll understand if you skip this one entirely.

Back?

OK, here we go!

In one of his "Screeeeed" blog's posts (currently offline as the Home of the Bleat is undergoing a massive urban renewal project of its own), James Lileks referred to this truly remarkable 1995 essay by Theodore Dalrymple, the nom de plume of an English psychiatrist who's also a brilliant social critic. Lileks quoted from Dalrymple's piece, but I don't believe he linked to it, so it took a few minutes of Googling to stumble across it.

[Update: Lileks' post is back online--Ed]

But needless to say, the whole thing is well worth reading. Dalrymple arrives, independently, at many of the same conclusions about England's public housing that Jane Jacobs did in the mid-1960s and America's then still burgeoning urban renewal projects, in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, one of the few books praised by both conservatives and the left. It's probably not all that surprising that most of her findings translate all too well across the Atlantic.

As Dalrymple wrote in his piece:

Until quite recently, I had assumed that the extreme ugliness of the city in which I live was attributable to the Luftwaffe. I imagined that the cheap and charmless high rise buildings which so disfigure the city-scape had been erected of necessity in great gaping holes left by Heinkel bombers. I had spent much of my childhood playing in deserted bomb shelters in public parks: and although I was born some years after the end of the war, that great conflagration still exerted a powerful hold on the imagination of British children of my generation.

I discovered how wrong I was not long ago when I entered a store whose walls were decorated with large photographs of the city as it had been before the war. It was then a fine place, in a grandiloquent, Victorian kind of way. Every building had spoken of a bulging, no doubt slightly pompous and ridiculous, municipal pride. Industry and Labor were glorified in statuary, and a leavening of Greek temples and Italian Renaissance palaces lightened the prevailing mock-Venetian Gothic architecture.

"A great shame about the war," I said to the store assistant, who was of an age to remember the old days. "Look at the city now."

"The war?" she said. "The war had nothing to do with it. It was the council."

The City Council—the people's elected representatives it transpired, had done far more damage to the fabric of the city in the 1950s and 1960s than had Goering's air force. Indeed, they had managed to turn it into a terrible visual ordeal for anyone with the most minimal visual sensibility.

Dalrymple places much of the wreckage done in the name of modern architecture firmly at the feet of Le Corbusier, the Swiss born, but thoroughly French modern architect, who spent his entire life--first symbolically, and then eventually literally--dynamiting the street, something he saw as all too messy, with its smells of cooking, corner merchants, kids running and bicycling, parents conversing on stoops, etc.

Like most of Europe's modernist architects, Corbusier came to prominence in the 1920s, when he built a series of remarkable--and remarkably handsome--expensive, airy white flat-roofed homes for the wealthy patrons of Paris's art community (Michael Stein was one of Corbu's early patrons--the home he built for Stein in Garches, France would eventually become hugely influential in its form. The brother of Gertrude, both were American expatriates living abroad.)

In many respects, these folks were the predecessors to the social class that David Brooks wrote about so memorably about a few years ago. Rather than today's Bobos In Paradise, these were proto-bobos in Paris, and they had the money and inclination to fund not just modern art, but modern architecture, and found the perfect avant garde architect in "Corbu".

Corbu's architecture worked splendidly when he was building private homes for wealthy patrons who desired to live in their austere modernism, and maintain the enormous upkeep they required with their pure white walls and flat roofs.

But Corbu also saw himself as a social planner desiring to work on an enormous scale, which Dalrymple mentioned in another, more recent, essay on modern architecture:

Le Corbusier (the French-Swiss architect) once said, a house is a machine for living in. By the same token, a school is a machine for being taught in, and a hospital for being cured in. Unfortunately, if you spend you entire life living in machines, you are likely to end up by feeling like a machine part.

Le Corbusier wanted to raze Paris to the ground and start again. Its irregularity, its nooks and crannies, its accretions of ornament, its grandeur, its illogicality and lack of overall plan, irritated him. He thought he could do better: pull the whole lot down – Sainte Chapelle, the Louvre, Notre Dame, everything – and replace it with militarised ranks of buildings like the UN Headquarters, separated by open spaces in which rapists might safely rape for lack of anyone else in them. Cars would speed down the multi-lane highways between the ranks of the buildings, as people (those irritating flies in the ointment) rushed from one machine to do something in to another,

Well, his dream – everyone else’s nightmare, of course – has come true, at least in small part. All over the world, people have been decanted into dwellings that provide them with cubic space and the bare amenities but little else. When I say people, I mean principally the poor, of course, those with little choice of where to live; the architects and planners who do the decanting them prefer to live in bijou cottages or, where available, Georgian mansions. Not for them the self-denying ordinance of frugal functionality: it is the ornament of others they hate and despise, not their own. Hell for them is not just other people, it is other people’s taste.

What is so obvious about the Corbusian vision, and that of so many of its followers, is its complete lack of tenderness, its deliberate, full-frontal brutalism, as if the only thing that protects is from the sentimentality of kitsch is a complete and conscious rejection of anything approaching ornament, of anything that could imply a fondness for the world. In other worlds, the Corbusian vision is but a gestalt-switch away from kitsch, upon the existence of which its own existence is parasitic.

Perhaps it is not altogether surprising that people who live in a brutal or brutalised architectural world should themselves so often turn out brutal or brutalised. My argument does not require, of course, that bad architecture should be the only or even the main cause of human brutality; it would be obviously absurd to argue that human brutality first entered the world with Le Corbusier. But it is not surprising if people who are herded into machines for living in, and are educated in machines for learning in, and cured when they are ill in machines for being cured in, should not have a very tender attitude to their surroundings or even their fellow machine-inhabitants.

It has fallen to the post-Corbusian age to erect housing and public buildings devoid of all embellishment. If you observe the mud huts of Africans in the bush that they build with their own hands, you will rarely find one that is not embellished in some way, often with great good taste, sense of colour and design. They express thereby not only a love of the world but of life. By contrast, bleak Corbusian functionalism expresses in concrete form the insignificance of man as an individual. Le Corbusier wanted to build a world fit not for heroes (he was active between the wars), but for clones. His buildings are to architecture what Maoist overalls were to clothes; and it is no great surprise that his work was much appreciated by collectivists, both Communist and Fascist, to both of which groups he was himself drawn.

