Back in the old days (ask your parents or grandparents), immigrants adjusted to the culture they were migrating to. But that's a rather fuddy-duddy way of looking at things, as Kofi Annan explains:

The offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were first published in a European country which has recently acquired a significant Muslim population, and is not yet sure how to adjust to it.

Staggeringly, Newsweek agrees with Kofi, Roger L. Simon notes:

I don't know if there is a more fuddy-duddy publication than Newsweek (unless it's Time). Now they are tut-tutting those Europeans who have the temerity - in the post-cartoon riot world - to be concerned with protecting free speech and other Enlightenment values through new immigration standards that encourage assimilation. Not surprisingly the Newsweekies title their article The End of Tolerance, meaning Europe's, of course, not those Sharia-bound Muslims whose tolerance is legendary. Here's how the authors (there are three) sum it up near the end:

Until such double standards can be abolished and a new equality established, Europe's new toughness will feel like forced integration. "It's a form of creating a second-class citizenship," says Tariq Modood, director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship in Bristol. "All the burden of change is placed on the immigrant."

Oh, I get it. It's time for those atheistic Dutch and Danish to meet their Islamic guests mid-way. They should be half-misogynist and half-homophobic. Is that the kind of culture Newsweek really wants? Of course not. They're just lying phonies and poseurs. They continue, slightly further on:

It's an open question whether Germans, Dutch, or Danes will ever truly accept a multiethnic, multireligious "Germanness," "Dutchness" or "Danishness."

Open question? Maybe so, but I'll tell you a closed question - whether Saudi Arabia could ever accept Germans, Dutch or Danes living among them. Or sanctimonious Newsweek writers, for that matter. Enough already.

Well, maybe not: In Canada's Western Standard, Mark Steyn reminds the big Blue State north of the 49th Parallel that "History Swings Both Ways":

Bruce Bawer's new book, While Europe Slept, is an instructive read in that regard: he's a gay American who moved to Holland because it was more open and tolerant than his repressed uptight theocratic native land yet in the end he was driven out of the Netherlands by a--what's the phrase? --"rising tide" of gay bashing and other forms of homophobia from the ever more culturally confident young Muslim men who now dominate urban life up the European coast from France through Belgium to Scandinavia. It's not a good time to be a gay man in Europe.

The question is whether Canada will prove more like the Continent and succumb to creeping Islamification or more like America and resistant to would-be encroachments? Which would you bet on?

Which would Newsweek?

Update (3/1/06): Welcome readers of Tim Blair! Be sure to look around the rest of the site; we hope there's much you'll enjoy here.

...and "literally tens of people each day willingly volunteer to submit themselves to my hits and missives"--Confederate Yankee gets profiled by the Washington Post.

Do they drink Dewar's south of the Mason-Dixon?

(Speaking of which, greetings, between flights, from the Admiral's Club at D-FW Airport!)

I'm waiting for my flight to board, but this is too much fun to ignore:

In 2003, Krauthammer famously wrote:

It has been 25 years since I discovered a psychiatric syndrome (for the record: ``Secondary Mania,'' Archives of General Psychiatry, November 1978), and in the interim I haven't been looking for new ones. But it's time to don the white coat again. A plague is abroad in the land.

Bush Derangement Syndrome: the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency -- nay -- the very existence of George W. Bush.

Now, I cannot testify to Howard Dean's sanity before this campaign, but five terms as governor by a man with no visible tics and no history of involuntary confinement is pretty good evidence of a normal mental status. When he avers, however, that ``the most interesting'' theory as to why the president is ``suppressing'' the 9/11 report is that Bush knew about 9/11 in advance, it's time to check on thorazine supplies.

When Rep. Cynthia McKinney first broached this idea before the 2002 primary election, it was considered so nutty it helped make her former Rep. McKinney. Today the Democratic presidential front-runner professes agnosticism as to whether the president of the United States was tipped off about 9/11 by the Saudis, and it goes unnoticed. The virus is spreading.

It is, of course, epidemic in New York's Upper West Side and the tonier parts of Los Angeles, where the very sight of the president -- say, smiling while holding a tray of Thanksgiving turkey in a Baghdad mess hall -- caused dozens of cases of apoplexy in otherwise healthy adults. What is worrying epidemiologists about the Dean incident, however, is that heretofore no case had been reported in Vermont, or any other dairy state.

Krauthammer's tongue was somewhat in cheek when he wrote the above passage. I'm not at all sure the same is true over at the Gray Lady, when one of its reporters writes this:

Renana Brooks, a clinical psychologist practicing in Washington who said she had counseled several White House correspondents, said the last few years had given rise to "White House reporter syndrome," in which competitive high achievers feel restricted and controlled and become emotionally isolated from others who are not steeped in the same experience.

She said the syndrome was evident in the Cheney case, which she described as an inconsequential event that produced an outsize feeding frenzy. She said some reporters used the occasion to compensate for not having pressed harder before the Iraq war.

"It's like any post-traumatic stress," she said, "like when someone dies and you think you could have saved them."

Well, to be honest, it's not like any post-traumatic stress. Just ask the great Dr. Krauthammer.

Well, more like The Road To Mt. Laurel: I'll be traveling to visit my parents in South Jersey today, posting is going to slow down a bit--although hopefully not stop entirely--this week.

Lots of archives below to scroll through in the meantime--and of course, loads more blogs await via the Pajamas logo on the right.

Pieter Dorsman of Peaktalk tries to break "The Silence of the Left":

Cathy Seipp - who also runs the excellent Cathy’s World blog - had an interesting column up in the LA Times yesterday built around the notion that:

“ … one of the great paradoxes of our time is that two groups most endangered by political Islam, gays and women, somehow still find ways to defend it”

While a somewhat sweeping generalization, it goes to the heart of the Fortuynist argument that the groups that benefited most from the liberalization of our society in the 1960s and 70s, probably are least aware of what they stand to lose if radical Muslims and their western appeasers are allowed to embrace and implement a new social agenda.

Seipp’s claims sparked a sharp rebuff from Gabriel Rotello on the Huffington Post where he countered by compiling a list of notable gays and women who have taken on the excesses of radicalism in our midst. That of course is a fairly superficial way of addressing the issue as anyone can come up with a list that contains Sullivan, Bawer, Manji, Hirsi Ali and the late Fortuyn. But it doesn’t address the core of the issue and therefore Rotello largely misses the point.

The fact that the focus is on these few brave individuals that speak up and who now in some cases have to live under police protection proves Seipp’s point: it is the left at large that has been silent. Where is that mass movement, where are the rallies, those concerted efforts that characterized women’s and gay movements from the 1960s onwards? And it is not just gays or women: there is a string of left-wing causes which always managed to find a joint umbrella under which it protested the free west’s accomplishments, think of the “women against nukes” or the various “animal rights” groups. I grew up in a country that was in the vanguard of this leftist revolution and which as a result spawned a political and media establishment that was firmly rooted in the values of this post-war social and cultural revolution.

This is certainly far from a new phenomenon: in his recent essay on H.L. Mencken, Fred Siegel dubbed Menck an "Anarcho-Authoritarian" for his pro-German attitudes World War I:

Part of the reason it's so hard to make sense of Mencken is that he was, paradoxically, an anarcho-authoritarian. He agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union on the importance of free speech. But while that organization, under the influence of principled men such as Felix Frankfurter, argued for such freedoms on the grounds that "a marketplace of ideas" (to use Justice Holmes's term) was the best method of arriving at the truth, Mencken supported it in order to shield superior men like himself from being hobbled by the little people. For the same reason, Mencken was a near anarchist when it came to America, but an authoritarian when it came to the iron rule of the Kaiser and General Ludendorff. We are more familiar with anarcho-Stalinists such as William Kunstler, who had a parallel attitude toward the United States and the Soviet empire, but it was Mencken who blazed the trail down which Kunstler and his ilk would travel.

More recently, the issues that Dorsman focuses on in his post, the "women’s and gay movements from the 1960s onwards", as he puts it, are, at least in the US, far more trends of the 1970s than they were of the sixties, which was dominated, at least until 1968, by a relatively benign FDR/Great Society liberalism, until it morphed into something far more punitive.

As a result, the anarcho-authoritarianism that Siegel described, while it may be a mouthful of an expression, was definitely at work in the 1970s, particularly in Hollywood. Tinseltown simultaneously celebrated liberal sexual mores in its 1970s movies, while simultaneously championing societies would happily through anyone caught committing such actions into the gulag. One of the peaks of this mental schism was the 1975 Oscars, as James Webb noted in 1997:

There is perhaps no greater testimony to the celebratory atmosphere that surrounded the Communist victory in Vietnam than the 1975 Academy Awards, which took place on April 8, just three weeks before the South’s final surrender. The award for Best Feature Documentary went to the film Hearts and Minds, a vicious piece of propaganda that assailed American cultural values as well as our effort to assist South Vietnam’s struggle for democracy. The producers, Peter Davis and Bert Schneider [who plays a role in David Horowitz’s story—see page 31], jointly accepted the Oscar. Schneider was frank in his support of the Communists. As he stepped to the mike he commented that "It is ironic that we are here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated." Then came one of the most stunning—if intentionally forgotten—moments in Hollywood history. As a struggling country many Americans had paid blood and tears to try to preserve was disappearing beneath a tank onslaught, Schneider pulled out a telegram from our enemy, the Vietnamese Communist delegation in Paris, and read aloud its congratulations to his film. Without hesitating, Hollywood’s most powerful people rewarded Schneider’s reading of the telegram with a standing ovation.

Scott Fitzgerald once said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function". Not entirely paradoxically, he expressed that thought in "The Crack-Up".

Lawhawk reminds us that today is the 13th anniversary of the first attack on the World Trade Center, when a bomb was detonated in its parking garage. Six people were killed in what was the first major act of of Islamofascist terrorism on American soil.

The cost of the bomb? A mere three hundred dollars for the 1300 pounds of chemicals involved.

While Mark Steyn in the Chicago Sun-Times is focusing on the death of Europe, the Chicago Tribune, its cross-town rival, explores the death of blogs. The Trib ends its story on a much more rational note, but first tolls the expected bells of doom:

Gallup finds only 9 percent of Internet users saying they frequently read blogs, with 11 percent reading them occasionally. Thirteen percent of Internet users rarely bother, and 66 percent never read blogs. Those numbers, essentially unchanged from a year earlier, put blog-reading dead last among Gallup's measures of 13 common Internet activities. E-mailing ranks first (with 87 percent of users doing so frequently or occasionally), followed by checking news and weather (72), shopping (52) and making travel plans (also 52).

If this sounds to you like a perennial theme for big media, you'd be right. Here's what I wrote for TCS Daily right around this time two years ago, in response to a similar story on CNN.com, back when there were "only" five million blogs for Technorati to follow, as opposed to the 28.9 million they track today:

The Pew Internet and American Life Project, in a study released Sunday, found that somewhere between two percent and seven percent of adult Internet users in the United States actually keep their own blogs.

Let's examine those numbers a little further! As I wrote on my own Weblog about the story, the numbers tell a very different story than its slant.

According to one study, there are 146 million adult Internet users in the US alone. The article claims that between two and seven percent of those Internet users keep blogs. If we round that number to five percent, it means that there are 7,300,000 Weblogs in the US alone. And that's a lot of Weblogs!

This is the sort of cynical, "glass half empty/glass half full" story that bloggers love to parse, and many Weblogs had a field day with it. Scott Ott, the humorist whose Scrappleface Website is a Blogosphere favorite (in January of 2003, Ott coined the brilliant "Axis of Weasels" meme that later graced the cover of The New York Post), put things into sharp perspective. In one of his typical satiric news articles, he wrote that if only about two percent of Internet users actually write Weblogs, it means that there are more bloggers writing, than people reading USA Today (whose circulation is 2.6 million), The New York Times (1.6 million) or The New York Daily News (805,000).

Ott doesn't mention CNN, but since the article most prominently appeared on CNN's Website, it's probably worth noting that in the US, CNN's typically daily viewership is only about 450,000 viewers. (The Fox News Channel, the cable news ratings leader, gets an average of 799,000 viewers during their broadcasting day.)

Of course, if I were CNN, I'd be worried about having, in a manner of speaking, all of my viewers, and then some, owning Weblogs.

Fortunately, the author of the Trib article begins to pull up on the controls about halfway through the piece, but not before more alarm sirens go off:

The pixels hadn't faded on Gallup's downbeat report when Slate.com columnist Daniel Grossman chimed in with another requiem, "Twilight of the Blogs." Grossman says: "There are troubling signs--akin to the 1999 warnings about the Internet bubble--that suggest blogs have just hit their top." Among those signs: too much corporate money trying to buy into what could be a fad (including Time Warner paying a reported $25 million for Weblogs Inc.). Is too much money chasing not enough revenue? As Grossman aptly notes: "In the end stages of any investment mania, the clueless and the greedy flood in."

Even if blogging flops as a business and doesn't attract more readership, many bloggers will still have loyal followings.

That last sentence is exactly right--in fact, it sounds very much like something I wrote last November when Pajamas Media first launched, amidst the height of the bi-partisan epidemic of Pajamas Derangement Syndrome that seemed to sweep through the Blogosphere, during the brief period that PJM was known as OSM:

The funny thing is, living in Silicon Valley, I watched lots of dot.coms crash and burn, interviewed their staffs for magazines, and had lots of friends who had signed up for all-too-brief tours of duty. And my wife has served as attorney for more than a few start-ups. I’ve also written for a surprising number of start-up magazine ventures that didn’t make it past their first year. (Not to mention writing some of the first articles for National Review Online’s nascent Financial section, some of the first pieces for Blogcritics, and starting a blog three and a half years ago, back when you still had to explain to everyone what the heck a frickin’ blog was.

You don’t have to do that any more. Thanks, Ms. Mapes! Thanks Mr. Klein!

But do I think that OSM is a sure bet? No, of course not. And I’ve never drunk the Tony Robbins-ish Kool-Aid that makes you believe that you must not think any bad thoughts at all or you’ll ruin all that positive thinking. Will OSM succeed? I don’t know--and more importantly, the members of the Complainy-American Community who’ve bitched, moaned and pecked at its ankles for the past few months really don’t know. (Jealousy and paranoia make for a bitter cocktail when mixed together.) But what’s the downside? If OSM fails, it’s not going to be the Internet equivalent of the wreck of the Penn Central: this is as demassified a business as possible, which will make long-term casualties virtually nil: Roger, Charles, Glenn, Michelle Malkin and the other "Names" aren't going to lose their massive readership. Nor will anybody else involved in the project. Do you care whether your broker works for Smith Barney or Paine-Webber if he’s been doing great work for you for a decade?

The Trib piece ends:

So blogging has a future, however indefinite. At least till Al Gore invents the Next Big Thing.

And even that's pretty bulletproof, as I noted as recently as this past week, when I explored a possible video-oriented future for blogs at TCS. To borrow from something I posted here last month, it's possible the form of blogging could change radically in the coming years, but individual self-publishing on the Internet--or, pace Al Gore, whatever its successor is called--is here to stay for a very long time, indeed.

Mark Steyn's latest Chicago Sun-Times essay begins on an utterly chilling note:

In five years' time, how many Jews will be living in France? Two years ago, a 23-year-old Paris disc jockey called Sebastien Selam was heading off to work from his parents' apartment when he was jumped in the parking garage by his Muslim neighbor Adel. Selam's throat was slit twice, to the point of near-decapitation; his face was ripped off with a fork; and his eyes were gouged out. Adel climbed the stairs of the apartment house dripping blood and yelling, "I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven."

Is that an gripping story? You'd think so. Particularly when, in the same city, on the same night, a Jewish woman was brutally murdered in the presence of her daughter by another Muslim. You've got the making of a mini-trend there, and the media love trends.

Yet no major French newspaper carried the story.

This month, there was another murder. Ilan Halimi, also 23, also Jewish, was found by a railway track outside Paris with burns and knife wounds all over his body. He died en route to the hospital, having been held prisoner, hooded and naked, and brutally tortured for almost three weeks by a gang that had demanded half a million dollars from his family. Can you take a wild guess at the particular identity of the gang? During the ransom phone calls, his uncle reported that they were made to listen to Ilan's screams as he was being burned while his torturers read out verses from the Quran.

This time around, the French media did carry the story, yet every public official insisted there was no anti-Jewish element. Just one of those things. Coulda happened to anyone.

As James C. Bennett wrote three years ago:

The modern world was first carried forward by two great civilizations. The Anglosphere was one. The dynamic industrializing culture of 19th century Continental Europe, to which the spark of the Judaeo-Christian encounter was so important, was the other. That culture committed suicide in the '30s. Perhaps its successor is not the revival of that culture, but rather its zombie.

In considering the Holocaust, most attention has been given to its direct victims, as is appropriate. However, we must also consider that it was a form of self-administered lobotomy for Continental European culture.

Lobotomy? More like slow-motion suicide.

Update: Roger L. Simon explores a possible "French Wake-Up Call":

To protest a horrible racist murder, an estimated thirty-three thousand people, including ministers from opposing parties, marched in Paris today. This may not equal the crowds they muster for a transit workers strike, but let's hope this marks a new resistance to racism and anti-Semitism in France.

I hope so too, but it's tough to be optimistic about Old Europe's long-term prognosis.

Another Update: Power Line has numerous photos of the protest.

One More: Alexandra von Maltzan has lots more links and info.

First it was fluoridated water that was the root of all evil, originally for the Birchers, more lately for the Naderites. Then there was California's infamous Dihydrogen Monoxide panic of 2004. Nowadays, another liquid asset is cause for alarm, writes Tim Blair:

So, you like the bottled water, huh? Well, thanks for killing the planet, you landfill-clogging, petrochemical-burning, guzzle-mad Gaia haters!

As one of Tim's commenters adds:

To paraphrase Sir Humphrey, “Environmentalists like to panic, they need activity. It is their substitute for achievement.”

Heh. Personally, I've always thought W.C. Fields had the right attitude towards water...

Speaking of Hollywood movie icons, did you know that Tom & Jerry was a Zionist conspiracy? Professor Hasan Bolkhari, Iranian “mass media expert” and cultural advisor to the Iranian Education Ministry, explains it all.

Which of course, begs the question: What Would Bugs Bunny Do?

Update: More from the cartoon kingdom: "Why Mommy Squirrel Is a Democrat", Power Line's Podcast interview with artist Jeremy Zilber.

Jeff Goldstein imagines a conversation between Billy Jack and Cindy Sheehan: one's a b-movie icon of the 1970s; the other simply left her mind there.

Baron Bodissey looks at extremists of the past and present.

CBS fires up the airbrushes again, altering the frontpage of a newspaper for their 48 Hours Mystery news magazine.