In England, Corbu's vision was adopted to both reduce post World War II housing shortages, but also by England's liberal politicians to simultaneously eliminate the last refuges of Victorianism, which Dalrymple notes in the 1995 essay we were discussing at the start of this post:

Read More »

As James Lileks once wrote:

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

This is the month that the press finds out; one of the great joys of August, Iowahawk writes, is knowing that the elite media will be making their "annual Bush vacation Bataan death march" to cover the president on his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Naturally of course, their coverage of the ranch and its surrounding region will be filtered through a Upper West Side mentality that views small town America as Hell On Earth:

The rampant cultural poverty that afflicts Crawford manifests itself in unanticipated ways. It even impacts basic necessities like food, clothing, shelter and transportation.

For instance, a severe arugula shortage means that salads here must be constructed out of crude iceberg lettuce. It is nearly impossible to find a restaurant that serves balsamic chervil aioli, or a simple bone marrow gnocchi in white wine reduction; diners are forced to subsist on a diet of jumbo enchiladas or the $6.99 all-you-can-eat Brisket Buffet at Sonny's.

Without a single Prada or Moschino or even Emporio Armani within a twenty-mile radius, the fashions of Crawford are dictated by the clumsy designs of local courtiers like Wal-Mart, Sheplers or Tractor Supply Company.

Even more shocking, during a recent Salvation Army clothing drive, local residents were seen giving away what appeared to be dozens of designs from Jean Paul Gaultier's new fall collection.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the desperate straits of Crawford better than its bleak housing situation. While homes here appear plentiful and clean, most residents are forced to live in the numbing isolation of gigantic floor plans that often exceed 300 square feet, separated by as much as 50 yards from their nearest neighbors.

Compounding the loneliness, they are constrained by tiny housing budgets that would scarcely afford a seedy, roach-infested efficiency in the East Village, without the soothing sirens and the security of rent control.

Travel options are limited as well. The glaring lack of subways and cabs means residents of Crawford are forced to rely on dangerous private automobiles and trucks, which are sometimes inexplicably decorated with "#3" and decals of a urinating cartoon Calvin, talismans perhaps designed to ward off evil spirits.

Read the rest with advance warning that--unless your name is Al Hunt or E.J. Dionne--it is a riot.

The Anchoress places the mainstream media's non-coverage of the "Air Enron" scandal into context alongside other leftwing scandals they've avoided and concludes that there is "an insidious and immature bunker mentality alive and well in the MSM. And right now, they’re making sandbags".

Read the rest.

I used to think my wife and I had a couple of cool home offices. But now I know that they pale in comparison to the room where Roger L. Simon does the bulk of his writing:

I am typing these words from the very spot where Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe slept for most of their brief marrige. Yes, my office was once their bedroom and my desk is exactly where their bed would have been.

Nothing like having the ghost of Marilyn Monroe as your muse.

The battered Raiders quarterback is trading his cleats for a microphone:

Rich Gannon is leaving the NFL after missing most of last season with a broken vertebra in his neck, and ready to move to the TV booth.

The 39-year-old quarterback for the Oakland Raiders was to officially retire Saturday at an afternoon news conference at the team's training facility in the California wine country. The announcement had been expected for months.

Gannon, the 2002 NFL MVP, already has signed with CBS Sports as an NFL game analyst after playing 18 seasons in the league. He guided the Raiders to the 2003 Super Bowl before spending much of the last two seasons injured.

He injured his neck in the third week last season in a helmet-to-helmet collision with Tampa Bay linebacker Derrick Brooks.

Gannon threw for 28,743 yards and 180 touchdowns in his career with Minnesota, Washington, Kansas City and Oakland. He won his MVP award while leading the Raiders to the Super Bowl in the 2002 season, passing for 4,689 yards and 26 touchdowns while completing more than 67 percent of his passes.

Gannon tried to help any way possible last season, attending meetings and games while wearing a bulky, plastic brace. He consulted with four of the country's top neck and spine specialists, and they advised him not to play last season. Gannon held out hope of playing this year though he knew it was unlikely.

Meanwhile, the first NFL preseason game of the season was played very early this morning if you're in an American time zone: Falcons 27, Colts 21 in the American Bowl, played this year in the Tokyo Dome.

While Hollywood's present and immediate future output looks grim (to say the least), an exception to the rule might be Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong, if his exceptional Lord of the Rings movies are any guide. It's due out on December 14th.

But even better, the original--and safe to say, still best-- King Kong from 1933 will be coming to DVD in November, according to The Digital Bits:

There's some big news today. The Hollywood Reporter has posted a feature story on Warner's new 2-disc King Kong DVD (yes, that's the classic 1933 Kong), which is at long last expected to street on 11/22. Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson is helping to produce extras for the forthcoming edition, even as he works on his own theatrical remake. Specifically, Jackson is working on a new 2-hour/7-part documentary, RKO Production 601: The Making of Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World, that will be included on the set. Among other things, the documentary will include a segment on the infamous "spider pit" deleted scene (including a recreation of the lost footage). Other extras on the Kong release will include a documentary on director Merian C. Cooper, trailers for other films by Cooper, and audio commentary by legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, actress Terry Moore and special effects guru Ken Ralston. Warner's King Kong will be available in no less than THREE versions - a 2-disc special edition, a 2-disc collector's edition packaged in (according to the story) "a collectable tin and including a 20-page reproduction of the original souvenir program, postcard reproductions of the original one sheets, and a mail-in offer for a reproduction of a vintage 27-by-41-inch movie poster", and finally a 4-disc collector's box set which includes the 2-disc King Kong DVD along with The Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young. Each version will contain the same two Kong discs (just the packaging and the "in the box" extras differ). All I can say is it's about damn time. Very cool news indeed.

Indeed.

RKO's lifespan was a troubled one, but the studio certainly had its moments. A few years back, we looked at an even more fabled RKO production, from 1941.

Yesterday, we looked at a couple of recent articles that argued that Islamofascist terrorism has deep roots in the eschaton-raising Marxists and Nazis of 20th century Europe. Jonah Goldberg agrees:

A sizable faction of the Islamists aren't so much pro-Islam as anti-Western.

Consider Hussain Osman, another of the alleged conspirators, Osman spent his youth as an enormous fan of all things American. "He had a fixation with America," his girlfriend explained, particularly with hip-hop. The Somali refugee went to the discos all the time and "worshipped" Tupac Shakur, the murdered rapper and son of a Black Panther. Now, it should be made clear that Mr. Osman is what some experts in the field call a "moron." Explaining to Italian authorities that he "preferred" not to be extradited to Britain — isn't that special? — Osman insisted that he was no "terrorist." After all, "We didn't want to kill, just sow terror."

But idiots are often very useful in illustrating the appeal of fascistic cults. Intellectuals are too good at covering their real psychological motivations with verbiage. It turns out that the famously "homegrown" terrorists of the London bombings were much more like John Walker Lindh or even the Patty Hearst types of the 1960s and '70s. Radical chic may be as a big a part of the story as radical Islam.

We've always understood this was the case to a certain extent. Osama bin Laden's prattling about the Crusades, for instance, merely shows how poisoned Islamism is by Western Marxism and anti-imperialism. Muslims used to brag about winning the Crusades. It was only after the West started exporting victimology that Islamic and Arab intellectuals started to whine about how poorly they'd been treated.

To a certain extent, radical Islam in Europe has taken the place of third-world Marxism — hardly a big leap when you think about how many Vietnamese "revolutionaries" were trained in Parisian salons. It's all about fighting capitalism, American "imperialism," modernism, etc. Marxism no longer provides a workable model, but the Islamists think sharia might. At the same time, like fascism and Communism before it, radical Islam provides a sense of purpose and meaning for losers and misfits who blame their misfortunes on "the system" (variously defined as the ruling class, the Jews, the capitalists, Col. Sanders, etc.). In this sense, Islamism is less about religion than ideology, and less about ideology than it is about alienation and low self-esteem.

This is just one reason why poverty is such a silly explanation for terrorism. Most of the 9/11 attackers, like the London bombers, were squarely middle class, and the leadership of al Qaeda is downright wealthy. My guess is that most of these losers would be miserable living in the utopia they're fighting for.

Besides previous examples such as the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Mao's China, North Korea, and Vietnam and Cambodia from the mid-1970s on, we need only look at Afghanistan under the Taliban to see yet another "utopia" that in reality, was Hell on earth.

Speaking of Libertas, check out Jason Apuzzo's post on Terminus, a Warner Brothers film currently in production:

It’s becoming obvious that Hollywood is going absolutely off the deep-end into left-wing saturnalia, almost like something out of Goethe’s ‘Walpurgis Nacht.’ Word comes today from Hollywood Reporter and Variety that Warner Brothers (also doing the pro-terror V For Vendetta ) will be distributing a new film called Terminus, which is described by Hollywood Reporter as following:

” … a burned-out and disillusioned war correspondent covering an insurgency who finds he can no longer stay objective. “It deals head on with what some call insurgency, what some call guerilla warfare and what some call freedom fighting,” [producer Basil] Iwanyk said.

Whether he knows it or not, Iwanyk is paraphrasing the words of Stephen Jukes, global news editor for Reuters, less than two weeks after terrorists killed 3000 on September 11th, 2001. As James Taranto noted:

Stephen Jukes, global news editor for Reuters, the British wire service, has ordered his scribes not to use the word terror to refer to the Sept. 11 atrocity. . . . "We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist," Jukes writes in an internal memo. "To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack."

Reuters is the most self-righteous about it, but many other news organizations also use terms like militants, commandos, guerrillas and even dissidents to refer to terrorists--even though in some cases these terms are not only overly solicitous to the enemy but factually inaccurate (a guerrilla attack, for instance, has a military target, while a terrorist attack targets civilians).

Back to Libertas, where Jason concludes:

Get used to it folks: Hollywood is absolutely, unequivocally, unambiguously, taking the side of Terrorism in the War on Terror.

And yet they wonder why their American revenues are down.

Libertas is loaded for Hollywood bear this week. Just keep scrolling, beginning with the current post, a parody (at least I think it's a parody!) of a postmodern Foucault-swilling review of The Dukes of Hazzard. (Best line: "If one examines ‘Dukes,’ one is faced with a choice: either reject sub-cultural theory or conclude that ‘Daisy Duke’ is fundamentally a fiction."--hey, if she's not a fiction, I know a lot of guys who will be checking maps to find out exactly where "Hazzard County" is located...)

Michelle Malkin uses Kathrine Harris's complaints that photos of her during the conclusion of the 2000 presidential election were digitally manipulated by the news media, to look at its long history of altering photos.

And as Jonah Goldberg noted a few years ago, even when a photo isn't altered, it can also distort reality, by not offering any context behind an initially shocking image.

I have an interview with Bernard Goldberg up on Tech Central Station. Rather than asking Bernie why he ranked this person or that a certain way in his new book, The 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America, I tried to get Goldberg's thoughts on how and why so much of liberalism became so unliberal over the last few decades.

We first interviewed Goldberg last year, for a memorable two-parter that also ran on Tech Central Station. And be sure to read a recent two-part interview that Goldberg had with another Ed--Ed Morrissey.

Bare Knuckle Politics has the video (note the very prescient last line from CNN's blog reporter); Ed Morrissey has a transcription and some thoughts:

Maybe Bob Novak has had a bad year, but after watching this video twice, I fail to see what got him so riled up. Carville interrupting him? Novak has done too much of that in his career to get sensitive about that now. Carville's needling about showing backbone by standing up to him for interrupting hardly seemed anything more than a playful jab, especially considering what Carville can do when he wants to be mean.