Paul Berger, a self-described Englishman In New York, seems somewhat surprised by, as he calls it, The Greeting:

I have spent the past month doing research work in the city. It’s the longest I have spent in an office environment since my days booking hotel rooms in London six years ago. I’ve adjusted to the commute. I’ve adjusted to the lack of sunlight. And I’ve adjusted to eating lunch out every day. But I’m still struggling with the office greeting.

Not content with “hello” I’ve noticed many people prefer the “how are you?”. By the time I have answered “fine” we have already passed each other and the opportunity for me to return the question has gone. This leaves me feeling selfish and somewhat egotistical since I am spending my days telling everyone I am fine but never managing to inquire as to their wellbeing.

I have resolved for today, and next week, to pop the question first.

How are you--or as it's normally enunciated, at great speed, how'r'ya! is a derivation of slightly more complex greeting, as David Gelernter wrote in a absolutely terrific City Journal article ten years ago. Gelernter's piece is an almost archeological look at what life was like in New York in 1939, as America's Depression slowly but inexorably gave way to her entrance into World War II:

Nineteen thirty-nine lived in an " ought" culture. We inhabit more of a "want" culture, a desire-not-obligation culture. One of the most obvious and important consequences of the slow death between 1939 and today of American civic religion—the coherent, deeply held set of shared beliefs and ideas that bound Americans into one community—is the sweeping aside of its oughts.

The ought culture made itself felt in many ways. For example: 1939's daily experience was assembled to a far greater extent than ours out of countless small rituals—pieces of formulaic behavior that you enacted not because you feel like it, necessarily, but because it was expected of you. Because it is the proper thing, and you ought to do it.

A middle-class dinner or even breakfast of the 1930s might involve an entire family seated at table with the males in ties and the maid scurrying about. The ritual of each child's planting a breakfast kiss on seated mamma's cheek was sufficiently well known to have been included in movie scenes not evidently intended to be farcical. Hats have rules: a gentleman of course removes his when speaking to a lady on the street, removes it when a lady enters an elevator (unless the elevator is inside an office building or a store); replaces it when he steps off into the corridor. He lifts his hat as a gesture of politeness to strangers and lifts it more emphatically when he performs an outdoor informal (versus an indoor ceremonial) bow.

Nineteen thirty-nine's polite conversation is scripted and therefore ritualized to a much greater extent than ours is. "Under all possible circumstances, the reply to an introduction is 'How do you do?'" ("The taboo of taboos is 'Pleased to meet you.'") When the need arises, one says "I beg your pardon"—never, ever, "Pardon me," which is a barbarism. It goes without saying that first names are to be used only under the proper, restricted circumstances (never among strangers), and that "sir," "madam," or "miss" is an appropriate form of address.

Read the rest of Gelernter's article--while many of the buildings in Manhattan remain the same, the ubiquitous "how are you" that Berger's encountering is one of the last remnants of an "ought" culture that, depending upon your perspective, is either long since passed, or in the latter stages of twilight.

Evan Coyne Maloney has some thoughts on Dana Milbank's stunt of appearing on the Chris Matthews show last week in a hunter's orange safety vest and ski cap, and the somewhat tepid response of the Washington Post's ombudswoman:

How about admitting that opinion sometimes sneaks into the writing of even the most earnest "objective reporter"? How about doing away with the labels "reporter" versus "columnist"?

This discussion goes to the very heart of the problems that plague the modern news media. Outlets insist that their "reporters" are objective, while "columnists" aren't held to the same supposedly-stringent rules of objectivity. But what distinguishes a "reporter" from a "columnist"? If you look through many newspapers, you may have a hard time figuring out which is which. Even the Washington Post and WashingtonPost.com don't seem to agree how to categorize someone like Milbank. If two sides of the same news organization can't figure it out, how can they expect the reader to understand the distinction?

I don't think Milbank's the bad guy here. His situation is merely the result of the unrealistic set of rules and assumptions that govern the modern newsroom. Milbank's just being Milbank. If you read him regularly, you see the same kind of snarky--dare I say blog-like--attitude in his writing that you see on display when he mocks the Vice President by donning day-glo hunting gear on a national news program.

So, maybe it's time for the establishment media to rewrite its rules. The existing environment doesn't seem to lead to a very good product, and it's preventing people like Milbank from doing the sort of work that they so clearly ache to do.

I agree. (Although I'm not sure how much I'm actually looking forward to journalists going on TV dressed like Floyd R. Turbo...) The continued effects of the "mass with class" era of American newspapers are stifling journalism. When there was only one or two big city newspapers and three TV networks for the vast majority of Americans to turn to for their news, this was, arguably, a reasonable institutional tone. But between the Blogosphere, TV programming such as The Daily Show (honest Gov. Blagojevich, it's satire!) and talk radio, the universally bland tone of newspaper journalism only hurts itself.

The "New Journalism" of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and others in the 1960s was one attempt to update the tone of longer-form reporting. It's happening today anyhow, thanks to the Blogosphere; but maybe it's time for newspapers themselves to jump on board, much like the British media's long history of wild diversity of attitude and opinion.

Vital Perspective has photos and video from the pro-Denmark, pro-freedom of speech rally in front of Washington's Danish embassy.

Update: More photos at VodkaPundit, including sightings of Hitch (who conceived this shindig) and Andrew Sullivan.

Another Update: More photos and links, here.

More: Ian Schwartz has video of Hitchens' speech to the crowd. (Via InstaPundit.)

Yasser Arafat had an infamous habit of saying one thing in English, and something much worse in Arabic. The Davids Medienkritik blog ("Politically incorrect observations on reporting in the German media" is their slogan) discovers that Der Spiegel has a similar style, running roughshod over the German translation of a recent interview with US Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes, right down to the caption under the photo of Hughes:

Bush-Freundin Hughes: "Ein wunderbarer Führer"

As a commenter on Medienkritik's site note:

"Führer" is rarely used in contemporary Germany in the context of German politicians (or businesspeople). The slant in the SPIEGEL quote ("Ein wunderbarer Führer") is obvious for Germans, in particular for SPIEGEL readers. No way you would call a German politician "ein wunderbarer Führer".

Don't miss Davids Medienkritik's gallery of loaded Der Spiegel covers, as well.

(Via Ace of Spades.)

One of the better of the seemingly ubiquitous Brokeback video mash-ups:

Via the Corner, where there are links to additional Brokebackian silliness, and an article about the growing backlash to the Brokeback backlash. The recent essay by John Birmingham in the Sydney Morning Herald, on the ability of political correctness to cripple the left's sense of humor is well-worth revisiting in response.

I think I'd prefer James Bond's Astin Martin DB5, or maybe even the Batmobile itself. But the Manolo has definitely found the wheels of his dreams, in a size 97-triple-D.

Tammy Bruce has some thoughts on the recent sentence a German court passed on a man who was so incensed by the Islamofascist London 7/7 bombing that he decided to...well, he decided to do this:

The 61-year-old man, identified only as Manfred van H., was given a one-year jail sentence, suspended for five years, and ordered to complete 300 hours of community service, a district court in the western German town of Luedinghausen ruled.

Manfred van H. printed out sheets of toilet paper bearing the word "Koran" shortly after a group of Muslims carried out a series of bomb attacks in London in July 2005. He sent the paper to German television stations, magazines and some 15 mosques.

Prosecutors said that in an accompanying letter Manfred van H. called Islam's holy book a "cookbook for terrorists."

As Tammy writes:

Uh, yeah. His is an opinion that is based in the facts as he sees them. It's funny how Germany is obsessed with keeping Nazi theory from re-emerging, and in the process they're doing exactly what the Nazis did--punish those who do not confirm or dare to challenge the status quo.

Welcome to 1934.

Elsewhere in a Europe that seems obsessed with turning back the clock to the Bad Old Years, a Dutch lawmaker proposes forced abortions to stop "Unwanted Children":

Alderman Marianne van den Anker of the Leefbaar Rotterdam (LR) party says the forced abortion and contraception would reduce the incidence of child abuse.

Van den Anker has two children and is the official in charge of the city's health issues. [...]

Van den Anker said Antillean teenage mothers, drug addicts and those who are mentally disabled should be forced to have abortions and use contraception if they are having sex.

Nothing like a little eugenics to complete the 1930s picture.

Daniel Henninger writes that when it comes to politics, it's Tex Avery's world, we just live in it:

Witnessing the political reaction this week to the administration's Dubai ports-management decision, the phrase that insistently called out from memory was the title of a famous essay by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "Defining Deviancy Down." One would not have thought it possible, but Washington's political class is defining our politics down.

After nearly seven days of elevating the Cheney bird-hunting accident to the level of a national crisis, now comes this week's flap over managing the ports. To be sure, the matter of secure U.S. ports trumps the hunting of quail as an affaire d'état. But it was the strikingly low quality of the politicians' commentary and behavior that attracted notice.

Within hours, if not minutes, Sen. Hillary Clinton and Rep. Robert Menendez announced "emergency" legislation to "ban foreign governments from controlling operations at our ports." No matter that most of the current operators of our ports are from Denmark, Britain and, uh-oh, China. Chuck Schumer: "It's hard to believe that this administration would be so out of touch with the American people's national security concerns." Yes, that is hard to believe.

Once the match was put to the ports decision in Washington, the bonfire spread quickly to the governors' mansions. New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, until recently a U.S. senator, told Ron Insana he was filing a federal lawsuit to thwart the move because the roads near the Port of Newark are "the two most dangerous miles in America." They are? Maybe he should put warning signs on the Jersey Turnpike.

What we have here is the dawn of the new Yosemite Sam school of national politics. Put any news event in front of our politicians now--Hurricane Katrina, Terri Schiavo, Dick Cheney's quail or this week the ports--and like Bugs Bunny's hair-triggered nemesis they'll start spraying the landscape with wild remarks and opinions decoupled from what is knowable about these events. Wait to learn the facts--as almost alone, Sen. John McCain, suggested? Why bother?

As Henninger notes, it's a tripartite issue: Republicans, Democrats, and the media are all responsible for creating the Looney Tune world of Washington.

Henninger writes, "in our jacked-up media age, first impressions--false or true--becomes powerful and hard to alter". And the conventional wisdom is that the Blogosphere has done the most since the development of 24 hour cable news to jack up the speed that first impressions are formed. So it's been quite fascinating to watch the second, and even third opinions form regarding the Dubai port control issue. That's a level of thoughtfulness that's absolutely impossible in, say, television news, and is nearly almost as rare in newspapers as well.

There's a curious flip-over that occurs in any celebrity's career when he or she comes out as a member of the left. On the one hand, the fullblown brass ring of Schwarzenegger/Bruce Willis/Mel Gibson-level megastardom becomes much more difficult to obtain, because you've given audiences in red state middle America a great reason to avoid your movies. On the other, your career is set: you'll never not each lunch in this town again, to mangle the title of the late Julia Phillips' famous tell-all.

Take for example, Rob Reiner, whom Hugh Hewitt has been hammering all week. (Click here and just keep scrolling.)

Just in time for Christmas, his latest film, Rumor Has It was released, starring Jennifer Aniston of Friends fame. Two months later, it's grossed a paltry $42m in domestic box office.

Hey, everybody's entitled to strike out now and then, especially with a public as fickle as ours. But if you look at the box office returns of Reiner's movies on IMDB.com for literally the last decade, the last time he directed a film that grossed higher than its budget in the US was the leftwing-lovefest The American President in 1995, and even then, just barely. (About three million over its $62m budget, according to the IMDB. George Lucas and James Cameron don't even get out of bed unless they know their films are going to gross a few hundred million dollars.) And yet somehow, a studio manages to assign Reiner a film to direct every couple of years.

Wonder why? Tim Cavanaugh explains, in his 2002 article for Reason:

From merely being another Hollywood player, he has now become a quasi-governmental official - Chairman of the California Children and Families Commission - with a leadership role in disbursing $700 million in annual tobacco tax revenues. This is just the latest feather in the cap of the successful director, producer, actor and intellectual beacon (to Hillary Clinton during her village-taking days). It's common to marvel at how far Reiner has risen above early typecasting as Mike "Meathead" Stivic, the sanctimonious mooch responsible for so many of Archie Bunker's most painful hours on the TV classic All In the Family. (You can track Reiner's rising profile by how his relationship to Prop 10 is described in the press; while early reports called him the "driving force" or "inspiration" behind the measure, the Chronicle now designates him the law's "author.")

On closer inspection, though, it's not always easy to see the difference between the freeloader who lectured Archie on women's lib and overpopulation while helping himself to the Bunker groceries (a practice that no doubt contributed to the Hollywood triple threat's relentless supersizing), and the tiresome busybody who can't stop haranguing us with obscure data points like the fact that smoking is bad for you and that children should be fed and changed on a regular basis.

More alarmingly, the fully grown Reiner has access to a fridge far more capacious than Archie's, and his motivations have grown, if anything, more narrowly personal. In describing his motivations for Prop 10, the Meathead consistently describes how his adherence to the first-three-years cult came out of therapy after the breakup of his first marriage. "It's no great revelation that my early experiences as a child informed my relationship to others," the son of funnyman Carl Reiner confides to Horizon magazine.

It's quite a leap, however, to extrapolate from a tough Hollywood childhood to a wholesale belief in the early-years theory, "enriched" learning environments, a half-decade window of mental "hardwiring," and the efficacy of pumping Mozart into the uterus. The early-years assumption has taken some knocks in recent years, most notably the publication of John T. Bruer's The Myth of the First Three Years, which argues that cognitive development occurs throughout life, and that much of the effort spent on French for tots could more profitably be spent addressing the more basic needs of kids. Rather than addressing the Bruer argument, early-years proponents have typically shifted emphasis, cautioning readers against "taking to heart [the book's] negative messages" and redoubling calls for Early Head Start and other dubious attempts to pump babies up. Since everybody agrees infants and toddlers need attention, why ask what type of attention?

That close-enough-for-rock-n-roll attitude informs Prop 10's other plank - reducing smoking through excise taxes. California, whose per-capita cigarette consumption is the second lowest in the nation, was a poor test case for this method, as well as a poor source of tobacco-based revenue. Prop 10 funds are parceled among California's 58 counties according to birthrate. Los Angeles County's ambitious program is a direct result of its population's fertility; other counties, according to the Chronicle are having a harder time getting such efforts off the ground in the face of declining tobacco revenues.

Reiner is the poster-child for what so many in Hollywood yearn to achieve: not just politicizing entertainment, but using entertainment as a stepping stone to actual political power.

That the product that got him there fails to make a profit these days is as irrelevant as whether or not his social programs work in California. Reiner has no clout at the box office, but plenty in studio boardrooms: he's guaranteed to direct Hollywood films with tens of millions of dollars in budgets as long as he wants.

Update: Rob's fan comes out swinging in his defense.

I received a nice email this morning from Mickey Kaus on the TCS Daily article about Web video--and a reminder that he has his own v-blog, where he debates issues with Pajamas' own David Corn.

A year from now, if I do a sequel to this piece, no doubt there'll be lots more joining them. If I was a network TV producer, I'd be scared. Or, as I wrote in the TCS piece, hopefully smart enough to start co-opting the burgeoning Videosphere.

When two men of such diverse viewpoints as Bill Bennett and Alan Dershowitz agree, it's worth noting:

So far as we can tell, a new, twin policy from the mainstream media has been promulgated: (a) If a group is strong enough in its reaction to a story or caricature, the press will refrain from printing that story or caricature, and (b) if the group is pandered to by the mainstream media, the media then will go through elaborate contortions and defenses to justify its abdication of duty. At bottom, this is an unacceptable form of not-so-benign bigotry, representing a higher expectation from Christians and Jews than from Muslims.

Exactly.

Of course, by Harvard standards, the two would probably on the same page, as Dershowitz noted to Hugh Hewitt:

"In America, I am left-center, but certainly closer to the left. And on the Harvard arts and sciences faculty, I would be on the extreme right."

Which speaks volumes towards the intellectual diversity in academia.

Update:Ed Morrissey is much more optimistic about the repercussions of Dershowitz and Bennett's op-ed than I am:

The utter failure of the press to inform its readers and to defend free speech and open criticism has been remarked several times on this blog, but this effort by Dershowitz and Bennett will have major repercussions for the media in the politics of the day. We saw this coming with the media's love affair with the McCain-Feingold Act, in which Congress basically bribed the media with an exemption to the near-ban on political speech they imposed on almost everyone else. Once someone sells out, it becomes much easier to convince them to do it again.

When leading lights from across the political spectrum rise up to condemn the media for their cowardice -- I can find no other word -- the media can no longer hide behind a partisan analysis of the critique. They have exposed their own pusillanimity, and all Dershowitz and Bennett do here is shine a light on it.

And this will change...what, exactly? The press have been, in their own way, Victorian gentlemen probably since the end of World War II, and the great consolidation of city newspapers began their march, replacing a wide variety of opinion and vigorous muckracking with "Mass With Class". The media knew they were no longer operating in a vacuum during the 2004 election (Drudge, Fox, the Blogosphere, et al), yet a self-described "objective" media paraded its bias and their limitations for all to see. Why should this latest example change anything?

The press is what is. I'd rather help build alternatives than call for reforms from within at this late date.

James Taranto frequently likes to refer to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as being "intelligent as a post". Sometimes it seems fiiting though.

Here's how yesterday's story on University of Washington's recent attempts to block a memorial to legendary alumnus Gregory "Pappy" Boyington begins:

After rejecting a memorial to Marine Corps fighter ace Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, a University of Washington alumnus -- and feeling the sting of talk radio, television commentators and the e-mail-sending public -- UW students may now back a tribute to all former students who have received the Medal of Honor.

A resolution calling for students to recognize five Medal of Honor recipients has been submitted to the student government, and it will probably be considered next week. Student government leaders briefly discussed the issue at a meeting Tuesday night.

The university itself, which received hundreds of e-mails about the rejection of a memorial to Boyington, is also trying to cool public tempers that student leaders raised when, among other things, some questioned whether the university should honor a Marine who had killed people or another rich white man.

At no point does the article comment negatively on the racist (not to mention sexist and classist) "another rich white man" slur, or even mention that the late Boyington was actually half-Sioux Indian--which is pretty ironic for a newspaper published in a town that was itself named after an American Indian chief.

And as the Paradosis blog notes, Boyington wasn't exactly rich, either, despite having actor Robert Conrad portray him every week in the mid-1970s on NBC:

Also, clearly, the student who made the racist statement never met him because I will tell you that you could not mistake the Sioux in him. And while he did write a best-selling book (best selling authors are a dime a dozen), he was never really a rich man...rather he spent most of his last days wandering through Air Shows reliving the glory days, never in any grand luxury that I saw. He seemed a very nice man, who despite his personal problems did some extraordinary things to help defend freedom and defeat tyranny and injustice.

It sounds a bit like the late Boyington is still doing just that, today.