Maybe Novak should think about retirement from television soon. If he can't behave any better than this, the choice may soon be made for him. He simply has no excuse for his language nor his thin-skinned attitude, and he owes CNN and Ed Henry an apology, if not Carville as well.

Right now, I agree entirely. But I can't wait to hear Novak's side of the story.

Update: CNN has suspended Novak, probably more for uttering "bull****" on the air than for walking off, which makes for dramatic Jerry Springer-style TV theater in the long ignoble tradition of Crossfire, which Novak and Carville co-hosted for years.

Another Update: The Political Teen also has video. Meanwhile, LaShawn Barber notes the asymmetrical interest in this story by some quarters.

One More: Mark Steyn has some interesting comments about Novak's incident with Hugh Hewitt's guest host, Jed Babbin.

We have met the enemy, and he is us--or at least an offshoot of multiple elements of 20th century far left worldviews, as two essays making their way through the Blogosphere today argue.

First up is a remarkable piece by David Brooks (made even more remarkable for where it's appearing--but then, this is far from the first time that the moderate Brooks has played an iconoclastic role at the house of Pinch). Brooks reminds us that terrorists are an offshoot of the 20th century modernist utopians who universally sought to immanentize the eschaton:

In the days after Sept. 11, it was commonly believed that the conflict between the jihadists and the West was a conflict between medievalism and modernism. Terrorists, it was said, emerge from cultures that are isolated from the Enlightenment ideas of the West. They feel disoriented by the pluralism of the modern age and humiliated by the relative backwardness of the Arab world. They are trapped in stagnant, dysfunctional regimes, amid mass unemployment, with little hope of leading productive lives.

Humiliated and oppressed, they lash out against America, the symbol of threatening modernity. Off they go to seek martyrdom, dreaming of virgins who await them in the afterlife.

Now we know that story line doesn't fit the facts.

We have learned a lot about the jihadists, from Osama bin Laden down to the Europeans who attacked the London subways last month. We know, thanks to a database gathered by Marc Sageman, formerly of the C.I.A., that about 75 percent of anti-Western terrorists come from middle-class or upper-middle-class homes. An amazing 65 percent have gone to college, and three-quarters have professional or semiprofessional jobs, particularly in engineering and science.

Whether they have moved to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, England or France, these men are, far from being medieval, drawn from the ranks of the educated, the mobile and the multilingual.

The jihadists are modern psychologically as well as demographically because they are self-made men (in traditional societies there are no self-made men). Rather than deferring to custom, many of them have rebelled against local authority figures, rejecting their parents' bourgeois striving and moderate versions of Islam, and their comfortable lives.

They have sought instead some utopian cause to give them an identity and their lives meaning. They find that cause in a brand of Salafism that is not traditional Islam but a modern fantasy version of it, an invented tradition. They give up cricket and medical school and take up jihad.

In other words, the conflict between the jihadists and the West is a conflict within the modern, globalized world. The extremists are the sort of utopian rebels modern societies have long produced.

In his book "Globalized Islam," the French scholar Olivier Roy points out that today's jihadists have a lot in common with the left-wing extremists of the 1930's and 1960's. Ideologically, Islamic neofundamentalism occupies the same militant space that was once occupied by Marxism. It draws the same sorts of recruits (educated second-generation immigrants, for example), uses some of the same symbols and vilifies some of the same enemies (imperialism and capitalism).

Roy emphasizes that the jihadists are the products of globalization, and its enemies. They are detached from any specific country or culture, he says, and take up jihad because it attaches them to something. They are generally not politically active before they take up jihad. They are looking to strike a vague blow against the system and so give their lives (and deaths) shape and meaning.

In short, the Arab world is maintaining its nearly perfect record of absorbing every bad idea coming from the West. Western ideas infuse the radicals who flood into Iraq to blow up Muslims and Americans alike.

Meanwhile, Brendan O'Neill explains that al-Qaeda deputy Al-Zawahri is simply throwing multiculturalism--which is fueled by the far left's self-hatred for western civilization and its accomplishments--back at its creators:

Someone should have Ayman al-Zawahri, lieutenant to Osama bin Laden, done for plagiarism. There's nothing remotely original in his statement about the London attacks. Instead he has ripped off sentiments already expressed by scaremongering politicians and in handwringing newspaper editorials here in Britain since the 7/7 attacks. He 's only doing what al-Qaeda bosses have consistently done since 9/11: taking the West's own fear and loathing and throwing it back at us in a supposedly scary, finger-wagging statement to camera.

* * *

This doesn't only suggest that al-Zawahri has not got an original thought in his head - it also reveals an essential truth about al-Qaeda. They feed off our fears. Far from being the terrible enemy we have been led to believe - who are planning a 'holocaust' against the West, as one particularly overexcited author has put it - al-Qaeda is a ragbag of deluded nihilists and opportunists who thrive on tapping into our doubt and uncertainty. We are scaring ourselves, and al-Qaeda bosses merely cheer along from the sidelines.

We pretty much wrote that script for al-Zawahri and he just read it back to us in a scary, shouty Middle Eastern voice, like a James Bond villain circa 1980. Come on, people, are we really scared of that?

Not really, to be honest. The right isn't, and the left sees many of its ideas reflected, and all too frequently, approves, sadly.

Update: Jeff Goldstein has some very much related thoughts on al-Zawahri's rhetoric.

Hugh Hewitt and Ed Morrissey have articles on The Weekly Standard's Website on Air America--or "Air Enron", as Michelle Malkin has dubbed it, as a result of their brewing scandal. Hewitt writes:

Short version: Not-for-profits that exist to serve kids and Alzheimer's' patients, overwhelmingly via the funds obtained from government grants, should not be "investing" in incredibly risky start-up radio networks. But the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club--apparently now defunct--did just that last spring, funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into Air America's coffers.

Hugh adds that the media's self-imposed blackout of the story could be changing, however:

But nothing is so odd as the black-out of the story in the mainstream media. It took about a week from the first television mention of Eason Jordan's Davos speech for that story to break out into the mainstream media. CNN's Inside Politics blog segment covered the Air America story on July 29, so we may be getting close to break-out day. There is every indication--conflicting accounts, big names, big money--that the story has legs.