Tim Blair: master of the punchline.

Just to tie our two major themes today together, Pajamas Media has several videos, featuring Roger L. Simon interviewing key figures on Iraq's WMDs and the recordings Saddam made before his fall in 2003.

Don't miss them.

There's a horrible pair of before and after photos on Free Republic.com of the damage done in a bombing of a 1,200-year-old Shiite shrine, which reduced it to rubble. Hugh Hewitt has links to several other sources for details. And Glenn Reynolds writes:

If Danish cartoons could create riots worldwide against the defamers of Islam, you'd think that bombing of mosques would create anti-terrorist marches all over.

Since the majority of the cartoon riots appear to have been organized top-down, sadly, I doubt too many spontaneous anti-terror protests will begin.

But I'd love to be proven wrong.

One reason why women in particular should consider launching videocasts of their own on the Web: to break the peroxide apartheid of cable TV.

(And no, this does not mean I think Virginia Postrel should change her hair color if and when DynamistTV goes live.)

If I'm responsible for inspiring what is to come, then all I can do is to apologize profusely to America in advance: "And we have HughTV on the way, so Ed is once again ahead of his time".

As that cryptic hint implies, Hugh Hewitt, and Duane, his producer are being very secretive as to what the final product will look like. But one fellow closely associated with the project seems to have smuggled out a single frame of the test footage.

"As you surely realize", James D. Miller writes, the Lawrence Summers controversy at Harvard "mirrors the fight over the Mohamed cartoons" in the press.

Read the whole thing.

Update: Related thoughts from Mark Tapscott.

In his Spenglerian magnum-opus "It's the Demography, Stupid" essay last month, Mark Steyn wrote:

This ought to be the left's issue. I'm a conservative--I'm not entirely on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a slut: I'm with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first victims of the West's collapsed birthrates? Even if one were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store by "a woman's right to choose," in any sense.

The left's embrace of Islamofascism is, at least on the surface, little different than their reactionary embrace of the Soviet Union in the 1970s: it's the old "The Enemy Of my Enemy Is My Friend" meme, but starring the Alec Guinness of Lawrence of Arabia, rather than the Alec Guinness of Dr. Zhivago. (I was going to say Omar Sharif, but he's too much of a good guy in both movies.)

In the New York Observer, Bruce Feinstein takes the moral equivalency it to its natural conclusion: meet the New York Times' new Ombudsmullah: Ali bin-Zabar!

His first headline will undoubtedly be:

Is The New York Times A Sharia Newspaper?

Of Course It Is

(Via Power Line.)

As a follow-up of sorts to the TCS piece earlier today on video and the Blogosphere, I have a review of Adobe's Premiere Elements 2.0 video editing program, over at Pajamas Theater 3000. (I wrote about its previous version for PC World last year.)

If you're looking for cheap ($100) software to edit camcorder tapes to upload them to the Web or master them to DVD, this could be a great program to quickly get into the video game.

For quite a while now, Adobe's Premiere Elements DVD-authoring program has managed to combine a variety of attractive features at an extremely affordable price--it streets for about a C-note. All of which makes the program suitable for a wide range of applications and users. It's certainly easy enough for beginners to plug in a camcorder and transfer and edit their first DVDs, but it's powerful enough to create some surprisingly professional looking finished discs.

However, as I wrote in PC World last year, there were several areas where the program lacked horsepower, especially when compared with more full-featured programs (not the least of which is Premiere Elements' own big-brother, Adobe Premiere).

Several of these areas have been rectified with version 2.0, which we'll address in a moment. But first, an overview of the basic concepts of the program and the minimum horsepower a computer needs to run it.

Minimum Requirements

With a program like Premiere Elements, it helps to have a fairly speedy computer and a fair amount of RAM. Adobe recommends running the program on a Windows XP PC with an Intel Pentium 4, M, D, or Extreme Edition or AMD Opteron or Athlon 64 and 256 MB of RAM; anything beyond those minimums would be all the better. I used a machine with 2.5 gigahertz Pentium 4 and a gig of RAM, and the program ran very smoothly.

A FireWire card and a FireWire-equipped digital video recorder are both fairly essential elements for getting the most out of Premiere Elements; the program is tailor-made for them. (If your PC lacks a FireWire card--as mine did until earlier this year--installing such a card is a breeze; for most computers, only a screwdriver is necessary.) Having both of those components will make importing video a surprisingly seamless task.

Essentially, the DV camcorder and Premiere Elements merge into one component. Pressing fast-forward, play or rewind on Premiere Elements' GUI sends those commands to the DV camcorder, which responds accordingly. And another button on the GUI will capture the camcorder footage and import into the PC and into Premiere Elements. (And of course, if your camcorder has A/V inputs, a conventional VCR can be connected to it, and then via the FireWire cable, video can also be input into Premiere Elements).

A new feature of PE 2.0 makes the program compatible with camcorders and PC's supporting the USB 2.0 standard. Otherwise, it's possible to import video via a video-USB interface such as Pinnacle Systems' Dazzle 150, or a comparable device.

PE's Great GUI

Once data is imported, Premiere Elements' graphical user interface is extremely intuitive, and makes editing, then inserting special effects a snap.

Premiere Elements stores all of a project's video in its media window. These elements can then be dragged and dropped into the program's timeline, where they can be edited and modified.

By clicking on "File" then "Interpret Footage", it's possible to set the aspect ratio of any clip stored in Premiere Elements. This is useful both to ensure that all of a project's footage is in the same aspect ratio (whether it's 4X3, 16X9 or 2:1, all of which are supported by PE), or to customize your DVD for a specific play-back format.

This is highly useful, especially for projects with a disparate variety of sources. Premiere Elements works with video in a wide range of formats, which include DV, AVI, MOV, MPEG/MPE/MPG and WMV.

The program also allows for a reasonable amount of straightforward audio editing. It won't make you give up Cakewalk's Sonar, or Steinberg's Cubase, but for many applications, it can get the job done. Premiere Elements accepts a variety of Windows-supported audio formats including WAV, AVI, MP3, and WMA. So it's possible to have a background song from an MP3, sound effects in WAV, and the dialogue in the default Windows Media format from the video it was recorded with--or in any other combination. (PE 2.0 will import Dolby Digital AC-3 files, but exports them as stereo. Adobe still appears to want keep surround sound the province of its full-blown version of Premiere.)

The Timeline: Premiere Elements' Nerve Center

Whether working with video, still photos, or some combination of the two, photos and video are edited and conformed via Premiere Element's timeline window, which is where the bulk of the work in the program is carried out.

The timeline has a time stretch tool, making it easy to adjust the duration of a shot, either by dragging it forward and slowing it down, or by right clicking on the shot and typing in a percentage number for its speed. 100 percent is normal speed, a smaller number speeds it up (by reducing the frame count), a number greater than 100 percent slows it down, and a negative number reverses the shot's motion.

Premiere Elements also works with BMPs, GIFs (including animated GIFs), JPEGs, TIFFs, PSDs, and other still photo formats, which allows the program to create a slideshow on DVD, for those producing, for example, a wedding production that combines professional videography with still photos shot by the attendees. To create a slideshow, simply insert still photos (such as gifs or jpegs) into the media window, and then click it's "MORE" command, which brings up a dropdown window. Click on "Create Slideshow". A dialogue box will allow you to adjust the duration the images display.

Menu Templates Now Allow For Motion Video

If all of this makes the program sound like a very user-friendly program for someone new to video editing you're absolutely correct. But the new menu templates included with the program make it even more useful to professionals who wish to use it as an element (pardon the pun) of their trade.

While PE 1.0 had a variety of extremely serviceable menu templates they were silent and static; their lack of audio and motion video was an obvious defect, which version 2.0 corrects. It includes several menus with either or both, in addition to the previous static templates.

What's the bottom-line on PE 2.0? With its street price of $100 or less, Adobe's Premiere Elements Version 2.0 packs a surprising amount of bang for the buck, even when compared to its full-featured $700 big brother, Premiere Pro.

Daniel Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquier's "Bling" Weblog pays homage to the mystical Church of Chuck Norris Worship.

If Charles Bronson had lived longer, or been born a decade younger, he'd probably be enjoying similar sorts of encomiums today.

Or not: There's no equivalent Stallone-mania these days, is there?

No, not sexy--sexist, as the great Spinal Tap riff goes: Riding Sun and Newsweek document how Europe's economic policies are holding women back.

Which seems only fair--Europe's economic policies are holding everyone there back.

In the Dallas Morning News, the great Theodore Dalymple looks back on A Clockwork Orange, 35 years after Stanley Kubrick's still-controversial movie, and almost 45 years after Anthony Burgess' novel:

And of Britain, at least, Mr. Burgess was certainly right. He foresaw a future in which self-control had shrunk to vanishing, and he realized that the result could only be a Hobbesian world, in which personal and childish whim was the only authority to guide action. A brief residence in a British slum should persuade anyone that he was not altogether wide of the mark.

A Clockwork Orange is not completely coherent. If youth is violent because the young are like machines who cannot help themselves, what becomes of the free will that Mr. Burgess otherwise saw as the precondition of morality? Do people grow into free will from a state of automatism, and, if so, how and when? And if violence is only a passing phase, why should the youth of one age be much more violent than the youth of another? How do we achieve goodness, both on an individual and social level, without resorting to the crude behaviorism of the Ludovico Method or any other form of cruelty? Can we bypass consciousness and reflection in our struggle to behave well?

There are no schematic answers in the book. One cannot condemn a novel of 150 pages for failing to answer some of the most difficult and puzzling questions of human existence, but one can praise it for raising them in a peculiarly profound manner and forcing us to think about them.

To have combined this with acute social prophecy (to say nothing of entertainment) is genius.

Burgess was rather uncomfortable with Kubrick's film version of his book, but its timing was exquisite: in terms of England's youth, the peace and love of the late 1960s was over, and the anarchic punk rock of the mid-1970s was about to begin. If anything, Kubrick's film may have sped up the process, which is why Kubrick banned its showing in Great Britain until he passed away in 1999.

Why yes, that is my essay on the future of video on the Web and in the Blogosphere, on TCS Daily today. (Big thanks to Evan Coyne Maloney, Glenn Reynolds, Ian Schwartz, Justin Hart, and Slingbox's Brian Jaquet for their quotes and background material.)

Incidentally, here's an important, and utterly non-related tip: if you do decide that video-podcasting is for you, don't choose this jacket as part of your on-screen wardrobe--even Johnny looks a might embarrassed in that rig.

Dr. Sanity and Stanley Kurtz agree: appeasing tyrants is always a bad idea, as Lawrence Summers' resignation following his thoughtcrime at Harvard demonstrates. Dr. Sanity writes:

Summers abjectly apologized and fell all over himself backpedaling after making some perfectly harmless remarks which happend to mightily offend (to the point of causing a near-swooning episode) some of his female faculty. And for his herculean efforts to appease the eternal victims of academic feminism, Summers reaped only further scorn and rage, expressed in an angry offensive against his administration--not entirely dissimilar to the escalation of the more recent cartoon jihad.

In the history of academia, I don't think anyone has ever come closer to voluntary castration for the cause of radical feminism. And look where it got him.

As I have stated before, bullies --no matter what their gender or religion--only thrive on appeasement. The PC Feminists could have learned something from all this; it could have been the starting point of a self-analysis of where they had gone wrong and why they always feel put upon and victimized by life. It is possible that they could have grown and matured from the experience of having their childish tantrums dealt with appropriately for a change. But it will never happen on the PC campus, where free speech and diversity of ideas were sacrificed years ago.

Meanwhile, Sissy Willis reminds us of the totalitarian origins behind many of modern-day academia's most important memes.

In his syndicated Newhouse column, James Lileks wonders why "American politicians of the Democratic flavor take such solemn pleasure in trashing their country before foreign audiences?"

Clinton was in full weather-vane mode in Qatar last month, denouncing the infamous Danish cartoons. "So now what are we going to do?" he asked. "Replace the anti-Semitic prejudice with anti-Islamic prejudice?"

Well, if history is a guide, the Europeans can probably multitask and handle both.

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.

To borrow from the title of Hannah Arendt's classic book, the Great Cartoon Crisis of 2006 isn't an illustration of the banality of evil, but of its absurdity, as Mac Johnson of Human Events (via Tim Blair) points out:

As has now been well established by the Western press, five months ago a vicious right-wing propaganda rag in Denmark, possibly edited by a cryogenically preserved Nazi collaborator, sought specifically to denigrate Islam by commissioning a series of unspeakably horrible caricatures that baselessly portrayed Islam as having a tendency towards violence and intolerance.

Now, Muslims are not normally a people to congregate in mass protest and burn flags, hurl stones or break things. But this unprovoked act of cultural aggression (coming, as it did, out of the blue and occurring in Islam’s heartland, Denmark) was simply too much to take. Therefore, after five months of consideration, it was decided to make an exception for this case, and spontaneous protests broke out.

So it’s settled then. Had not the Jyllands-Posten newspaper committed its unforgivable violation of Sharia law, everything would be peaceful in the world. What we have here is a clear case of direct cause and effect, well isolated. That’s why the protestors targeted their anger narrowly at the newspaper in question and did not use the occasion to let loose a general pogrom of anti-Western, anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-Moderate rioting.

Oh wait, now that I think about it, that’s exactly what happened. After a suspicious pause that lasted longer than Joe Biden’s first set of hair plugs, the offended masses erupted in anger at the newspaper, Danish foods, the Prime Minister of Denmark, all the rest of Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, the principle of Free Speech, Israel, the Red Cross, the European Union, Christian churches, their own governments, Catholic Priests, the United States, Christian children, Ronald McDonald, and (of course) Kentucky Fried Chicken.

What? The United States cannot be on that list! Our brave State Department, always at the tip of any retreating spear, issued a condemnation of the cartoons and declared that free speech carries with it the responsibility not to say anything controversial. Plus, 99% of America’s media refused to even show the cartoons without more pixilation than they would provide for a daytime broadcast of “Caligula, The Larry Flynt Cut.”

Then why would many of the crowds feel a need to throw in a chorus of “Death to America!” and burn the U.S. flag at a riot over doodles from Denmark? Perhaps it was just habit. You know, like when I always miss the turn to go to the post office because I am so used to going straight at that intersection on my way to work. Or maybe it’s because the cartoons are just a pretext for many of the professionally angry that assembled at the riots.

Yes, there were many Muslims, normal people of a non-radical bent, that were offended by the cartoons (and embarrassed by the fact Islam is afflicted by so many radicals that the cartoons hit a chord), but they were not the ones doing photogenic things to embassies and effigies.

For the radicals that used the cartoons as an excuse to party like it’s 1999, it was all just a pretext. Had the cartoons not existed they would have been in the streets about something else. And once in the streets all the same targets would have been torched.

Elsewhere, Christopher Hitchens puts the Cartoon Intafada into perspective:

The incredible thing about the ongoing Kristallnacht against Denmark (and in some places, against the embassies and citizens of any Scandinavian or even European Union nation) is that it has resulted in, not opprobrium for the religion that perpetrates and excuses it, but increased respectability! A small democratic country with an open society, a system of confessional pluralism, and a free press has been subjected to a fantastic, incredible, organized campaign of lies and hatred and violence, extending to one of the gravest imaginable breaches of international law and civility: the violation of diplomatic immunity. And nobody in authority can be found to state the obvious and the necessary—that we stand with the Danes against this defamation and blackmail and sabotage. Instead, all compassion and concern is apparently to be expended upon those who lit the powder trail, and who yell and scream for joy as the embassies of democracies are put to the torch in the capital cities of miserable, fly-blown dictatorships. Let's be sure we haven't hurt the vandals' feelings.

You wish to say that it was instead a small newspaper in Copenhagen that lit the trail? What abject masochism and nonsense. It was the arrogant Danish mullahs who patiently hawked those cartoons around the world (yes, don't worry, they are allowed to exhibit them as much as they like) until they finally provoked a vicious response against the economy and society of their host country. For good measure, they included a cartoon that had never been published in Denmark or anywhere else. It showed the Prophet Mohammed as a pig, and may or may not have been sent to a Danish mullah by an anonymous ill-wisher. The hypocrisy here is shameful, nauseating, unpardonable. The original proscription against any portrayal of the prophet—not that this appears to be absolute—was superficially praiseworthy because it was intended as a safeguard against idolatry and the worship of images. But now see how this principle is negated. A rumor of a cartoon in a faraway country is enough to turn the very name Mohammed into a fetish-object and an excuse for barbaric conduct. As I write this, the death toll is well over 30 and—guess what?—a mullah in Pakistan has offered $1 million and a car as a bribe for the murder of "the cartoonist." This incitement will go unpunished and most probably unrebuked.

Could things become any more sordid and cynical? By all means. In a mindless attempt at a tu quoque, various Islamist groups and regimes have dug deep into their sense of wit and irony and proposed a trade-off. You make fun of "our" prophet and we will deny "your" Holocaust. Even if there were any equivalence, and Jewish mobs were now engaged in trashing Muslim shops and embassies, it would feel degrading even to engage with such a low and cheap stunt. I suppose that one should be grateful that the Shoah is only to be denied rather than, as in some Islamist propaganda, enthusiastically affirmed and set out as a model for emulation. But only a moral cretin thinks that anti-Semitism is a threat only to Jews. The memory of the Third Reich is very vivid in Europe precisely because a racist German regime also succeeded in slaughtering millions of non-Jews, including countless Germans, under the demented pretext of extirpating a nonexistent Jewish conspiracy. As it happens, I am one of the few people to have publicly defended David Irving's right to publish, and I think it outrageous that he is in prison in Austria for expressing his opinions. But my attachment to free speech is at least absolute and consistent. Those who incite murder and arson, or who silkily justify it, are incapable of rising above the childish glee that culminates in the assertion that two wrongs make a right.

How silly have things gotten? This silly:

Ed Kallaher, who has an Irish surname, tried to get a Yahoo mail account using his name and couldn’t. He discovered that the word allah is banned, even in a character string. But is Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Mohammad, God, Jehova? Nope.

I’m actually surprised Mohammad isn’t banned. It probably will be.

But this shows how the Islamic Radicals have spread fear to places you haven’t even thought about. If they were being sensitive to religion, why not ban the names of other people’s sacred figures?

If I were the MSM, I'd start to worry about the long-term implications of this current level of kowtowing. But I'm not at all sure if, institutionally, they're capable of that level of self-reflection, rather than merely reaction.

Update: "According to this story in The Register, the Allah ban was real, but short-lived". Good to see! And notice the lower-case spelling of God in the subhead of the The Register story--at least they're attempting to be equal-opportunity offenders!

Just in time for the next Liberty Film Festival, Sony unveils a high-definition camcorder.

Neo-Neocon writes:

I can't find the quote right now, but I remember reading (I believe it was in Primo Levi's fine and highly recommended Survival in Auschwitz) that one of the ways in which the guards taunted prisoners in the concentration camps--those prisoners who were "lucky" enough to have escaped the ovens, at least for a little while--was by saying to them that they would never live to tell their tale, and that the world would never know or care what they had suffered. What's more, the guards said, if by some slim chance some of them did somehow survive and report to the world what had happened, the world would never believe them. And in fact the Nazis worked hard to cover their traces, in hopes that the evidence would remain hidden.

Holocaust denial, seen in this light, is a continuation of Nazi thought, and was in fact part of the Nazi plan--and, if allowed to grow and spread, might represent their final triumph. And so (to continue to use the fire metaphor) the who espouse criminalizing it want to snuff it out while it's still a harmless little brush fire. Because they know that brush fires can grow into--well, into Holocausts.

Read the whole thing.

Greg Gutfeld crafts the definitive style guide for the Huffpost.

This seems to be the day to define terms--and maybe invent a few along the way. No Speed Bumps and VodkaPundit are debating what is a conservative, liberal and leftist, treating the Professor like a Stretch Armstrong doll along the way.

Meanwhile, in the inventing new hyphenated categories department, the Wall Street Journal reviews Rod Dreher's new Crunchy Cons book, and at the other end of the scale, Mark Gauvreau Judge and Architecture and Morality debate what it means to be a Metrocon.

That last category would sound somewhat appealing--if it wasn't a contracted hyphenation that included the clapped-out "Metrosexual" label, and that fact that it sounds too much like the guys who captured Capt. Kirk and made him fight the seven-foot tall stuntman in the green lizard suit.

But other than that...

Jim Geragthy writes, "If the whole thing weren't such a deadly serious issue, I would say that Danish cartoon protesting has jumped the shark":

From the Washington Post:

About 40 protesters gathered yesterday in front of the Danish Embassy, shouting " Allahu akbar !" — Arabic for "God is great!" — in a peaceful demonstration against a Danish newspaper's publication of cartoons of the Islamic prophet Muhammad...

Leading the demonstration was D.C. lawyer Malik Zulu Shabazz, head of the New Black Panther Party. He and other speakers criticized the cartoons but went on to address a long list of targets: the Bush administration, Western civilization, slavery, Zionists and Dick Cheney's hunting skills. Even breakfast pastry was not spared.

"I'm not going to eat any more Danish in my life — no strawberry Danish, no cheese Danish," Shabazz intoned.

There was no word on his stance on whether his breakfast would include French toast, as a French newspaper had published the cartoons as well.

Heh. As Jim writes, "It's good that moderate Muslims in America are expressing themselves through peaceful protest, but I hope they understand that Islam's reputation isn't being shaped by their lawful actions; it's being shaped by the arson and murder overseas".

Having written my share of "Here's what life will be like ten/twenty/thirty years now" articles (including this one, which I think I originally wrote in 1999 or 2000), I always enjoy looking back at other attempts to predict the future.

In 1987, the now defunct Omni magazine polled its readers as to what life will be like 20 years from then. In other words: today. All in all, they did a pretty reasonable job on their profile of the future.

(Via The Corner.)

Having written my share of "Here's what life will be like ten/twenty/thirty years now" articles (including this one, which I think I originally wrote in 1999 or 2000), I always enjoy looking back at other attempts to predict the future.

In 1987, the now defunct Omni magazine polled its readers as to what life will be like 20 years from then. In other words: today. All in all, they did a pretty reasonable job on their profile of the future.

(Via The Corner. Cross-posted on Pajamas Theater 3000.)

On NBC's Meet The Press, Mary Matalin points out that Hillary Clinton missed a superb triangulation opportunity:

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON, (D-NY): A tendency of this administration from the top all the way to the bottom is to withhold information, to resist legitimate requests for information, to refuse to be forthcoming about information that is of significance and relevant to the job that all of you do and the interest of the American people. The refusal of this administration to level with the American people on matters large and small is very disturbing.

[End videotape from 2/14/06--Ed]

MR. RUSSERT: How do you respond?

MS. MATALIN: Putting aside the delicious hypocrisy there, what a missed opportunity. What if Mrs. Clinton had come out and said, “Do you know, I’m not a hunter, but lived in Arkansas and I understand this is an accident. These sorts of accidents are not infrequent. I don’t agree with Dick Cheney on many things, as you know, but I do know Lynn and Dick Cheney and I have to believe like any human being that he must be feeling awful right now for shooting his friend. And most of all, I don’t know Harry Whittington, but there’s a man lying in a hospital bed and I think we should all pass our thoughts and prayers along to him. Now, I’d like to talk about the serious business of this nation, things that I do not agree with the vice president on.” Well, Maureen Dowd, the diva of the smart set would be swooning. Moms across the country would be saying, “Hey, she thinks like me. That’s right. A guy shoots his friend. That’s not relative to my life. Let’s move on to serious issues.”

Of course, such language would infuriate her base, illustrating the tightrope that Hillary has to walk--which will only get tougher as we get closer to 2008.

Betsy Newmark writes:

Jimmy Carter has been out trying to commit foreign policy again. The man who was such a pal of Yasser Arafat is now recommending that we recognize Hamas's government in the Palestinian Authority.

Read the whole thing, and if you haven't seen it, don't miss Jay Nordlinger's great "Carterpalooza" from 2002, to see just how consistently Carter's never met a terrorist he didn't admire.

I'm glad it didn't happen in the US, but to be honest, I'm glad it happened:

The British revisionist historian and Nazi apologist David Irving was today sentenced to three years in prison after he admitted denying the Holocaust.
An eight-member jury at a court in Vienna convicted Irving, 68, a few hours after it began its deliberations on the first day of his trial.

Irving had pleaded guilty to denying the Holocaust in two speeches on a visit to Austria in 1989, but said at the trial that he had later changed his views.

The speeches included a call for an end to the "gas chambers fairy tale", and claims that Adolf Hitler had helped Europe's Jews and that the Holocaust was a myth.
Irving told the court today he had revised his opinion after seeing the personal files of Adolf Eichmann. Speaking in German, he told the court he now accepted that the Nazis had killed millions of Jews.

At one stage, while giving evidence, he expressed sorrow for "all the innocent people" who died during the war. "I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz," he said.

Austria has the world's stiffest laws against denying the Holocaust and Irving could have faced a maximum of 10 years in prison.

Frederick Taylor documented in his seminal 2003 book Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945. that Irving was also responsible for the spread of the myth that Dresden was a pure, innocent backwater German city ruthlessly savaged out of the blue by the Allies.

As I wrote last year:

Dresden became famous for its role in two overlapping wars: first, as a target of the allies in the waning days of World War II, as the city was bombed by the British and then the US on February 13th, 1945. Of this, history is certain: the bombing leveled the city and left thousands killed.

As Taylor recounts, almost immediately after the city was bombed, Dresden was about to become a pawn in a different war all together: a propaganda war.

First, Joseph Goebbels added an extra zero on the immediate death toll in German propaganda, to turn an estimate of 20,204 killed into 202,040, in order to rally Germans for one last push before the inevitable downfall.

Then, the Soviet Union captured the city and it became part of communist East Germany, exchanging, as Taylor notes, one totalitarian master for another. And just as Nazi Germany had a skilled propaganda machine, so did the Soviet Union, which were all too happy to use the destruction caused by the allied bombing as a way of inflicting maximum guilt on the free west.

Add to this the role of David Irving, now relatively well known as a Holocaust denier, but in the early 1960s, just making his name as a historian. Arguably, it was his best-selling 1963 book, The Destruction of Dresden, that was most effective in establishing the modern myth of Dresden as an innocent city wrongly incinerated by the Allies in a final punch-drunk show of force late in the war. It served as the basis of a growing method for Germans to deflect their own responsibility for the tens of millions killed by National Socialism by transforming World War II into a sort of massed guilt that attempts to portray American and British actions as equally culpable as the Nazis, much as multiculturalism attempts to argue that no single culture is greater than another.

As I said, while I'm glad the Europeans threw Irving in jail, I'm also glad the First Amendment (or what's left of it, as campaign finance reform critics will immediately add under their breath) prohibits this sort of thing in this US.

Where do you draw the line? Should the nuts who say 9/11 either never happened, or was deliberately planned by President Bush be arrested? The JFK conspiracists? And so on.

For more on Irving, don't miss this recent post by Neo-Neocon.

Update: To be consistent, here's another prominent Holocaust denier Austria should look into extraditing into custody...

Another Update: Damian Penny has some thoughts on Irving's arrest that are well worth reading. Be sure to follow his links, as well.

The man who called the first Super Bowl and the infamous "Heidi Game" a year later for NBC was 86. Gowdy died after a long struggle with leukemia.

In the Weekly Standard, Andrew Keen looks at Web 2.0, a bloggish attempt to bring Web publishing to the masses.

Keen explores the downside of such a proposition:

So what, exactly, is the Web 2.0 movement? As an ideology, it is based upon a series of ethical assumptions about media, culture, and technology. It worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer. It suggests that everyone--even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us--can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves. Web 2.0 "empowers" our creativity, it "democratizes" media, it "levels the playing field" between experts and amateurs. The enemy of Web 2.0 is "elitist" traditional media.

Empowered by Web 2.0 technology, we can all become citizen journalists, citizen videographers, citizen musicians. Empowered by this technology, we will be able to write in the morning, direct movies in the afternoon, and make music in the evening.

* * *

We know what happened first time around, in the dot.com boom of the '90s. At first there was irrational exuberance. Then the dot.com bubble popped; some people lost a lot of money and a lot of people lost some money. But nothing really changed. Big media remained big media and almost everything else--with the exception of Amazon.com and eBay--withered away.

This time, however, the consequences of the digital media revolution are much more profound. Apple and Google and Craigslist really are revolutionizing our cultural habits, our ways of entertaining ourselves, our ways of defining who we are. Traditional "elitist" media is being destroyed by digital technologies. Newspapers are in freefall. Network television, the modern equivalent of the dinosaur, is being shaken by TiVo's overnight annihilation of the 30-second commercial. The iPod is undermining the multibillion dollar music industry. Meanwhile, digital piracy, enabled by Silicon Valley hardware and justified by Silicon Valley intellectual property communists such as Larry Lessig, is draining revenue from established artists, movie studios, newspapers, record labels, and song writers.

Is this a bad thing? The purpose of our media and culture industries--beyond the obvious need to make money and entertain people--is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent. Our traditional mainstream media has done this with great success over the last century. Consider Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece, Vertigo and a couple of other brilliantly talented works of the same name Vertigo: the 1999 book called Vertigo, by Anglo-German writer W.G. Sebald, and the 2004 song "Vertigo," by Irish rock star Bono. Hitchcock could never have made his expensive, complex movies outside the Hollywood studio system. Bono would never have become Bono without the music industry's super-heavyweight marketing muscle. And W.G. Sebald, the most obscure of this trinity of talent, would have remained an unknown university professor had a high-end publishing house not had the good taste to discover and distribute his work. Elite artists and an elite media industry are symbiotic. If you democratize media, then you end up democratizing talent. The unintended consequence of all this democratization, to misquote Web 2.0 apologist Thomas Friedman, is cultural "flattening." No more Hitchcocks, Bonos, or Sebalds. Just the flat noise of opinion--Socrates's nightmare.

The Vertigo reference is curious. Hitchcock himself thought the film was a bomb, because, 20 years before VCRs first appeared, the film failed to make money during its initial run at the box office. (Hitchcock attributed its failure to Jimmy Stewart's aged appearance, but its themes may have been just too dark to connect with a 1950s-era mass audience.)

Vertigo became a cult hit only later, because critics eventually recognized how many of Hitch's obsessive themes he brilliantly explored within the movie, and they managed to convince enough people to go back and give it a second look, via revival houses, late night TV movie airings, and eventually, videotape and now DVDs.

In other words, it wasn't a hit because Paramount said This Is The Big Film To See In 1958! Quite the contrary: Paramount's attempts to promote the film failed. But word of mouth ultimately prevailed.

The same thing is happening on the Web: the stars of the Blogosphere (insert your favorites here: InstaPundit, Hewitt, Lileks, LGF, Roger Simon, etc., etc.) have built-up large followings because they do consistently great work which strikes a chord with their audiences. Cream rises to the top. And it doesn't necessarily take a mass media promoting it to succeed these days.

More from Keen:

One of the unintended consequences of the Web 2.0 movement may well be that we fall, collectively, into the amnesia that Kafka describes. Without an elite mainstream media, we will lose our memory for things learnt, read, experienced, or heard. The cultural consequences of this are dire, requiring the authoritative voice of at least an Allan Bloom, if not an Oswald Spengler. But here in Silicon Valley, on the brink of the Web 2.0 epoch, there no longer are any Blooms or Spenglers. All we have is the great seduction of citizen media, democratized content and authentic online communities. And weblogs, course. Millions and millions of blogs.

But you can't put the genie back in the bottle: the mass media began to splinter in the 1970s with the birth of cable TV and the first dial-up computer bulletin board systems. It's only going to continue, and accelerate.

Sadly, that means less and less shared culture. But would you like to go back to the alternative? Three TV networks, one or two big city newspapers, a handful of music radio stations, no viable talk radio, no Internet, no blogs, no fun.

No thanks.

Smelling the Coffee looks at the three waves of America's coffee love, along with the small but growing backlash against Starbucks.

Writing in The Guardian, Glenn Reynolds looks at the Washington media that goes to 11--and never modulates its volume:

As Daniel Henninger noted in the Wall Street Journal, it was a pattern we had seen before. "Have you ever noticed how," Henninger wrote, "on a scale of one to 10, every untoward event in the life of the Bush presidency goes straight to a 10?

"The Abu Ghraib photos? A 10 forever. Dick Cheney catching a hunting buddy with some birdshot? An instant 10. The Bush national guard story? Total 10. How can it be that each downside event in this presidency greets the public at this one, screeching level of outrage and denunciation by the out-of-power party and a perpetually outraged media?

"There was a time when what has been called news judgment would deem some stories a five or six and run them on page 14 or deeper in the newscast ... Not with this presidency. Every downside event - large, small and in-between - plays on the front page above the fold now. And when Dick Cheney accidentally pops Harry Whittington, old Harry Reid jumps up from his Senate leader's desk faster than a Nevada jack rabbit to announce, one more time, that this 'is part of the secretive nature of this administration'.

"Here are some of the political and media bonfires that have been lit on the White House lawn, stoked and reignited over the past five years: the 'stolen' 2000 election, Halliburton, 'Fahrenheit 9/11', Cheney lives in an 'undisclosed location', Abu Ghraib, torture at Guantánamo Bay, Bush lied about WMD, secret CIA prison sites, Valerie Plame, the neocons ... Cheney's 'secret' energy task force, Cindy Sheehan, Bush is destroying social security, Hurricane Katrina, Jack Abramoff, illegal wiretaps, Bill Frist's stock sales, what else?"

With a nod to the movie Spinal Tap, I would say the media treatment of Bush administration scandals "goes to 11". This lack of proportion reflects poorly on the press and on Bush's opponents (categories that often seem indistinct these days) but in some ways it actually benefits Bush and the Republicans. First, the tendency of the press and opposition to seize on stories that reflect their own prejudices, rather than their newsworthiness, means stories that might actually harm the Grand Old Party get ignored in the rush to pick up on those that symbolise why they dislike the administration.

As Glenn writes earlier in the piece, these include stories such as:

Its response to the "cartoon jihad" by Islamic extremists has been limp. There seems no clear plan, beyond allowing the obviously ineffective diplomacy of the EU to continue, for dealing with Iran. US domestic spending is out of control, and an anti-pork-barrel movement among conservatives and libertarians (of which I am part) is targeting Republican congressional representatives as well as Democrats, not surprising given that Republicans are in control of Congress, and chafing at the White House's lack of support for spending limits.

Reading between the lines of the media figures being quoted in Matt Drudge's latest post, you get the feeling that some of them know off their profession is off the rails as much as half their audience does. But they have no idea how to right the ship, to mix transportation metaphors.

The issues that Glenn lists above as Bush being vulnerable on are conservative/libertarian issues. But it would go against the Washington press corps' ideology to explore those topics. Fox News might, but CNN's Jack Cafferty gave away how most journalists view that channel, when he sneeringly referred to them as "The F-Word Network". So any topic Fox explores is automatically suspect in the eyes of the rest of the media.

So let's look at the topics that Reynolds mentions, through the same prism that the bulk of the MSM views life:

Spending out of control? Ever since the days of LBJ's Great Society, liberalism has been defined by entitlements. The same press that to man doesn't own a gun would love to see America's defense budget cut. Is there anything else they'd agree is a good, positive budget cut?

The cartoon crisis? That would run the risk of actually having to show the cartoons--or writing that maybe, just maybe, the Muslim rioters are wrong. In a press obsessed with multiculturalism (read Bill McGowan's Coloring The News for a thorough discussion of journalism and that issue), so much for that.

Iran and nukes? Well hey, isn't that what the UN is for? I mean, they were doing a swell job in Iraq on that issue, UNTIL GEORGE BUSH INVADED!

And we're right back to the Spinal Tap--all Marshall amps on 11, all the time--media.

"If Bush's opponents had a sense of proportion and a measure of self-discipline, he would be in trouble. Luckily for him, they don't", the Professor concludes, and he's right.

I swear I only had one brandied port with dinner tonight, but I must be seeing pink elephants and other alien creatures. For example, what is that weird "lavender man-rat" thing, as Manolo calls it, that Halle Berry is dancing with???

Michelle Malkin has "your weekend Cartoon Jihad photo album": photo after photo cars, embassies, and Danish and American flags going up in smoke.

Meanwhile, she notes that the bounty on the Danish cartoonists' heads is now up to 11.5 million dollars. The article that Michelle links to in the Arab News is unintentionally deeply ironic:

A minister in India’s Uttar Pradesh state government has offered a reward of $11.5 million to anyone who would kill any of the cartoonists who drew the images of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

I guess peace doesn't move in two directions on the Arab street.

Variety's Peter Bart writes, "though everyone (including the studio chiefs) acknowledges that the business model is broken, the movies of summer '06 have to produce record numbers or heads will roll. Last summer the insiders could complain that movie attendance was sagging. No excuses this year".

Which means that summer blockbuster line-up will include the following:

"Mission: Impossible 3" gets little breathing room before "Poseidon" floats by, to be imminently followed by "The Da Vinci Code," "Over the Hedge" from DreamWorks and then Fox's "X-Men 3." The July 4 melee begins with "Superman Returns" and ends with "Pirates of the Caribbean II." And so it goes all summer.

Rolling out the comedies is no laugh either. On June 2 Paramount's "Nacho Libre" bumps into Universal's "The Break-Up" with Vince Vaughn, and "Cars" is speeding up their driveway.