We know a lot about the medications Rush Limbaugh has taken.

We know a great deal about Bill O'Reilly's troubles.

But thus far we don't know much about how Al Franken got paid the big bucks last year, when all of the mainstream media seemed to be cheering his debut.

Of course, coverage of the Air America scandal may be slightly delayed at The New York Times, as they perform what their insiders have been quoted as describing as a "standard background check" on the records of the adopted children of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts.

Mark Steyn places the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki into modern context, and observes how radically in the opposite direction the pendulum of modern warfare has swung:

Nobody's suggesting nuking Mecca. Well, okay, the other day a Republican Congressman, Tom Tacredo, did – or at any rate he raised the possibility that at some point America might well have to "bomb" Mecca. Even I, a fully paid-up armchair warmonger, balked at that one, prompting some of my more robust correspondents to suggest I'd gone over to the side of the New York Times pantywaists. But forget about bombing Mecca and consider the broader lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: an enemy folds when he knows he's finished. In Iraq, despite the swift fall of the Saddamites, it's not clear the enemy did know.

Indeed, the western peaceniks pre-war "human shields" operation proved to be completely superfluous mainly because the Anglo-American forces decided to treat not just Iraqi civilians and not just Iraqi conscripts but virtually everyone other than Saddam, Uday and Qusay as a de facto human shield. Washington made a conscious choice to give every Iraqi the benefit of the doubt, including the fake surrenderers who ambushed the US marines at Nasiriyah. If you could get to a rooftop, you could fire rocket-propelled grenades at the Brits and Yanks with impunity, because, under the most onerous rules of engagement ever devised, they wouldn't fire back just in case the building you were standing on hadn't been completely evacuated. Michael Moore and George Galloway may have thought the neocons were itching to massacre hundreds of thousands, but the behavior of the Ba'athists suggests they knew better: they assumed western decency and, having no regard either for enemy lives or for those of their own people, acted accordingly.

Was this a mistake? Several analysts weren't happy about it at the time, simply because Washington and London were exposing their own troops to greater danger than necessary. But, with hindsight, it also helped set up a lot of the problems Iraq's had to contend with since: not enough Ba'athists were killed in the initial invasion; too many bigshots survived to plot mischief and too many minnows were allowed to melt back into the general population to provide a delivery system for that mischief. And in a basic psychological sense excessive solicitude for the enemy won us not sympathy but contempt. Better Nagasaki than a lot of misplaced wicky-wacky-woo.

The main victims of western squeamishness in those few weeks in the spring of 2003 turned out to be not American or coalition troops but the Iraqi civilians who today provide the principal target for "insurgents." It would have better for them had more Ba'athists been killed in the initial invasion. It would have been preferable, too, if the swarm of foreign jihadi from neighboring countries had occasionally been met with the "accidental" bombing of certain targets on the Syrian side of the border. Wars fought under absurd degrees of self-imposed etiquette are the most difficult to win – see Korea and Vietnam – and one lesson of Germany and Japan is that it's easier to rebuild societies if they've first been completely smashed. Michael Ledeen, a shrewd analyst of the present conflict, likes to sign-off his essays by urging the administration, "Faster, please." That's good advice. So too is: Tougher, please.

Exactly. Which, to second Steyn's dismissal of Tancredo's remarks, isn't an invocation to deploy the full General Jack D. Ripper arsenal, but politically correct warfare is frequently a recipe to disaster, as Mark Bowden noted in Black Hawk Down.

The 2005 NFL season--or at least its preseason--gets under way this weekend, with two preseason games to kick things off. On Sunday is the American Bowl, featuring Indianapolis versus Atlanta, playing in Japan's Tokyo Dome. (Players hate the umpteen hour flights across the Pacific, along with the ensuing jetlag and disruption to their internal clocks, which is why Edgerrin James, the Colts' superstar running back threatened not to play.)

And Monday is the Hall of Fame game, pitting Chicago against Miami, and the return of the Dolphins' prodigal halfback, Ricky Williams.

The Hall of Fame is also where 1920s quarterback Benny Friedman will be inducted posthumously, along with two modern, and very much living counterparts at that same position, Dan Marino and Steve Young. AP notes that also joining them posthumously in enshrinement in Canton this weekend will be Fritz Pollard, the NFL's first black head coach:

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The Internet Movie Database reports that Hollywood's box office slump may be feeding upon itself:

The box office slump is about to affect the video rental and sales market the way falling tectonic plates generate a tsunami. An early warning of the potential disaster was issued by Blockbuster on Tuesday when CEO John Antioco said in a statement that earnings in the second quarter were disappointing and predicted that results for the remainder of the year were not likely to improve. As Antioco put it: "Overall industry decline and continued poor theatrical performance had a negative impact on the second quarter and has created uncertainty about the balance of the year." He promised that the company would take "aggressive actions" to counteract the decline. Ironically, theater owners and movie studios had been blaming the growth of home theater systems and increased DVD use for the slumping box office.

Govindini Murty and John Leo have some suggestions for a way out of the slump, but it's doubtful they'll be listened to.

Glenn Reynolds posts this passage from Ronald Bailey's new book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific And Moral Case For The Biotech Revolution:

Why would leaders of these African nations risk starving millions of their citizens over fear of food that 290 million Americans have been eating safely since 1996? Because antibiotech activists such as [Vandana] Shiva and nongovernmental activist groups such as Greenpeace have been misleading the public about the alleged dangers of genetically improved crop varieties. . . .

Scientists trying to help the world's poor are appalled by the apparent willingness of biotechnology opponents to sacrifice people for their cause. At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February 2000, Ismail Serageldin, then director of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research posed a challenge: "I ask opponents of biotechnology, do you want two to three million children a year to go blind and one million to die of Vitamin A deficiency, just because you object to the way golden rice was created?"

Glenn responds, "The answer, basically, is 'yes'".

And it has been for almost four decades.