Some high-profile casualties inevitably will result from this combat -- the production chiefs fully understand this. Given the extraordinary costs ($150 million and up) of summer blockbusters, they know that a major flameout will impinge on the bottom line of their parent companies. They also comprehend the implications of the "Kong" conundrum: Rich talent deals have triggered big paydays for the talent, leaving only distribution fees for the studios.

As a result, several studio regimes know they're on tenuous ground. This is a make-or-break year, which means May-through-July will be the summer from hell.

For studio moguls, the audience, or both?

Matt Drudge writes that this week will be another week of CheneyMania from the legacy media:

On CNN's RELIABLE SOURCES, WASHINGTON POST reporter Dana Milbank fretted that the White House is exploiting the public's growing disdain for the mainstream media. "Of course they succeed,” Milbank said of Bush aides. “The press always looks awful. They will once again make us look awful.”

CNN's Candy Crowley added: "The perception is that we're whining."

Occasionally, perception really is reality.

Or as Mark Steyn writes today:

It's easy to be tough about nothing. The press corps that noisily champions "the public's right to know" about a minor hunting accident simultaneously assures the public that they've no need to see these Danish cartoons that have caused riots, arson and death around the world. On CNN, out of "sensitivity" to Islam, they show the cartoons but with the Prophet's face pixilated so that he looks as if Cheney's ventilated him with birdshot and it turned puffy and gangrenous. C'mon, guys, these are interesting times. Anyone can unload the umpteenth round of blanks into the bulletproof Chimpy Hallibushitler, but why not take a shot at something that matters?

Courage, boys!--To borrow one of Dan Rather's old riffs.

Update: Besides the under-reported cartoon-driven unrest in the Muslim world, in a post titled, "Ground Control To MSM: Your Judgement's Dead, There's Something Wrong", Will Collier drops another important, but ignored story right into the collective laps of the press:

A credible allegation that an American citizen was attacked, beated and robbed in his own home by agents of a hostile foreign power because of his political views and activities.

Call me a press-hating fascist wingnut, but I think that's a big story. That's a page one, lead for a week, cover-of-Time-and-Newsweek story. Why the hell are you whining yourselves hoarse about how long it took the White House press corps to learn about a minor hunting accident?

Think they'll take him up on the offer and persue the story?

Nahh, me neither.

New Hampshire-based journalist John Burtis uses his own riff on a Tom Wolfe title to explore "The Bonfire of The Inanities":

In their Herculean efforts to lend further "gravitas" to the beleaguered story, the media trundled out grizzled hunting experts, college-trained weather men and women, experts on color recognition and the reasons for the use of international orange on hunting outfits, the problems to be encountered from lead poisoning, ornithologists and the year of the expected Texas quail extinction, medical experts and the grave damage to be expected from the horrors of bird shot, cardiologists, Neil Young and the needles and the damage done, schematic diagrams of shooting victims, savvy attorneys to discourse on the legal ramifications of the expected charges for attempted murder and great bodily harm, pettifoggers to discuss the upcoming civil penalties, constitutional scholars to describe this latest nail in the proverbial coffin of impeachment, pundits to describe in glib detail the replacement of Dick Cheney for this strategic gaffe of immense proportions and experts in finer points of haberdashery to explain the meaning of the pink tie - the full list may never be fully tabulated because of its absolutely daunting size and the fact that it was pounded out in 24 news cycles for nearly a week.

The line about "the meaning of the pink tie" is a reference to the Washington Post's Robin Givhan--the Post's last line of defense. Givhan is called in whenever the GOP scores an advance: her columns--a combination of Sigmund Freud and Alan Flusser--have ripped apart newly nominated Supreme Court Judges Roberts and Alito, and shortly after the 2004 election, Cheney himself. She's not so much the Doomsday Machine as a sartorial kamikaze: from Hell's Bloomingdale's, she stabs at thee!

Glenn Reynolds writes:

Hugh Hewitt...observes "The Party ought to require every member read An Army of Davids. (Who's got the rights in the PRC Glenn?)". Why limit it to Party members? I think that everyone in China should read it!

And they very well may. But Alvin Toffler told C-Span's Brian Lamb an instructive story about how The Third Wave circulated through China in the early 1980s:

Read More »

Ed Morrissey links to Jeff Jacoby's latest essay on the cowardly nature of the American press and writes:

At the same time, the same media outlets that have kept its customers in the dark in one of the most important stories in the conflict with radical Islamists screeched like banshees when Dick Cheney took all of eighteen hours to reveal that he had accidentally shot his hunting partner and friend on a Saturday afternoon. For days, these stalwarts of journalistic courage took turns castigating Scott McClellan for Cheney's failure to give the story to the White House press corps, arguing that the story was so important that it could not be trusted to the Corpus Christi local paper to inform the nation. David Gregory, whose network has not even allowed a pixilated version of the Prophet cartoons to appear lest they incur the wrath of Muslim terrorists, accused the White House of censorship and coverups in supposedly hiding the shooting from the nation.

Jacoby has this correct. The media attacks those who they know will not spend much energy fighting back. Gregory could act like a rude, spoiled child denied his choice of birthday gift because he knew the White House would not dare to even expel him from the room.

Expel him? If I were in the Bush White House I'd go out of my way to encourage this sort of behavior on camera as much as possible.

The Washington Press Corp--by their behavior both in and out of the White House--did much to advance the Bush Press Thesis this past week--to the point where the light bulb is just now starting to slowly go on inside even David Gregory's head about how badly he and his comrades looked.

Rich Lowry writes:

If the press is supposed to be adversarial, does that mean that it has to froth at the mouth? It is often said that President Bush has brought a return of the Imperial Presidency of the Nixon years. But the more enduring creation of Watergate was the Imperial Press, bloated with its own self-importance and fond of the taste of blood after bringing down a president. The qualities attributed to Cheney — arrogant, out of touch, consumed with a dark, paranoiac worldview — all belong to the Imperial Press in its self-regarding glory.

Leave it to the Washington press corps to make a story about what could have been an awful personal tragedy and was still wrenching — with Harry Wittington's life in jeopardy, and Cheney burdened with the guilt of having shot a friend — all about themselves. Instead of learning of the story Saturday night, they had to wait until Sunday afternoon, and that ignited their rage. Worse, the story broke in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Wrong Times. The Corpus Christi paper doesn't belong to The Club and doesn't, like the other Times, employ a host of reporters reflexively hostile to the Bush administration and obsessed with the latest Beltway minutia. [I touched on the Washington Media's Scoop Envy as well--Ed]

The media need to clue into the fact that no one cares about press management as much as they do. In polls asking what issues matter to it, the public has never said, "Whether David Gregory of NBC News gets his information on his preferred timetable." Still less does it care if Gregory has a tizzy at the White House briefing, an event considered so momentous by his media brethren during the Cheney brouhaha that it caused an avalanche of coverage.

Astonishingly, Gregory agrees with Lowry, before he doesn't.

Sometimes an idea is so radical, so out there, that it takes time to wrap your mind around the brilliance that's hidden within it. California Conservative has a thought that's so far from the conventional wisdom that its crystalline logic is actually transparent. But making it happen will test the very limits of Karl Rove's genius:

Hold the 2008 GOP presidential convention in San Francisco.

Now, I know what you're thinking--but just remember what James Taranto wrote a year before the Republican convention was held in Manhattan in 2004:

"In what looked like a mini dress rehearsal for the cacophony of dissent that's expected to hit the streets of New York City during next summer's GOP convention, nearly 3,000 demonstrators gathered on Seventh Avenue to protest President Bush as he presided over a $2,000-a-plate fundraiser inside midtown's Sheraton Hotel on Monday," the Village Voice reports:

The folks on the street seemed to have little trouble connecting the issues. Antiwar placards demanding "Where are the Weapons of Mass Destruction?" and "End King Geoge's Reign of Terror!" jostled freely with pro-choice banners and signs denouncing Bush's "War on Women." Many in the crowd said they were outraged that the Republican party continues to invoke the attacks of 9/11 as a rallying cry for Bush's presidency. "I feel like Bush coming to New York is especially hypocritical because he's done nothing for this city," said Sarah Beretczki, a 29-year-old illustrator from Brooklyn who sported a sign that read, "My Bush Sheds Its Own Blood."

We saw some of these people riding the subway Monday night, and it makes us understand why the Republican Party chose New York as the site of its convention. No one pays much attention to protests of a mere fund-raiser, but during the convention TV crews will be unable to resist them--thus treating voters across the country to images of Bush's opposition as a bunch of extremists and freaks.

And the reaction that the GOP actually did receive in New York in 2004 would be doubled if, astonishingly, they really were heading for the 'Frisco bay.

Karl--drop me an email, and let's talk about this...

Tammy Bruce has an amusing video of what we all would have liked to have seen: "the fantasy of Tom Cruise being given the James Frey treatment" by Oprah Winfrey, as Tammy puts it.

After his own War of the Words encounter with Cruise, I wonder what Matt Lauer would think of this video mash-up?

Anybody who's ever proposed a magazine article or a book knows what it's like to get a rejection letter. Keep this one in mind next time you strike out.

Well, these folks don't beat around the bush, do they? Nor does this fellow.

Just out of curiosity, what do the people carrying signs praising Hitler think of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent spate of Holocaust denial?

Update: In contrast to the above lunacies, Betsy Newmark and Mansoor Ijaz have some thoughts that are well worth reading, on, as Betsy puts it, "how Muslim leaders could have behaved if they truly had the interests of Muslims in mind".

Another Update: John Hinderaker spotlights the organizational efforts behind the recent cartoon protests--which killed 11 in Libya yesterday, and 15 in Nigera today, incidentally:

FIfteen thousand people turned out in Hyde Park today to protest the Danish cartoons. They were bused in from all over England, which highlights the fact that we are not dealing here with spontaneous outbreaks of indignation, but with a coordinated campaign that is kept going because many Muslim leaders believe it advances their interests.

The AP quotes Taji Mustafa, spokesman for the Muslim Action Committee, which organized the Hyde Park event:

Mustafa said the cartoons were reminiscent of attacks on Jews in European publications in the 1930s.

"Now there is a demonization of the Muslim community, so we have to speak up to prevent something like the Holocaust from happening," he said.

The analogy is silly, of course, but, hey, look on the bright side--at least he admits that the Holocaust did take place.

Heh.

For anyone familiar with the antics of America's critics during the latter parts of the Cold War and after 9/11, it will come as little surprise that H.L. Mencken (recently dubbed "the premier social critic of the first half of the 20th century" by the New York Times) bet on the other side during World War I, as Fred Siegel writes in The Weekly Standard:

During the course of the war he was censored by the Sunpapers, but wrote three revealing articles for the Atlantic. The first, "The Mailed Fist and Its Prophet," celebrated Nietzsche as the inspiration for the new Germany, which was "contemptuous of weakness." Germany, as he admired it, was a "hard" nation with no patience for politics because it was governed by the superior men of its "superbly efficient ruling caste." "Germany," he concluded, "becomes Nietzsche; Nietzsche becomes Germany." Mencken approvingly quotes Nietzsche to the effect that "the weak and the botched must perish. . . . I tell you that a good war hallows every cause."

The second Atlantic article, based on Mencken's own reporting from the Eastern front in 1917, was a piece of hero worship that exalted General Erich Ludendorff as Germany's "national messiah." Mencken treasured the kaiser, but he thought Ludendorff was worth "40 Kaisers," and was the man to lead German Kultur in its total war against Anglo-Saxon civilization. According to Mencken, the general's greatness was to be found in the way that he had stamped out people's individuality so that "the whole energy of the German people [could] be concentrated on the war."

The third, and most intriguing, essay--"After Germany's Conquest of the United States"--talked about the benefits to America of being ruled by the hard men of a superior Kultur. Known only because of the exchange of letters between Mencken and the editor of the Atlantic, the article was withdrawn and never published. Interestingly, despite Mencken's extraordinary efforts to document his own life, the manuscript, according to Vincent Fitzpatrick, curator of the Mencken collection, cannot be found. Mencken's reputation, it seems, was saved by wartime self-censorship--in Boston, home of the Atlantic.

Mencken had genuine cause for bitterness during World War I, when the excesses of zealous Americanism left him fearful for the safety of his family. But neither Rodgers nor his other biographers have noted the context of that hostility. While Mencken was touting the genius of Teutonic militarism, German saboteurs blew up the munitions depot at Black Tom Island off Manhattan. That strike, until 9/11 the most violent action by a hostile force in the history of the city of New York, caused $40 million of damage, sinking the island and its contents into the sea. The Kaiser's plans to invade America might never have come off, but Germany plotted to bring Mexico into the war against the United States.

The Sage of Baltimore needs to be placed in a broader intellectual context. The man who is still selectively celebrated by people like Rodgers, as if he were nothing more or less than an American iconoclast, was one of a number of anti democratic thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Some of them, like D.H. Lawrence, were proto-fascists; others, like H.G. Wells, were apologists for Stalin. But they all denounced democracy in the name of vitalism, eugenics, and a caste system run by an elite of superior men.

Part of the reason it's so hard to make sense of Mencken is that he was, paradoxically, an anarcho-authoritarian. He agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union on the importance of free speech. But while that organization, under the influence of principled men such as Felix Frankfurter, argued for such freedoms on the grounds that "a marketplace of ideas" (to use Justice Holmes's term) was the best method of arriving at the truth, Mencken supported it in order to shield superior men like himself from being hobbled by the little people. For the same reason, Mencken was a near anarchist when it came to America, but an authoritarian when it came to the iron rule of the Kaiser and General Ludendorff. We are more familiar with anarcho-Stalinists such as William Kunstler, who had a parallel attitude toward the United States and the Soviet empire, but it was Mencken who blazed the trail down which Kunstler and his ilk would travel.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Clive Davis.)

Update: Sissy Willis looks at modern-day anarcho-authoritarians in action.

Another Update: Liberty Corner has some thoughts about Siegel's "Anarcho-Authoritarian" phrase.

Via the Pajamas motherblog and TigerHawk, SportsProf has a great post on the joys of old L.L. Bean duds. I'll second that emotion--somehow, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, my mom got stuck on L.L. Bean for much of her Christmas shopping; I still have L.L. Bean clothes from that era that hold up astonishingly well. Come to think of it--including the plaid button-down shirt I'm wearing as I type this!

It also highlights one of the rules of menswear: if you avoid the latest outfits touted by GQ and other mens' magazines, you'll save a ton of money, by avoiding styles that rapidly go out of fashion.

Jonah Goldberg writes that he's a pro-choice conservative:

Republicans and conservatives aren't the same thing. This distinction seems lost on lots of people, including cable television bark-show bookers and partisan Democrats and Republicans alike. To a principled conservative, it is bad news when the Democrats lurch to the left, even if it makes the Democrats less likely to win elections. Why? Because when the Democrats move left, so do the Republicans.

In American politics, when one party moves left or right, the political center of gravity moves that way too. Bill Clinton, whatever his flaws, moved his party to the right. His triangulation infuriated Republicans because it is always vexing when someone steals your lunch. Democrats despise Bush's compassionate conservatism for similar reasons. A Republican president promising to "leave no child behind" annoys Democrats as much as Clinton's denouncing of Sista Soulja irked Republicans. When the Bush presidency is over, it will be more obvious in hindsight how much he moved the GOP to the left — by making the nanny state bipartisan.

It all boils down to what matters to you most. As a conservative, the extent I root for the GOP depends entirely on how successful it is in moving the political climate of the country toward fiscal restraint, limited government, and cultural decency. Single-issue voters understand this point best: Pro-lifers would dearly love to break the GOP monopoly on opposing abortion, just as abortion-rights supporters dream of the day when both parties are pro-choice. Many conservatives, including yours truly, would have agonized over a choice between a reliably pro-war Democrat and George W. Bush in 2004, particularly if judicial appointments weren't so important.

The point, dear liberals, is that some conservatives who criticize the Democrats or offer them advice do so not solely to salt wounds, but in the hope that someday we will have a real choice on Election Day — and not between the lesser of two evils.

I agree that it's bad news for the country that the left has moved much further to the left than any time since the early 1970s--especially after Bill Clinton made attempts to re-center the party in the 1990s (and paid even more lip-service to the idea). But certainly the last two presidential elections at least offered quite an enormous choice, not an echo.

Woody Allen career may be in shambles these days, but he definitely spot-on, back when he compared the differences between New York and L.A. in Annie Hall: Cathy Seipp has a round-up of recent and "not-so-brilliant media insights from the City of Angels".

The Pundit Guy writes that the New York Times "Lobs Another Airball at WalMart".

My take? As I wrote a few years ago, any store that carries Citizen Kane on DVD can't be all bad.

In the 1970s, Greg Boyington was the subject of an NBC TV series devoted to his legendary exploits in World War II. But sadly, he can't seem to catch a break at his alma mater today:

Gregory "Pappy" Boyington became a legend fast. He was dubbed Pappy by the younger pilots of his famed "Black Sheep" fighter squadron because of his "advanced" age. He was, after all, 31, and most of them were in their young 20s.

Pappy Boyington led by example in the air war over various Pacific islands. During one period, in 1943, he shot down 14 Japanese planes in 32 days. On October 17, 1943, Pappy led a force of 24 Marine fighters over the Japanese fighter base at Kahili, on the island of Bougainville. They circled the base repeatedly, daring the 60 Japanese fighters on the field to come up. When the Japanese responded, Pappy's boys shot down 20 of them before scooting back to base without losing a plane.

He displayed extraordinary leadership, extraordinary acumen as a pilot, and extraordinary courage, no matter what the odds against him. On January 3, 1944, during a huge fighter action over Rabaul, Pappy shot down his 28th Japanese plane and was himself shot down in the wild aerial melee.

Unseen by his fellow pilots, he bailed out, dropped into the ocean, and was soon picked up by a Japanese submarine. The Japanese did not report his capture and while he spent 20 months of torture and near starvation in prisoner of war camps, he was listed by the U.S. as missing in action.

In March 1944, Boyington was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His comrades thought it was a posthumous decoration. But Pappy survived the prison camp, was freed at the end of the war, and stood in the White House on October 5, 1945, still recovering from the physical and psychological effects of his imprisonment, as President Harry S Truman draped the nation's highest award for bravery around his neck.

Flash forward 61 years. A move is afoot, naturally enough, one would think, to honor Greg Boyington, Class of 1934, at his alma mater, the University of Washington. A resolution comes before the august Student Senate for a statue honoring the Medal of Honor winner. Not "a large statue, but rather something on a small scale" (according to the minutes of the senate).

Ahem.

A distinguished "Senator," Jill Edwards moves to table the matter. Discussion ensues on who this Boyington is and why he should be honored. One student says he had read about Boyington and thought the university should be proud of him.

Distinguished Senator Jill Edwards questions "whether it was appropriate to honor a person who killed other people."

She further wonders whether "a member of the Marine Corps was an example of the sort of person UW wanted to produce."

Another distinguished Senator, Ashley Miller, "commented that many monuments at UW already commemorate rich white men."

Student Senator Karl Smith casts some oil on the troubled waters by suggesting that the resolution honoring Boyington be stripped of any mention of "destroying 26 enemy aircraft." Perhaps, in this way, Colonel Boyington's "service" could be acknowledged, but "not his killing of others."

Discussion then ensues on the finer point that "a destroyed aircraft was not necessarily indicative that a pilot had died."

We will spare you the rest of the deliberations and ruminations of the UW student legislative body, filled as it is with pious parsing and handwringing and ahistorical thumbsucking over how to mention that embarrassing Medal of Honor in some way that would leave no trail back to the fact that it was won in a war, where killing took place, to stop an aggressor bent on subjugating at least one half of the globe.

If you are an alumni of UW, you should be pissed or ashamed or both.

If you are not an alumni you should at least be embarrassed at the fact that this kind of "thinking" is too, too normal from the present generation of college students (and professors) all over this country.

Not to mention city supervisors in large Pacific northwest cities.

Update: Not surprisingly, things are even sillier in Canada, as Tim Blair notes:

Over in Canada, plans proceed to honour draft dodgers with a creepy hippie statue:

The proposal calls for a sculpture of two Americans, a male and a female, crossing an imaginary border where a Canadian figure is waiting to welcome them.

As Clear and Present Danger reports: “They’re so liberal they even felt they had to create a female draft dodger.”

Malcolm Muggeridge, call your office!

Update: Michelle Malkin looks at the Pappy Boyington Scholarship Fund at the University of Washington, which aimed at undergraduate students who are either children of Marine Corps vets or Marine vets themselves.

Does UW's "Student Senate" approve of this?

Speaking of folks for whom the Blogosphere has given voice, I spent yesterday polishing my profile of an upcoming book by an author you may have heard of. Given how much he's already written about eBay, I wonder if he's seen this Reuters piece, headlined, "Pentagon must adapt to eBay world: Rumsfeld".

While few in the New York Times would admit it, one of the great joys of blogging has been how many non-professional writers its given voice to. For those who wish to bone-up on their chops however, John Scalzi's "Whatever: Writing Tips for Non-Writers Who Don't Want to Work at Writing" is really well-worth reading (just to keep the alliteration flowing).

Like Scalzi himself, I have a tendency to violate rule #2 all the time--when I'm just letting it flow somewhat subconsciously, my writing frequently seems to follow the rule, the more nested parentheticals in a single sentence, the better.

But as with music, the better you know what the rules are, the better you can break them--if you know what you're doing in the first place.

Back in 2004 Jay Rosen got in on the ground floor of how President Bush and his administration are approaching the media--it's a very, very different "strategery" from past administrations, and an especially far cry from the deliberately insulting tactics of the Nixon White House--the first, beginning with Spiro Agnew's speeches, to point out the bias of the media. As Jay wrote in 2004:

[Ken Auletta of the New Yorker], for example, can describe Bush at a barbeque for the press in August, where a reporter says to the president: is it really true you don't read us, don't even watch the news? Bush confirms it.

And the reporter then said: Well, how do you then know, Mr. President, what the public is thinking? And Bush, without missing a beat said: You're making a powerful assumption, young man. You're assuming that you represent the public. I don't accept that.

Which is a powerful statement. And if Bush believes it (a possibility not to be dismissed) then we must credit the president with an original idea, or the germ of one. Bush's people have developed it into a thesis, which they explained to Auletta, who told it to co-host Brooke Gladstone:

That's his attitude. And when you ask the Bush people to explain that attitude, what they say is: We don't accept that you have a check and balance function. We think that you are in the game of "Gotcha." Oh, you're interested in headlines, and you're interested in conflict. You're not interested in having a serious discussion... and exploring things.

Further data point: The Bush Thesis. If Auletta's reporting is on, then Bush and his advisors have their own press think, which they are trying out as policy. Reporters do not represent the interests of a broader public. They aren't a pipeline to the people, because people see through the game of Gotcha. The press has forfeited, if it ever had, its quasi-official role in the checks and balances of government. Here the Bush Thesis is bold. It says: there is no such role-- official or otherwise.

In a new post, Jay fits in the Cheney hunting accident and the mammoth press overreach into his theory:

Read More »

The headline at the top of the Drudge Report this hour isn't going to make the left happy: "SHERIFF: CHENEY CASE CLOSED".

But then, as Jonah Goldberg wrote earlier today:

Today is the day where the serious Cheney story and the Cheneymentia story split off from each other. The serious story will start to die off as reasonable people move on to other things, while those unable to let go ramp-up the volume and get sillier and sillier. The question is: how many people go the Cheneymentia route? The more who do, the better it will be for Cheney.

Exactly. Somewhat surprisingly, blogger Confederate Yankee is on the case, "determined to be Cheney's Jim Garrison", Jonah notes.

As Betsy Newmark writes, "Underneath their Robes has a very disturbing picture up of Justice Roberts".

(Click at your own risk: the management of EdDriscoll.com, Pajamas Media, and the above named bloggers disavow all responsibility for the psychic health of all who dare view the Medusa.)

Another quasi-religious icon gets slandered; will the Southeast street join the already bitter Midwest street in seething, riotous anger?

The Wall Street Journal, James Q. Wilson examines the incredibly polarized America in the first decade of a new millenia, with a brief detour to look at life from both sides now:

As summed up by the distinguished social scientist who writes humor columns under the name of Dave Barry, residents of Red states are "ignorant racist fascist knuckle-dragging Nascar-obsessed cousin-marrying road-kill-eating tobacco-juice-dribbling gun-fondling religious fanatic rednecks," while Blue-state residents are "godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving leftwing Communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts."

That about covers it!

In light our comments earlier today about the media's role in L'affaire Cheney, this passage by Wilson is well worth exploring:

Not only are they themselves increasingly polarized, but consumers are well aware of it and act on that awareness. Fewer people now subscribe to newspapers or watch the network evening news. Although some of this decline may be explained by a preference for entertainment over news, some undoubtedly reflects the growing conviction that the mainstream press generally does not tell the truth, or at least not the whole truth.

In part, media bias feeds into, and off, an increase in business competition. In the 1950s, television news amounted to a brief 30-minute interlude in the day's programming, and not a very profitable one at that; for the rest of the time, the three networks supplied us with westerns and situation comedies. Today, television news is a vast, growing, and very profitable venture by the many broadcast and cable outlets that supply news twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

The news we get is not only more omnipresent, it is also more competitive and hence often more adversarial. When there were only three television networks, and radio stations were forbidden by the fairness doctrine from broadcasting controversial views, the media gravitated toward the middle of the ideological spectrum, where the large markets could be found. But now that technology has created cable news and the Internet, and now that the fairness doctrine has by and large been repealed, many media outlets find their markets at the ideological extremes.

Here is where the sharper antagonism among political leaders and their advisers and associates comes in. As one journalist has remarked about the change in his profession, "We don't deal in facts [any longer], but in attributed opinions." Or, these days, in unattributed opinions. And those opinions are more intensely rivalrous than was once the case.

The result is that, through commercial as well as ideological self-interest, the media contribute heavily to polarization. Broadcasters are eager for stories to fill their round-the-clock schedules, and at the same time reluctant to trust the government as a source for those stories. Many media outlets are clearly liberal in their orientation; with the arrival of Fox News and the growth of talk radio, many are now just as clearly conservative.

The evidence of liberal bias in the mainstream media is very strong. The Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) has been systematically studying television broadcasts for a quarter-century. In the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry received more favorable mentions than any presidential candidate in CMPA's history, especially during the month before election day. This is not new: since 1980 (and setting aside the recent advent of Fox News), the Democratic candidate has received more favorable mentions than the Republican candidate in every race except the 1988 contest between Michael Dukakis and George H. W. Bush. A similarly clear orientation characterizes weekly newsmagazines like Time and Newsweek.

For its part, talk radio is listened to by about one-sixth of the adult public, and that one-sixth is made up mostly of conservatives. National Public Radio has an audience of about the same size; it is disproportionately liberal. The same breakdown affects cable-television news, where the rivalry is between CNN (and MSNBC) and Fox News. Those who watch CNN are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans; the reverse is emphatically true of Fox. As for news and opinion on the Internet, which has become an important source for college graduates in particular, it, too, is largely polarized along political and ideological lines, emphasized even more by the culture that has grown up around news blogs.

At one time, our culture was only weakly affected by the media because news organizations had only a few points of access to us and were largely moderate and audience-maximizing enterprises. Today the media have many lines of access, and reflect both the maximization of controversy and the cultivation of niche markets. Once the media talked to us; now they shout at us.

Of course, as Technorati notes, nearly 28 million of us now have the option to shout back.

Update: Hey, here's entirely phony and Photoshopped proof that maybe Wilson is wrong about the media--it's always been partisan and divisive!

Like I said in the post below, it's not the 1972-era media anymore: the InstaDrPunditHelen Podcast has Senate Majority Leader (did you know he's a doctor?) Bill Frist discussing Avian Flu preparations in the US--which at the moment, apparently aren't much.

Like a number of other bloggers, I started using the joking "legacy media" epithet a few years ago; especially when they don't get how asynchronous news can be these days. When Marlon Brando died in 2004, there was an incredulous piece in the journalism house organ Editor & Publisher that many in the press were angered that a small TV news show scooped them on Brando's death:

What newspaper was first to report the unexpected death of actor Marlon Brando?

The winner, by a wide margin, appears to be the New York Post, if only in an unconfirmed manner.

In its Friday morning edition, on page 11, the Post printed a small story, with a picture of Brando from "The Godfather," under the headline: "Brando is dead: TV report." It cited a bulletin on the Web site of Phoenix-based KPHO-TV, of all places. The paper said police had not confirmed the death but claimed that relatives were gathering at the actor's Los Angeles home.

As I wrote back then in response:

Given the Internet, the Blogosphere and wall-to-wall cable TV, why the condescending tone that it wasn't AP/Reuters/UPI/NYT but a Phoenix-based TV station "of all places" that broke the story?

We saw a similar reaction a week ago, when Senator Durbin (D-IL) questioned the credentials of Paul Mirengoff, guest-blogging the Senate for Pajamas Media, as a way to stall for time and deflect Paul's questions.

Now, don't get me wrong: I can certainly understand not taking an advance interview request from someone--or a publication--you've never heard of, but once someone has a mic in your face, if what you say is of sufficient news--or if you're sufficiently newsworthy because of your status or title, it's going to disseminate rapidly enough. It doesn't really matter these days whether the news begins first on Fox, CNN, the New York Times, or via a blogger living in Podunk, Arkansas with a core base of 200 readers, but who stumbles onto a great story.

Besides their pure hatred of the man, one of the reasons why the media are so outraged over the Dick Cheney hunting incident is that he gave the story first to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times rather than immediately getting on his cell phone and dialing up Helen Thomas (who was an unintentional riot today) or Dana Milbank.

As Stephen Spruiell wrote yesterday:

Cheney and his friends, the Armstrongs, went through the local press because they did not trust the White House press corps to break the news in a professional and responsible manner. After all, would you trust this man with such a sensitive story? How about this guy?

And of course, they're even angrier that Cheney chose Fox News' Brit Hume to be interviewed first by, rather arranging would be a shouting match of a press conference or an Oprah weep-a-thon.

It's tough to watch your monopoly on the news end. Especially when you've got so much of your life and ego invested in playing who's on first: being first was a lot easier in the days of the 1972-era media than it is today.

Last May, I wrote:

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

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

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

Lawrence's veins sure sound like they're popping away in his recorded interview with Hugh Hewitt that's airing right now.

Update: Transcription online now.

James Taranto looks at those in high places and low who wish that 78 year old Harry Whittington would simply get it over with and die so that Vice President Cheney could possibly be charged with "a case of something like negligent homicide", as Andrew Sullivan wrote yesterday.

In Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue, a DVD that documents Miles Davis' performance at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, which was promoted as being the English equivalent of Woodstock, and ended up closer to the English equivalent of Altamont, Carlos Santana was videotaped in 2004 uttering this defense of the 1960s:

Isle of Wight was a pure result of consciousness-revolution music. “Hell no, we won’t go to Vietnam” and “we shall overcome”. The sixties—the late ‘60s, early ‘70s—was the most important decade of the 20th century.

Why?

Because it gave birth to questioning authority, particularly if it’s not enlightened by God. Are you listening, George Bush?

Setting aside whether President Bush is listening to God or Santana, blogger and clinical psychologist Robert Godwin, AKA "Gagdad Bob", has a great rebuttal of Carlos' psychedelic solipsism:

Virtually all modern ideologies, movements and philosophies are somehow aimed at addressing this problem of alienation, of recapturing the broken unity of the world. Communism, nazism, European fascism, the beat movement, the hippie movement, the free love movement, the enviornmental movement, the new age movement--all are futile attempts to turn back the clock and return to a mystical union with the "volk," with nature, with the proletariat, with the instincts. Even psychoanalysis did not escape these trends in the 1960's. Psychoanalytic gurus such as N.O. Brown (who thoroughly misunderstood Freud) taught that we could achieve a sort of sexual nirvana by eliminating repression and freely expressing our primitive instincts, with the implicit message that our primitive aspects are more "real" than the civilized parts. You can see this phenomena in today's leftists, who clearly long for the "magical" 1960's, which represented a high water mark for a resurgence of romantic merger with the group, free expression of the primitive, and idealized notions of recreating heaven on earth: "All you Need is Love," "Give Peace a Chance," "Sing a Simple Song of Freedom," etc. As the scientist E.O. Wilson put it in another context: Beautiful theory. Wrong species.

Heh--read the whole thing.

Flopping Aces has a great round-up of where the Dick Cheney story stands right now, and reminds the media that--believe it or not--it really isn't about them.

Update: From the home office in Crawford, Texas: "Top 11 Reasons for the 24 Hour Delay in Reporting Dick Cheney’s Hunting Accident".

The Pataki 2008 Express hits C-Span on Sunday. As John Podhoretz quips, "Vladimir Putin will be president of the United States before George Pataki is".

Update: Holy cow! Did Pataki actually once utter:"It is conceivable," George Pataki, declared in 2000 when he signed a hate-crimes bill into law, "that if this law had been in effect one hundred years ago, the greatest hate crime of all, the Holocaust, could have been avoided."Geez.

I've done a few pieces on Spacecraft Films (including two for Blogcritics and one for TCS Daily), which for the past four years have been archiving in DVD form the voluminous footage that NASA shot during their glory days in the 1960s and early 1970s. But I've never spoken to Mark Gray, the company's founder before today. It was (at least from my point of view) a terrific interview; look for this piece on dead tree in the coming months--I'll keep you posted.

(In the meantime, be sure to check out the links above if this is a subject that's at all of interest to you.)

But no tape, glue, or Julien French Fries alas: I have the cover story on video editing in the March issue of Videomaker magazine.

Meet "The Sonic Teenager Deterrent", Britain's new weapon against loitering youths:

Shopkeepers in central England have been trying out a new device that emits an uncomfortable high-pitched noise designed to disperse young loiterers outside their stores without bothering adults.

Police carrying out the pilot project in Staffordshire say some of those who have tested the "Sonic Teenager Deterrent," nicknamed the mosquito, have talked of buying one of their own.

The device which costs 622 pounds (908 euros, 1,081 dollars) "doesn't cause any pain to the hearer," according to Inspector Amanda Davies, quoted by Britain's domestic Press Association news agency.

"The noise can normally only be heard by those between 12 and 22 and it makes the listener feel uncomfortable," she added.

Once in their early 20s, people lose their capacity to hear sounds at such a high pitch.

"It is controlled by the shopkeepers. If they can see through their window that there is a problem, they turn the device on for a few minutes until the group has dispersed," Davies said.

"Shop owners have reported fabulous results and we've been approached by some who are considering buying their own equipment," she said.

Cool! Does it come in a convenient handheld size as well?

I can't seem to confirm it via Zillow, but Michael J. Totten assures me that there are still some areas where $150,000 can buy a very, very nice spread.

One drawback: Cash is preferred, as financing may be difficult to arrange at the moment in that location, Michael writes.

Talk about understatement: Victor Davis Hanson writes, "It should be a fascinating spring ahead":

Europe has no real defenses against a 9/11-like attack. They know it. So do the terrorists.

Crash an airliner into the dome of St. Peter’s or knock down the Eiffel Tower tomorrow: Europe has no mechanism to hunt down the perpetrators in the Hindu Kush, the Bekka Valley, or the wilds of Iran—much less, like the United States, to hold a rogue regime responsible.

Frustrated by its lack of military resources, but cognizant of the classical need to warn an enemy that more is to be lost than won from starting a war, France is reduced to bluster about nuclear weapons—threats that probably are either not believed or welcomed by the jihadists. In lieu of a credible military, Europe will send more tiny contingents to Afghanistan, remind the world that Britain and France are nuclear, and somehow hurry up to construct a conventional deterrent where there is now none at all.

Finally, the Europeans who despised the unilateral and preemptory George Bush will start to grate at his new multilateral side even more. Be careful what you wish for, especially when an American leader may now not necessarily be such an easy target of caricature—or may not always do the dirty work of fighting jihadists from Pakistan to the Sunni Triangle.

Instead, by letting the Europeans take the lead with the Iranian negotiations, and keeping nearly silent about the cartoon hysteria, the United States essentially has told the Europeans, “Here is the sort of restrained sober and judicious global diplomacy that you so welcome.”

Because of slated troop withdrawals from European bases, and a new American weariness with the old anti-Americanism, some Europeans are beginning to recoil at the idea that they might well be on their own—and in a war against fanatical enemies that they have appeased and without rational friends that they have estranged.

In response, we may see less of the anti-American rhetoric and a return to the Cold War slogans of a “strong Atlantic Alliance” and “an essential Nato,” as nuclear jihadists replace the fear of 300 Soviet divisions.

So now Europe is being thrust right into the middle of the so-called war against Islamic fascism. Once threatened, it will either react with a newly acquired Churchillian maturity to protect its civilization, or cave, in hopes that even more Chamberlain-type appeasement will satisfy the Islamists.

Europe has some tough choices to make; then again, as Lee Harris writes, so do we.

Finally, James Lileks looks at the next, inevitable turn the Cartoon Intafada has taken:

The Cartoon Crisis reaches its second phase: cartoons about the cartoon crisis are being criticized – as racist, naturally. The cartoonist made a clever point, Ithink: the match isn't on fire. It doesn't have to be.

Exactly--the match isn't the cause of the fire in this case, either.