Forbes is reporting that AOL lost nearly one million subscribers in the second quarter of this year.

Via "Best of the Web Today":

Words matter. Words convey moral clarity. Without moral clarity, we will not succeed in Iraq. That is why the terms the press uses to cover this conflict are so vital. For example, take the word "guerillas." As you noted, mainstream media sources like the New York Times often use the terms "insurgents" or "guerillas" to describe the Sunni Triangle gunmen, as if these murderous thugs represented a traditional national liberation movement. But when the Times reports on similar groups of masked reactionary killers operating in Latin American countries, they utilize the phrase "paramilitary death squads." Same murderers, different designations. Yet of the two, "insurgents" and especially "guerillas" has a claim on our sympathies that "paramilitaries" lacks. This is not semantics: imagine if the media routinely called the Sunni Triangle gunmen "right wing paramilitary death squads." Not only would the description be more accurate, but it would offer the American public a clear idea of the enemy in Iraq. And that, in turn, would bolster public attitudes toward the war.

Supporters of the conflict in Iraq bear much blame for allowing the terminology---and, by extension, the narrative--of events to slip from our grasp and into the hands of the anti-war camp. Words and ideas matter. Instead of saying that the Coalition "invaded" Iraq and "occupies" it today, we could more precisely claim that the allies liberated the country and are currently reconstructing it. More than cosmetic changes, these definitions reflect the nobility of our effort in Iraq, and steal rhetorical ammunition from the left.

The most despicable misuse of terminology, however, occurs when Leftists call the Saddamites and foreign jihadists "the resistance" What an example of moral inversion! For the fact is, paramilitary death squads are attacking the Iraqi people. And those who oppose the killers--the Iraqi police and National Guardsmen, members of the Allawi government, people like Nour--they are the "resistance." They are preventing Islamofascists from seizing Iraq, they are resisting evil men from turning the entire nation into a mass slaughterhouse like we saw in re-liberated Falluja. Anyone who cares about success in our struggle against Islamofascism, or upholds principles of moral clarity and lucid thought--should combat such Orwellian distortions of our language.

--Steven Vincent, author of In The Red Zone, killed yesterday in Iraq.

Saturday will mark the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Neo-Neocon has some thoughts, including an interesting take on John Hershey's highly influential New Yorker essay, which later became a best-selling book:

I was very young--perhaps twelve or so--when I read the book Hiroshima by John Hershey. It terrified and sickened me. The descriptions of the suffering of the innocent residents of the city, going about their business on a summer day and either instantly incinerated or subject to horrific injuries and sights out of a Bosch painting, were nearly unendurable even in the reading. Multiplied in my mind's eye by many tens of thousands similarly suffering, they created a symphony of agony that reached such a crescendo it threatened to overwhelm me for a time.

Hershey's book purposely gives his reportage on Hiroshima no context at all, the better to appreciate the appalling human cost. He simply describes, and the reader identifies with the victims. There is no way to read his book and not feel a deep and visceral revulsion towards what happened there.

Compare that with Frederick Taylor's 2003 look at Dresden, which placed that doomed city into context, explaining its role, first within a millenia of history, and then during World War II as a cog in the Nazi's war machine, as George Rosie wrote in fine review for England's Sunday Herald:

Taylor is an assiduous researcher. He paints a picture which, while still terrible, is not quite the apocalyptic one of popular history. And in the process he deflates a number of myths.

One of them is that Dresden was an "innocent" city, a wonderland of art and architecture devoid of any strategic significance. Nothing more than Florence on the Elbe. This is nonsense. Dresden was home to any number of high-tech engineering firms all working flat out to supply Hitler's war machine. One was Carl Zeiss-Jena, the lens-making company which was churning out optics for bomb sights, artillery sights and U-boat periscopes. Many of these factories relied on slave labour from concentration camps. In fact, the Dresden Yearbook for 1942 boasts that the city was "one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich."

Dresden was also the site of one of the most important railway marshalling yards in eastern Germany. It was a nodal point on the network with hundreds of thousands of troops, guns and tanks being shunted through Dresden on their way to the eastern front. Politically, the city was solidly Nazi. Hitler's visits were met with wild enthusiasm. There was an SS barracks in the suburbs. Hundreds of Hitler's enemies had died on the blade of Dresden's electric-powered guillotine. One way or another, Dresden was a "legitimate" target for the allied bombers (if bombing of any city can be regarded as legitimate).

A raft of evidence and research allows us to reassess Dresden after 50 years of propaganda by the Nazis, the East Germans and Holocaust denier David Irving, who made Dresden the subject of his first book, before he was later discredited as a legitimate historian.

Similarly, in his essay in The Weekly Standard, Richard B. Frank writes that "beginning in the 1970s, we have acquired an array of new evidence from Japan and the United States" about the dropping of the first atomic bomb, and the reasoning behind it:

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Late last night, I started to post about the Arizona Cardinals' new uniforms, but then decided to sleep on it. My first take was that they were hideous--but really, it's just the all blood-red bodysuit-style rig that's included in the mix; the all-white uniform and white pants with red jersey variant aren't that bad.

But like the Cincinnati Bengals' recently updated dated uniforms, they're certainly no breakthrough in NFL sartorial standards, which peaked in the late 1970s, it seems. On the other hand, both teams' uniform designs place an additional emphasis on the two oft-beleaguered franchises: as Chris Collinsworth once said when the Bengals adopted their striped-helmets in the early 1980s, you'd better be winners when you look like that!

That's a question that Investor's Business Daily asks in its "Issues & Insights" column:

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"even sophisticated readers of The New York Times sometimes find it hard to distinguish between news coverage and commentary in our pages."

--Bill Keller, The New York Times' executive editor. What direction does that commentary come from? Well, let's flashback to another famous Times-related quote, from last year:

Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?

Of course it is.

--Dan Okrent, their former ombudsman.

Update: Speaking of the Times, Donald Luskin looks at Paul Krugman's "'BamaGate", which he calls Krugman's "own little Ra^therGate".