Be seeing you! A couple of years ago, Reason magazine caused quite a stir, when it custom-printed copies of its June 2004 issue with each subscriber's name and a satellite photo of his or her immediate neighborhood on the cover.

This real estate-oriented online database goes it one better: the property value of every home in the US is either contained within it or soon will be.

You, your friend and your neighbors will have a field day with it.

Yesterday, we commented on how un-controversial Hollywood's "controversial" movies are. Here's a film that's most definitely the exception to the rule:

Sandi Dubowski, who won the Teddy gay and lesbian award in 2001 for his controversial doc "Trembling Before G-d," may cause an even bigger stir with "In the Name of Allah," which explores the struggles of homosexual Muslims.

Gay Indian Muslim helmer Parvez Sharma is directing the pic, which looks at gay, lesbian, and transgender Muslims across the Muslim and Western worlds.

"The world right now needs to understand Islam, and these are the most unlikely storytellers of Islam," Dubowski said, who is producing 'Allah.'

Doc will undoubtedly prove an even thornier film to export than "Trembling."

Sharma and Dubowski plan to submit the pic to all major festivals in the Muslim world as well as in the West, but if it's rejected, Dubowski said, "We'll find ways of screening it in every Muslim nation, even if it's underground."

In the Soviet Union, China, and other communist nations, the photocopier has proven to be one of the most powerful weapons imaginable. Sounds like the VCR and DVD player will be as well in the Middle East.

Last year, we noted the left's attacks on Christmas and even Halloween. (Can't offend those sensitive Wiccans!)

Yet another traditional holiday with origins in Christianity is falling under attack: appropriately for February 14th, Registan, Charles Johnson, and Tim Blair look at Islam's war against Valentine's Day.

The Libertas film blog is loaded for bear today, focusing on the Paramount-Al Gore connection, the first poster for Oliver--shudder--Stone’s World Trade Center, and Mickey Kaus's great take on Brokeback Mountain's "Bogus Breakout Meme", which something that I've been meaning to link to as well.

Last December, I looked at Nissan's decision to relocate their headquarters from Los Angeles to Nashville, and wrote:

Beyond Nissan--and the 79 other corporations that have decamped from L.A. alone since 2002, when a company as deeply associated with California as Fender Guitars relocates to neighboring Arizona, you know the state isn't exactly business-friendly. (Just ask my wife, who frequently intercedes on behalf of business owners.) These problems have accumulated over the several decades of California's exponentially growing hard left tilt, and can't be blamed entirely on Governor Schwarzenegger, but what is Arnold doing to help reduce them? Hiring a former aide to Gray "Rolling Blackouts" Davis as his new chief of staff.

Will the last person out of California please turn out the lights?

In a post titled, "Voting With Your Feet", Larry Kudlow writes that it's not just businesses who are relocating out of high-tax states:

In case you didn’t see it, Barron’s published a great story called,“Revolution on Wheels”. Basically it makes the point that taxes matter to folks in choosing where to live.

“Quietly, without banners or raised fists, they are packing up their families and belongings and moving from high tax states like California and New York to lower-tax locales like Florida, Nevada and Texas.”

Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder says over the past five years, 1.2 million people moved out of the ten highest taxed states, while an almost equal number, 1.3 million, moved into the low tax states. “It’s a stealth migration, and it’s one of the biggest, most significant yet least recognized movements of the population in American history,” says Vedder. “People are voting with their feet to say that taxes do matter.”

This trend has been going on for a long time. It has been chronicled by Art Laffer, Victor Canto, Steve Moore as well as Richard Vedder. Among the lowest taxed states are New Hampshire, Delaware, Tennessee, Alabama, both Dakotas, Florida, Texas and Missouri. Among the highest taxed states are Maine, New York, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Vermont, Ohio, Nebraska and Utah, as well as Washington D.C. New York and New Jersey have huge tax bites on estates.

This is why our New York State Tax Reform Commission proposed a “five percent solution” for personal and corporate income taxes, with elimination of taxes on capital gains, estates and dividends. We noted that whether regionally, nationally or internationally, smart money and smart people move to where the tax and business environment is most hospitable.

Which is just common sense--but then that's something that's long been lacking in Sacramento.

The Photoshop-savvy experts in the Farkosphere weigh in on the Great Cartoon Crisis of 2006.

(Title inspired by Tim Blair.)

Update: More equally offensive cartoons here; meanwhile, Eugene Volokh puts it all into perspective:

So I guess it's not just that we aren't supposed to draw pictures of Mohammed as terrorist, or of Mohammed at all; we aren't even supposed to draw pictures that are obviously not of Mohammed, and that are meant to mock the inability to draw pictures of Mohammed.

Well, I have to admit: The folks who are offended by this have a First Amendment right to be offended. They should feel entirely free to be offended.

The rest of us should feel entirely free, as a matter of civility as well as of law, to say: Your decision to be offended by this particular cartoon gives you no rights (again, as a matter of civility as well as of law) to tell us to stop printing it.

More on the underlying conceptual issue — the difficult but necessary distinction between (more or less) reasonable taking of offense and unreasonable taking of offense — later; I also hope then to talk in some measure about the distinction between this cartoon and others that I do think can reasonably be found to be offensive, and that probably shouldn't (as a matter of civility) have been published in the first instance, though it is proper to publish them now in order to explain the controversy. For now, it seems to me that this incident does plenty to illustrate the danger of the "it's wrong to publish any cartoons that offend people" attitude.

As I wrote last year, big media isn't going to like the how this trend plays out if the folks driving it get their way.

As Jim Geragthy writes:

Notwithstanding the fine efforts of my colleagues and others, I’ve grown a bit tired of diagnosing liberal bias in the media. The media is what it is. Clearly they don't care if conservatives find 20 factual errors, omissions, half-truths and unfair slants a day; if they did care, they would try to fix these mistakes. (And they wouldn't dress like this.) But in this story, the media (with notable exceptions) has proven itself to be worse than useless in covering the news; they have made an effort to make these cartoons seem unimaginably, unprintably taboo (instead of letting readers decide this for themselves) and they have covered up the degree to which threats and intimidation are repressing free discussion of ideas in non-Muslim countries. That is the story.

Exactly.

Mary Katharine Ham writes that 78-year-old Harry Whittington, Vice President Cheney's hunting partner, suffered a minor heart attack today:

It was what they call an asymptomatic heart attack, meaning he suffered no, um, symptoms. No chest pain, no arm pain. He's conscious and talking to folks.

Good to hear.

Update: Was Paul Begala's appearance on CNN where he dressed up as another Floyd R. Turbo/Dana Milbank clone recorded today? Was it recorded after news broke of Whittington's heart attack? Truly classy stuff, by both Begala and CNN (who allowed him to go on the air in that getup), regardless.

Another Update: Ian Schwartz responds, in the same post linked to above:

Indeed it was. Begala appeared on CNN’s The Situation Room in the 4pm hour. This, of course, was hours after the minor heart attack was announced.

Lovely.

UCLA Professor Stephen Bainbridge has an interesting take, over at TCS Daily.

Frank J. examines the long, protracted war, pronounces it unwinnable, and calls for an immediate cease fire.

When I was in Washington DC in November for Pajamas Media, I met William Beutler, author of the National Journal's "Blogometer", their daily round-up of the Blogosphere. He asked about doing a profile of me for the site; after haggling over a six-figure sum, and finally cashing my check, it's online today.

The Anchoress examines NBC's politically correct coverage of the Winter Olympics, live from Turin, err--gag!-- Tur---eeee---no.

I watched a little bit of the women's snowboarding on the TV at the sushi bar while Nina and I were having dinner tonight. It's a litle strange to see that sport make it to the Olympics: I remember when it grew out of skateboarding in the late 1970s--now it's an Olympic sport?

If I were Tony Hawk or Tony Alva, I'd be shaking my fist at a TV.

The Manolo, he has the proof of the positive that it's possible to come back from the grave--if only to get your own CNN talkshow.

In his cover story in National Review this week, Mark Steyn looked at how worn-out Hollywood's subject matter is, even though the people who produce it (such as George Clooney) think they're on the cutting edge:

Hollywood prefers to make “controversial” films about controversies that are settled, rousing itself to fight battles long won. Go back to USA Today’s approving list of Hollywood’s willingness to “broach the tough issues”: “Brokeback and Capote for their portrayal of gay characters; Crash for its examination of racial tension . . .” That might have been “bold” “courageous” movie-making half-a-century ago. Ever seen the Dirk Bogarde film Victim? He plays a respectable married barrister whose latest case threatens to expose his homosexuality. That was 1961, when homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom and Bogarde was the British movie industry’s matinee idol and every schoolgirl’s pinup: That’s brave. Doing it at a time when your typical conservative politician gets denounced as “homophobic” because he’s only in favor of civil unions is just an exercise in moral self-congratulation. And, unlike the media, most of the American people are savvy enough to conclude that by definition that doesn’t require their participation.

Modern architecture went through a similar reactionary phase in the 1960s, as its leaders died off as elderly men one after the other during the decade: First Frank Lloyd Wright, then Corbusier, then in 1969 first Gropius, and then Mies. But in their final years, these men, once pioneers, were frequently living off past designs. In 1966, Robert Venturi wrote Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in which they pointed out that Mies van Der Rohe's architecture was little changed from projects he envisioned in the late 1920s. In other words, what called itself "modern architecture" was based on concepts that were forty years old--or more.

Modern art is going through a similar phase--only its concepts are even older, and much more reactionary. Modern architecture, especially as it advanced beyond its very early days in the 1910s and early twenties, was rarely designed to shock, unlike so much of today's modern art. On Saturday, I wrote:

Leftwing artists specialized in Epater Les Bourgeois for much of the 19th and 20th century to the point where everyone who could possibly be disgusted is now barely able to simulate the aura of the penumbra of amusement.

No doubt, Giuseppe Veneziano, the Italian artist who painted "Oriana Fallaci Beheaded" thought he was making a wild gesture that really epaters those bourgeois! But instead, it's the same old stuff; we've seen it a million times before.

Of course, to paraphrase something Glenn Reynolds wrote about Kanye West recently, if Veneziano had balls, he'd paint a portrait of Mohammed beheaded, instead of Fallaci. (Don't write--I'm being facetious. I don't want to see paintings of anybody beheaded.) But hey, who wants to end up like Theo Van Gogh? Nobody wants to suffer for their art that much, right?

And besides, that would run the risk of actually agreeing with Fallaci. And that's not going to happen anytime soon.

Update: Michelle Malkin has some thoughts as well.

I normally agree with Jim Geraghty. But when Jim writes, "Seriously, if the Vice President could go on Oprah with his hunting buddy, I would recommend it", all I can do is shake my head and ask why.

If Cheney were planning to run for the president himself in 2008, I'd agree completely. But by all accounts, Cheney is as much of a lame duck as President Bush is. Bush and Cheney's supporters aren't going to abandon either man over this. And for those who think that both men are the Anti-Christ, nothing Cheney could do would alter their opinion that he strangles puppies for fun and eats kittens for breakfast.

And the middle? They only barely follow politics, and then only during the last couple of months before elections. To the extent that Cheney's misfire impacts other Republicans, this gaffe will be old news--or little more than rehashed Letterman riffs--come November in 2006, and especially in 2008.

In-between bumper music that consists of Junior Walker's classic Motown tune "Shotgun", Hugh Hewitt is currently playing just the questions asked by journalists of President Bush's press secretary Scott McClellan one after the other, and they demonstrate the White House press corps' incredible narcissism. As Mark Levin wrote:

The vice president accidentally shot a hunting companion with buck-shot over the weekend. He is in "very stable condition." The media were not notified for some time. And we're all supposed to be worked up about that? Cheney spent much of the weekend with his injured friend. He was very apologetic. So, he didn't run to the media to issue a statement of some kind and the media didn't find out until later. Who cares? I don't. It's not as if there's some cover-up, or need for a cover-up. The local sheriff's office has investigated and concluded it was an accident — which, of course, it was. And don't give me "the public's right to know." Not from this media — which still refuses to publish those Danish cartoons. I'll leave it to others to split hairs about who knew what and when, as I know they will, but I just don't care.

Stephen Spruiell of NRO's Media Blog has a transcript of NBC's David Gregory morphing into the Incredible Hulk:

Why was the White House relying on a Texas rancher to get the word of Cheney's hunting accident out over the weekend, asked Gregory, accusing McClellan of "ducking and weaving.''

"David, hold on… the cameras aren't on right now,'' McClellan replied. "You can do this later.''

"Don't accuse me of trying to pose to the cameras,'' the newsman said, his voice rising somewhat. "Don’t be a jerk to me personally when I’m asking you a serious question.''

"You don't have to yell,'' McClellan said.

"I will yell,'' said Gregory, pointing a finger at McClellan at his dais. "If you want to use that podium to try to take shots at me personally, which I don’t appreciate, then I will raise my voice, because that’s wrong."

"Calm down, Dave, calm down,'' said McClellan, remaining calm throughout the exchange.

"I'll calm down when I feel like calming down,'' Gregory said. "You answer the question.'

"I have answered the question,'' said McClellan, who had maintained that the vice president's office was in charge of getting the information out and worked with the ranch owner to do that. "I'm sorry you're getting all riled up about.''

"I am riled up,'' Gregory said, "because you’re not answering the question,''

McClellan insisted he understood that reporters deserve an answer.

"I think you have legitimate questions to ask,'' the press secretary said. "The vice president’s office was the one that took the lead to get this information out… I don’t know what else to tell you... That's my answer.''

As Spruiell writes, Don't make David Gregory angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry...

Update: Ian Schwartz has video of the press's freak-out today, and John Hinderaker has a very plausible explanation of what caused it:

The press corps' over-the-top reaction to this event reflects two things, I think: the reporters' detestation of the administration, and their ignorance of firearms. If Cheney had been trout fishing and a companion had walked behind him as he started to cast, so that he inadvertently snagged his friend, resulting in a hospital visit, would we have seen this kind of frenzy? I don't think so. I think we're seeing, among other things, the press corps' innate ignorance of, and hostility to, firearms coming through.

Keep ingratiating yourself with the red states, boys!

Another Update: Hey, if you're going to go nuts--why not go all the way and go nuts on national TV, as the Washington Post's Dana Milbank does, channeling Johnny Carson's old Floyd R. Turbo character.

Yesterday evening, Duane Patterson, Hugh Hewitt's producer, asked what became today an obviously rhetorical question:

All the jokes that are coming are certainly understandable, fair game, and several will probably be quite funny. That's fine. But will the Democrats, especially the ones that reside in the fever swamp, be able to keep themselves from overplaying their hand?

Dana Milbank and David Gregory made the answer to that question even easier than it first appeared.

Well, hey, me too Linus! It's really a strange world, when Cracked magazine has more guts than just about every big city newspaper, isn't it?

Heretofore this weekend, I haven't covered the Great Cartoon Crisis of 2006, but here's a whirlwind tour of the action. Charles Johnson spots French retailer Carrefour advertising the removal of Danish products from their shelves, all the while denying that they're removing Danish products from their shelves. (Duplicitous French...grocers?)

Elsewhere, Michelle Malkin links to video of two staggeringly brave Protest Warrior-style counter-demonstrators flying the Danish flag in the midst of a babillian Muslims marching in Paris. (Note the "You--The Homosexuals!!!" epithet shouted by one fellow when he spots the two counter-protestors, which The Anchoress also spotted. As in the case of the Soviet Union, the western left are supporting an ideology that bans the very freedoms tolerated in Europe and America.)

Which is something that Michael Kinsey picks up on:

“The bewildered prime minister of Denmark, trying to calm the whirlwind that has descended on his innocent, unsuspecting country, gets it spectacularly wrong when he reassures disgruntled Muslims that Denmark supports "freedom of religion" and is "one of the world's most tolerant and open societies." Tolerance, openness, and freedom of religion are not what they have in mind. A lively debate is going on about whether Islam really does forbid any portrayal of the prophet, however benign, or whether that is a recent innovation of some subset of the faithful with possible ulterior motives. This debate misses the point. Some Christians believe they are required to wear particular sorts of clothing. Some Jews and Muslims don't eat pork. They don't claim that their religion requires other people to wear special clothing or avoid eating pork. Tolerance and ecumenism can only do so much. They have nothing to offer a Muslim in Afghanistan who is personally insulted and enraged about an image that appears in a newspaper in Denmark."

As Andrew Stuttaford remarks, "Michael Kinsey nails it. Yes, really."

Or as Glenn Reynolds writes, "Like race riots in the early 20th Century, this is a case of ignorant yahoos being exploited by elites in order to protect the elites' power against civilizing influences."

Update: Via Betsy Newmark, Theodore Dalrymple has some thoughts on last year's Clash of Civilizations, or as we once dubbed it, the Great Burning Citroen Crisis of 2005.

Another Update: Tammy Bruce writes that Sweden is the first western nation to censor The Cartoons That Dare Not Be Shown:

In an absolutely outrageous decision for any democratic Western country, the government of Sweden has shut down a website that was showing the Mohammad cartoons.

Sweden views itself, as leftist governments usually do, as progressive, tolerant, and flame-holders for personal liberty. With this act, they expose the ultimate nature of socialism and leftists--the willingness to smash freedom of expression and personal liberty in the name of 'security.'

While Sweden is the first Western nation to officially censor (Islamic nations have done so, but fascism and Islamic theocracies go hand in hand), let us hope it is the last. But this does not bode well when it comes to whether or not the West has the wherewithall to stand up for itself and its values. What could crush western European values now is the same thing that crushed it in the first half of the last century--when leftist socialism infects government, fascism is not far behind. Fascist control of media is the first act, always in the name of 'safety' or 'for the best of everyone,' or to ostensibly maintain 'social control.'

Swedes everywhere should be appalled and up in arms. So far, though, we've heard virtually nothing from the people of that 'progressive' country as it essentially abandons its neighbors Denmark and Norway, and the basic tenets and values that keep the Western world free.

The values of freedom are lovely and nice when one does not have to defend them.When we are challenged is when we find out who we really are. The Germans learned what was at their core in the last century. Sweden, are you to be the first Western nation in the 21st century to surrender to fascism?

As the well-known aphorism (usually credited to Jean-Francois Revel) goes, fascism is always descending on the United States, but somehow it always does seems to land on Europe.

Brietbart/AP is reporting that Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally sprayed a 78-year old Texas attorney with shotgun pellets during a man during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas". Fortunately he's "alert and doing fine" at a neaby hospital.

Cue the riffs from A Christmas Story: as Jonah Goldberg writes, "Get ready for an avalanche of nasty jokes and comments". At a minimum, Letterman and Leno's monologues for the week just wrote themselves.

Update: "In the interest of fairness", Tim of Hyscience writes, "and before anti-gun opportunists begin their campain of misinformation, let's not forget the 11th hour desperation photo op by former presidential candidate John Kerry".

Indeed.