Another Update: Not surprisingly, Ed Morrissey has an interesting take on Keller's statement:

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Modern Hollywood is a town known as much for its love of crank pseudo-philosophies such as est (in the 1970s) and Scientology (today) as its movies. And Cathy Seipp notes that it needs a serious lesson in anger-management and tolerance of employees currently less fortunate than those living the potentate-like lifestyles of their bosses:

Over the past decade or so, Hollywood screaming has evolved into something really rich and strange. It may have been around the time that snack-loving producer Scott Rudin programmed the digital readout on his office phone system to inform his assistant "String cheese NOW!" at the push of a single button that showbiz screaming entered the 21st century.

A master of the modern form, like Oliver Stone, evidently doesn't even need to raise his voice (although, of course, he often does) to keep his staff walking on eggshells, nervously wondering what kind of a mood “Mr. Stone” is in today. (Apparently it is always “Mr. Stone,” just like it was always “Miss Ross.”) Associates have reported that Stone is particularly good at playing his I-saw-action-in-'Nam-so-don't-mess-with-me trump card. “He knows exactly where to throw the knife so that it pins you to the wall for a few days,” one unfortunate told me. Favorite screamed phrase: “Move!”

I met a rather marinated-looking Oliver Stone a few years ago at a party, where we got into a little political disagreement. He didn’t scream at me, but he was belligerent.

“I think George Bush is a lesbian! A lesbian in a dress! And high heels,” he’d said conversationally, I suppose figuring I’d be appreciative. (The party was, after all, at Arianna Huffington’s house, and filled with major Democratic donors.) Why is it, I wondered, that when a man disapproves of another man the worst thing he can think of to say is that the man is really a woman?

“That’s your fantasy,” I said coldly.

“Are you calling me a...fantasist!” Stone yelled. Well, yes. [I can understand why Stone would feel uniquely paranoid about such a charge--Ed] Especially after he went on to say that he’d just returned from the Middle East, where he’d been interviewing Arafat. I asked if that was a package tour that included stopovers in Utopia and Xanadu. The conversation kind of went downhill from there, and luckily the valet soon pulled up with Stone’s car.

Behind the New Age grin of beatific self-righteousness with which so many Hollywood celebrities greet the world often lurks a tantrum ready to erupt. When the full, roiling boil is over, the slow simmer can last for weeks, if not months. By comparison, old-style screamers can seem quaint, almost benign. The storm may have been intense, but it passed quickly. A classic of the type — the agent Norman Brokaw, for instance — could suggest lunch within minutes of a blowup. And the scream usually took the form of a statement: “Get outta here!”

But new-style screamers eschew declarative sentences for rhetorical, F. Lee Bailey-esque questions: “What were you thinking? Why did you even pick up the phone? Do you even have a brain?” This can be harder to bear. As an observer told me once, “If it's ‘You're fired,’ then at least you're out. If it's someone trying to teach you a lesson, you're there, and you're stuck.”

Some screamers can hardly utter a sentence that doesn’t contain the f-word. The syllable almost seems to function as their sound, signifying only that they are in the room. Others are more careful with their language, because being sworn at is the point where many screamees stop listening and may even quit. So bland, schoolmarmish words of displeasure are amplified to ear-splitting volume. A vein-popping “Un-ACC-EPT-able!” is a great favorite. Also, a drawn out “DIS...A...PPOINTED!!!”

When in full throttle, the classic Hollywood screamer cannot be neither stopped nor shamed. I once heard a story about a studio executive who screamed at someone’s assistant for a good five minutes before realizing he was in the wrong office — possibly even on the wrong floor. “Well, if you see her,” he yelled before stomping out, “tell her what I said!”

Screaming actors, it seems, can be easier to deal with, perhaps because they are not always famous for their brains. Many years ago, I read a story about how Roger Moore (a nonscreamer) took a younger actor aside and suggested he stop attacking everyone on the set. “I'm not in this business to win a popularity contest,” the screamer fumed. “I just want to be a good actor.”

“Well, you've failed at being a good actor,” Moore replied reasonably. “Why not try for the popularity contest?”

What's really amusing is when a Hollywood temper tantrum spills over to a celebrity's audience at large.

Sometime this fall, the Fulton Fish Market will be moving to the Bronx, after nearly two centuries in lower Manhattan. The New Partisan takes a last look back in an Alfred Stieglitz-style black and white photo essay.

To paraphrase that sage philosopher, Janet Jackson, file this one under "what have you done for me lately"!

Some of our more popular reviews and posts from this past winter have a little extra-added significance this week.

First up is our March 22nd review of Downfall, a brilliant movie on the fall of the Third Reich, due out on DVD tomorrow. Apparently, it's the first dramatic German production to have an actor playing Hitler. (Bruno Ganz, who does an eerily realistic job of it, demonstrating Hitler's absolute evil, without becoming a parody. As does Corinna Harfouch as the sinister Magda Goebbels.)

On a much lighter note, The Dukes of Hazzard makes its big-screen debut this week. Oddly enough, a post we quickly dashed off on Christmas Eve regarding the controversy over the "General Lee" (the '69 Dodge Charger that's the real star of the franchise) and its rebel flag-painted rooftop has garnered an amazing amount of traffic over the past seven months.

And in the mail today was a copy of Marvel Comics' Combat Zone on our troops in Iraq. Its text was written by Karl Zinsmeister, the editor of The American Enterprise magazine, who served as an embedded journalist with the 82nd Airborne in Iraq. Our December inter-blog debate with Power Line and other bloggers over the role of the modern left in the comic book industry was another surprise hit with readers. Amazon says that Combat Zone is due out in print on August 10th; we'll try to post more after we've perused it properly.

With much of the left in meltdown mode over President Bush's recess appointment of John Bolton as America's ambassador to the UN, Betsy Newmark offers some welcome perspective, linking to a Washington Post list of famous recess appointments by prior administrations. Betsy writes:

Note that such liberal icons as Earl Warren, Thurgood Marshall, and William Brennan as well as Potter Stewart were all originally recess appointments.

So, apparently, the earth won't open up and the Constitution fall in to be burned to a crisp at the earth's fiery core just because Bush appointed John Bolton to the United Nations.

Meanwhile, Roger L. Simon hopes that Bolton doesn't become too nice a guy when dealing with the boys at Turtle Bay:

Mr. Bolton is supposed to be too intemperate for the job, too rude.

People I know who know Bolton, however, pooh-pooh this as partisan slander, saying Bolton is actually a nice guy. But I hope they are wrong. If there is one thing that pseudo-idealistic kleptocracy the United Nations needs right now, it is some rudeness... a solid blast of bigtime rudeness that doesn't stop until all the Oil-for-Food swilling kleptocrats are blown out of their troughs at the Secretariat building.

Concerning Roger's last sentence above, The Wall Street Journal, whose Claudia Rosett has done yeoman work uncovering the UN's Oil-For-Food scandal, has an update.

Update: Meanwhile, Rich Lowry lists the numerous recess appointments made by Bill Clinton.

Charles Robinson of Yahoo Sports says that the freshness date may be expiring soon on the Kansas City Chiefs:

Even the tools of greatness fade. Chisels dull, paint brushes fray and hands become arthritic. The trick of the creator is to grasp the last moment – to not wake up on a Monday morning with the realization that he slept through Sunday's last hurrah.

It's a cruel lesson in the NFL, where franchises, coaches and players are notoriously absent-minded about the expiration date on dominance. So maybe it's a surprise to see the Kansas City Chiefs so self-aware, with a head coach unafraid to make his own retirement seem imminent and an offensive roster that doesn't kid itself about a bottom-heavy hour glass.

The window is closing on one of the league's most prolific scoring creations, and the Chiefs are determined to enjoy every waking moment.

"There is an air that if they don't win it soon that it might be too late," coach Dick Vermeil said, reflecting on the urgency felt in the Chiefs' training camp. "Will Shields may not be not here, Willie Roaf may not be here, Eddie Kennison, too. … We talk about it. There's nothing that generates effort in training camp better than a sense of urgency, a sense of purpose and a focus to win."

Not that Kansas City didn't have all those things last season – or back in 2001, when Vermeil brought together quarterback Trent Green and running back Priest Holmes and laid the foundation to an offensive line that would become the team's central nervous system. The Chiefs felt the need to be great then, too.

Yet, here they are, entering the 15th anniversary of training camp in River Falls and seeming like parts of the roster have been around exactly that long. Shields and Roaf, the anchors of an offensive line more stifling than the Great Wall of China, have pondered retirement and likely won't be back in 2006. Kennison will be 33 in January, and even relatively low-mileage stars like Green and Holmes enter the season at 35 and 31, respectively.

Without a doubt, time has crept up on an offense that has packed the league's most impressive scoring punch over the last three seasons.

"We like to say we're not one of the older offensive teams, but we're one of the vintage teams," Vermeil said. "If you study the history of the National Football League, some of the finest offensive teams in the league were very experienced."

Likewise, many were also remarkably close to falling off a ledge. One need only look at AFC West rival Oakland, which had its own impressive "vintage" offense earlier this decade.

Much like Vermeil, former Raiders coach Jon Gruden hitched his wagon to stars late in their prime, lifting the team to prominence on a mixture of talent and experience. But the same Raiders team that rode a geriatric wave to a Super Bowl in 2002 saw a dropoff soon after, as Pro Bowlers like offensive tackle Lincoln Kennedy, quarterback Rich Gannon and wide receivers Jerry Rice and Tim Brown began to retire or decline.

The Chiefs aren't to that point just yet. Watching practice for five minutes is enough to see the hallmarks of greatness are still there.

But it sounds like the window of opportunity is closing fast. And like the post-Triplets Dallas Cowboys, post-Gruden Raiders, and post-Mariucci 49ers, their next phase could be painful to watch.

John Bolton was recess-appointed America's ambassador to the UN by President Bush earlier today. Ed Morrissey catches Senator Kerry whining, "John Bolton has been rejected twice by the Senate", but as Ed notes:

Kerry gets it wrong yet again. A filibuster does not equate to a rejection; it means that the minority refused to let the Senate vote to accept or reject the nomination. Bolton did not get rejected by the Senate at all, and had the Democrats not filibustered the vote, he would have won confirmation, albeit on a narrow margin. That foregone conclusion led the Democrats to stage the filibuster in the first place.

Meanwhile, Mark Steyn reprints his essay on Bolton, which originally ran in March, during that endless--at least until today--filibuster:

That’s what John Bolton had in mind with his observations about international law: ‘It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so — because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States.’ Just so. When George Bush Sr went through the UN to assemble his Stanley Gibbons coalition for the first Gulf war, it may have been a ‘diplomatic triumph’ but it was also the biggest single contributing factor to the received wisdom in the decade and a half since that only the UN has the international legitimacy to sanction war — to the point where, on the eve of Iraq’s liberation, the Church of England decided that a ‘just war’ could only be one approved by the Security Council. That in turn amplifies the UN’s claim to sole global legitimacy in a thousand other areas, big and small — the environment, guns, smoking, taxation.

Yet the assumption behind much of the criticism of Bolton from the likes of John Kerry is that, regardless of his government’s foreign policy, a UN ambassador has to be at some level a UN booster. Twenty years ago, the then Secretary of State George Schultz used to welcome the Reagan administration’s ambassadorial appointments to his office and invite each chap to identify his country on the map. The guy who’d just landed the embassy in Chad would invariably point to Chad. ‘No,’ Schultz would say, ‘this is your country’ — and point to the United States. Nobody would expect a US ambassador to the Soviet Union to be a big booster for the Soviets. And, given that in a unipolar world the most plausible challenger to the US is transnationalism, these days the Schultz test is even more pertinent for the UN ambassador: his country is the United States, not the ersatz jurisdiction of Kofi Annan’s embryo world government.

So why have so many diplomats and other Foggy Bottom figures flunked it? Earlier in his essay, Steyn explains why it's so easy for Americans to get caught-up in the transnational trap:

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