Update: Here we go! (To tell the truth, some of these are actually pretty funny.)

Another Update: Is Cafe Press publicly held? It might be time to buy stock.

The supergroup you've been waiting for:The Beatles and the Monkees performing "Paperback Believer"!

Only days after I read about the new German-produced film about Sophie Scholl and the Nazi-era White Rose resistance movement, do I find a page on the Internet Movie Database that Hollywood is about to start shooting an English language version of her life starring that supreme thespian...Christina Ricci (who turns 26 today, incidentally), directed by Angelica Houston(!) and written by first-timer Allegra Huston, Anjelica's sister. Of course, the IMDB frequently lists films that are planned, and for whatever reason never actually begin production; so take their listing with a big grain of a salt.

While Christina is the right age to play Scholl (and can probably be made up to resemble her), it's worth remembering what Frederica Mathewes-Green had to say last year about the lack of gravitas of modern Hollywood actors.

But there may be some good that comes out of this film, if it's made: watching the staggering moral equivalence of the film's cast, crew and critics, as they succumb to the inevitable Bush=Hitler riffs (as this site, and Sid Blumenthal have done) and compare our involvement in Iraq to the hellish battle in Stalingrad, which killed nearly 800,000 Russian troops and civilians, and an approximately equal number of Germans and their allies.

But let me make the safest bet possible: that this film isn't going to be the second coming of Downfall, or The Diary of Anne Frank.

It's always kept you up--but now it lets you sleep! A blog named Achieve-IT! explains "How to Take A Caffeine Nap".

(Via Discarded Lies.)

It may be a blog called Rightwing Nuthouse, but it makes a great point about Ann Coulter:

The most unpredictable mouth in America has once again proved that idiocy is not a mental state confined to the left wing in American politics. Calling Arabs “ragheads” while joking about her “ethical dilemma” regarding whether or not to kill Bill Clinton when she had the chance is simply the latest in a very long line of over the top – some would say out of control – thoughts that have spewed forth from her brilliant, eccentric mind.

In the end, this is Coulter’s dilemma. And the great trap she has set for herself as she has climbed the ladder of success to achieve fame and fortune. In this celebrity, media soaked age where the ravenous appetites of the news nets, “lifestyle” shows, and political talk radio are constantly demanding more and more controversy, more and more outrageous personalities to fill the time and attract more audience, the danger for any one personality like Coulter is that yesterday’s jaw droppers and head shakers can’t be repeated. She must come up with entirely new derogatory sobriquets to call her political opponents and ever more outrageous metaphors to describe her political pet peeves. By definition, she must go “over the top” on nearly a daily basis.

This way lies madness. Once people like Coulter start down this road it can only end in one way; you become a caricature of yourself. The barbs that once zinged your opponents with razor sharp wit causing even your political enemies to chuckle will lose their edge and end up as simple, hurtful, name calling more akin to playground epithets and hardly worthy of approbation except by your most rabid fans.

Hence, jokes about Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades morph into daydreaming about assassinating a President. And spot on, uproariously funny critiques of racialsm and the stupidity of identity politics segues easily into ethnic slurs. She has little choice if she wishes to remain atop the rickety pyramid of notorious celebrity she has carved out for herself. To do less would disappoint her numerous acolytes whose immaturity allows for giving her standing ovations when she casually refers to Arabs in a politically incorrect way.

As I wrote about another woman with a penchant for shock, this was the trap that Madonna fell into, with predictable results: after she deployed the nuclear option with her Sex book, her career has never been the same. See also, O'Connor, Sinead.

Leftwing artists specialized in Epater Les Bourgeois for much of the 19th and 20th century to the point where everyone who could possibly be disgusted is now barely able to simulate the aura of the penumbra of amusement. In her attempt to Epater Les Left, Ann sounds like she's heading into similar, numbing territory.

As Patterico notes, at least when it comes to the newspaper world, it's Greg Packer's world, we're just living in it.

(Via Mickey Kaus.)

In the latest "dead tree" issue of National Review (available online, but subscription required) Mark Steyn has a superb piece that examines just how badly Hollywood's needle is stuck in the grooves of an ancient 45--maybe 78:

“I’m an old-time liberal and I don’t apologize for it,” Clooney told Newsweek.

Good for him. And certainly, regardless of how liberal he is, he’s undeniably “old-time.” I don’t mean in the sense that he has the gloss of an old-time movie star, the nearest our age comes to the sheen of Cary Grant in a Stanley Donen picture, but that his politics are blessedly undisturbed by any developments on the global scene since circa 1974. Clooney’s other Oscar movie, Syriana, in which he stars and exec-produces, reveals that behind a murky Middle East conspiracy lies . . . the CIA and Big Oil! In Good Night, and Good Luck, he’s produced a film set in the McCarthy era that could have been made in the Jimmy Carter era. That’s to say, it takes into account absolutely nothing that has come to light in the last quarter-century — not least the relevant KGB files on Soviet penetration of America. To take one example that could stand for Clooney’s entire approach to the subject, Good Night includes shocking scenes of Senator McCarthy accusing Annie Lee Moss, who worked in a highly sensitive decoding job in the Pentagon, of being a Communist, and the heroic Edward R. Murrow then denouncing McCarthy’s behavior.

But we now know, from the party’s own files, that Miss Moss was, indeed, a Communist. What should we conclude from the absence of this detail in the picture? That Clooney, who goes around boasting that every moment in the screenplay has been “double-sourced” for accuracy, simply doesn’t know she’s a Commie? Or that he does know but thinks it’s harmless? That she, like he and Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, is merely exercising her all-American “right to dissent,” in her case in the Pentagon Signal Corps’ code room? If so, that’s a subtly different argument than Murrow was making: It’s one thing to argue that it’s all a paranoid fantasy on the part of obsessed Red-baiters, quite another to shrug, hey, sure they were Commies, but what’s the big deal?

Or is it that Clooney doesn’t care either way? That what matters is the “meta-narrative” — the journalist as hero, “speaking truth to power,” no matter if the journalist is wrong and wields more power than most politicians. Even if one discounts the awkward fact that these days CBS News is better known for speaking twaddle to power — over the fake National Guard memos to which Dan Rather remains so attached — the reality is that the idea of the big media crusader simply doesn’t resonate with any section of the American public other than the big media themselves. Indeed, if you wanted to create a film designed to elicit rave reviews from the critics, you could hardly do better than a McCarthy-era story built around a Watergate-style heroic reporter, unless you made the reporter gay. The media seem to have fallen for it, with the splendid exception of Armond White in the New York Press who said Clooney was far more hagiographic of his subject than Mel Gibson was in The Passion of the Christ.

This is the Platonic reductio of political art. Say what you like about those Hollywood guys in the Thirties but they were serious about their leftism. Say what you like about those Hollywood guys in the Seventies but they were serious about their outrage at what was done to the lefties in the McCarthy era — though they might have been better directing their anger at the movie-industry muscle that enforced the blacklist. By comparison, Clooney’s is no more than a pose — he’s acting at activism, new Hollywood mimicking old Hollywood’s robust defense of even older Hollywood. He’s more taken by the idea of “speaking truth to power” than by the footling question of whether the truth he’s speaking to power is actually true.

That’s why Hollywood prefers to make “controversial” films about controversies that are settled, rousing itself to fight battles long won. Go back to USA Today’s approving list of Hollywood’s willingness to “broach the tough issues”: “Brokeback and Capote for their portrayal of gay characters; Crash for its examination of racial tension . . .” That might have been “bold” “courageous” movie-making half-a-century ago. Ever seen the Dirk Bogarde film Victim? He plays a respectable married barrister whose latest case threatens to expose his homosexuality. That was 1961, when homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom and Bogarde was the British movie industry’s matinee idol and every schoolgirl’s pinup: That’s brave. Doing it at a time when your typical conservative politician gets denounced as “homophobic” because he’s only in favor of civil unions is just an exercise in moral self-congratulation. And, unlike the media, most of the American people are savvy enough to conclude that by definition that doesn’t require their participation.

So savvy that, as World magazine recently noted, the five Academy Award best picture nominees "reached a combined U.S. box-office total of just over half of what 2005's top-grossing film, Star Wars [Revenge of the Sith], raked in. None of them makes it into the top-40 grossing films of the year".

Norma Desmond didn't know the half of it: not only did the pictures get small--so did the audience.

I picked up a copy of Ann Coulter's How To Talk To A Liberal at an airport newsstand to kill time on a flight last fall; while it probably wouldn't surprise you to read that I concurred with some her ideas, actually reading her book was tough sledding. Unlike say, the beautiful prose of Mark Steyn or James Lileks, she invariably uses H-bombs where a flyswatter would do the job nicely. So sadly, I'm not at all surprised that she used language like this today, while speaking at CPAC:

“Rag-head talks tough, rag-head faces thunderous consequences.”

As Sean Hackbarth writes, "Ann, Thanks for Nothing".

Shapes Of Days, via North American Patriot, puts it succinctly: "Do you ever just wanna say to someone, 'get off my side'?"

After touring the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, Dr. Helen asks a great question:

Why do so many of the left tout Nazism as a creation of the right when there were so many traits of the left embedded in it's theology?

As I wrote a year ago:

I'm one of those folks who view both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as twin creatures of the totalitarian left. (See this article for a sense of closely the two ideologies are intertwined.) I view the political spectrum, as it proceeds from left to right, as going from totalitarianism to moderate liberalism (which in this case, I'm defining in the broadest sense of the word, running from JFK to Reagan), to libertarianism, to, finally, anarchy. As this biography of Friedrich (no relation to Salma) Hayek says:

English intellectuals--promoters of central planning--claimed socialism was the opposite of Nazism, but Hayek insisted that socialism, communism and Nazism were part of the same collectivist trend which had gathered momentum during the 20th century.

[UPDATE 8/13/05: John Lukacs' The Hitler of History also explores these connections in detail.]

So how did Nazism come to be an ad hominem attack on the right? Jonah Goldberg, probably based on research he's been doing for his upcoming book, recently wrote:

The classic Marxist definition of fascism, put forward in 1935 by Georgi Dimitroff, holds that fascism is "the open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital." This notion that the Nazis were the fighting brigade of the rich and powerful has had a remarkable shelf life. The only problem, as countless scholars have demonstrated over the years, is that this isn't true. Nazism was a popular movement that crossed all class and regional lines in Germany. Hitler was hardly a tool of the rich, and to the extent he was helped by a few wealthy individuals, the fact remains that the Nazis achieved their electoral success by portraying themselves as defenders of the little guy and of national pride.

It's no coincidence that several elements of Nazism--not the least of which were the eugenics programs that ultimately led to the Holocaust--flowed directly from the preceding and very socially liberal, Weimar Republic. The Nazis simply dialed up the amps on those ideas to 11--and then some.

And while German National Socialism and Italian Fascism weren't identical ideologies, it's worth revisiting David Ramsay Steele's "The Mystery of Fascism", which begins with 18 year old Benito Mussolini moving to Switzerland in 1902 "starving and penniless. All he had in his pockets was a cheap nickel medallion of Karl Marx", and eventually, being supplied plans of May Day parades by Stalin, "to help him polish up his Fascist pageants".

It's also worth revisiting the very interesting portrait that Edward Feser painted of an ideal candidate in election year 2004:

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It's been a while since I've linked to Andrew Sullivan, but I think he's got a great observation here, regarding journalism's role in the Great Cartoon Crisis of 2006:

It's fascinating, isn't it, how this war has so often come down to what we are and are not allowed to see. We were not allowed to see (for long) the video deaths of those who jumped out of the World Trade Center. We were not allowed to see the coffins of soldiers arriving back in the U.S. We are still not allowed to see the most revealing photographs of what really happened at Abu Ghraib (the case is still tied up in appeals). We were not allowed to see the beheading of Nick Berg. And now we are not allowed to see the cartoons that are being used by Islamists for another round of violent intimidation of free societies.

And then, of course, there is what makes this war different. The web has made it possible to see almost all of this, if you look hard enough. Only the government-withheld Abu Ghraib pics are actually out of view for most people - and, even then, some have been kept back by editors, who see their job as preventing the flow of information, rather than enabling it. And so we have two media now in the world. We have the mainstream media whose job is increasingly not actually to disseminate information but to act as a moral steward, to become an arbiter of sensitivity and good taste. And it's up to places like Wikipedia or the blogosphere to disseminate actual facts, images and informed opinions. Obviously, I don't see the need to publish everything. And editorial judgment counts. But we are approaching a time when the MSM may have that as precisely its role - not as a source of information, but as an arbiter of social etiquette and good judgment. The NYT as Miss Manners.

But that's actually nothing new. When Tom Wolfe wrote The Right Stuff, he described newspapers, collectively, as the Proper Victorian Gentleman. He saw firsthand how much news is withheld from readers, in an effort to be, as Sullivan writes, arbiters of "social etiquette and good judgment", as this response to a 1980 interview with Rolling Stone's Chet Flippo indicates:

I’ll never forget working on the [New York] Herald Tribune the afternoon of John Kennedy’s death. I was sent out along with a lot of other people to do man-on-the-street reactions. I started talking to some men who were just hanging out, who turned out to be Italian, and they already had it figured out that Kennedy had been killed by the Tongs, and then I realized that they were feeling hostile to the Chinese because the Chinese had begun to bust out of Chinatown and move into Little Italy. And the Chinese thought the mafia had done it, and the Ukrainians thought the Puerto Ricans had done it. And the Puerto Ricans thought the Jews had done it. Everybody had picked out a scapegoat. I came back to the Herald Tribune and I typed up my stuff and turned it in to the rewrite desk. Late in the day they assigned me to do the rewrite of the man-on-the-street story. So I looked through this pile of material, and mine was missing. I figured there was some kind of mistake. I had my notes, so I typed it back into the story. The next day I picked up the Herald Tribune and it was gone, all my material was gone. In fact there’s nothing in there except little old ladies collapsing in front of St. Patrick’s. Then I realized that, without anybody establishing a policy, one and all had decided that this was the proper moral tone for the president’s assassination. It was to be grief, horror, confusion, shock and sadness, but it was not supposed to be the occasion for any petty bickering. The press assumed the moral tone of a Victorian gentleman.

Mark Steyn explored this phenomenon as well, in his obituary of Katharine Graham, longtime publisher of the Washington Post:

Her formula for her publications was succinctly expressed: "Mass With Class" -- "perhaps the best three-word definition for what a good news magazine should be," wrote Mark Whitaker in Newsweek. But what "Mass With Class" boils down to in practice is the genteel middlebrow conformity that makes so much of the mainstream U.S. media such a world-class yawnfest. "Mass With Class" means you don't ask Hillary Clinton about her husband's perjury and trashing of his, ahem, female acquaintances but only whether she finds it difficult coping with the accusations and if she thinks this is because conservatives have a difficult time dealing with her as a strong intelligent woman in her own right. "Mass With Class" means Dan Rather piously declaring that the Chandra Levy story is too unseemly for the CBS Evening News, no matter that it involves a Congressman obstructing a police investigation.

"Mass With Class" equals "All the news that's fit to print" and it's never more protective than when giving the mass a glimpse of the class. Thus, Mrs. Graham's death clippings tell us more in their oleaginous uniformity about the relationship between journalism and politics than the heroics of Woodward and Bernstein ever did. The mourners at her funeral "read like a Who's Who," albeit a somewhat obvious one: Alan Greenspan, Bill Gates, Oscar de la Renta, John McCain, Tina Brown. I shall refrain from disparaging the guest list any further as our own power couple, Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel, were also among those present. But the cosiness of this world is American journalism's principal problem: There is "us" and there is "them," the "class" and the "mass," and the media have long since decided which side of the fence they belong on.

It may be that one of the reasons why the press hates the Blogosphere is not just that they've lost control over the flow of information, but that they've also lost control over the tone of public discourse.

This isn't to say that I'm happy to see the proper "social etiquette and good judgment" that Sullivan describes disappear from public discourse. (Though I'd argue that it disappeared long before blogs, as anybody who in the mid-1980s watched CNN's Crossfire or The Morton Downey Jr. Show saw: both shows were little more than pro-wrestling without the body slams or sexy girls holding the round cards.) But I'll happily take unfiltered information and opinion, via blogs whose tones I am comfortable with, than have it bottlenecked by self-imposed "Mass With Class" Victorian Gents.

Update: To easily see the Victorian Gentlemanly style in action, pick up a copy of a paper like the San Francisco Chronicle. (Or scroll through their Website of course, but it's even more obvious "on dead tree".) Read their coverage, of say, the protests outside the gates of San Quentin during Tookie Williams' execution. Then peruse the photos of the same event at Zombietime.

Another Update: Welcome Lucianne.com, InstaPundit and SteynOnline readers! Please look around; we're sure there's lots of material here you'll enjoy.

Ever since the right side of the Blogosphere pointed out Google's capitulation to Chinese censors, and their inability to celebrate traditional Western holidays such as Christmas and Easter on their splash page, they were due to fight back.

Once a search engine with a seemingly neutral appearance, Google drops the mask and demonstrates its bias, taking a potshot at Michelle Malkin.

The Anchoress has further thoughts:

And there is a vaguely insinuation that the blogosphere is hypocritical.

I wonder if Google is having any second thoughts over its purchase of Blogger back in 2003.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey reminds us that when it comes to kowtowing to China, Yahoo are no saints, either: "Freedom's Just Another Word At Yahoo".

Update: Much more from Business Week:

Google has a Washington problem. Since it started hiring for its public policy team last year, the Web giant hasn't snagged a single high-profile Republican. Indeed, Washington's GOP ruling elite isn't giving Google the time of day.

The Republicans can't seem to forgive what they see as Google's leftward tilt. In the 2004 federal election cycle, 99% of Google (GOOG ) employees' campaign contributions went to Democrats. For its first lobbyist, the company last May hired Alan Davidson, a Democrat and former privacy policy wonk at the Center for Democracy & Technology think tank.

And now Google has taken positions on two issues that rankle many on the Right: rebuffing U.S. government subpoenas to measure how many Google searches are related to pornography, while bowing to the censorship demands leveled by China's communist government as the price of doing business in that country. "It sends a signal that the company doesn't know who its friends are," says a GOP lobbyist.

Or that it's willing to make enemies of people who were once its staunchest supporters.

Update: Want a good reason to switch your blog from Google's Blogger software to Movable Type or Typepad? Google is now placing "CONTENT WARNING" pages in front of blogs it doesn't approve of. I'm not sure how wise a decision that is--I'll leave that to the lawyers who blog--but as Gates of Vienna writes, "Somehow, I think that other webpage designers are going to find themselves with new customers".

I was about to link to my annual "the Grammy's ratings are the lowest ever, and here's what it means post", but Hugh Hewitt and Mark Steyn presented a unique twist on the story this afternoon:

HH: I want to close on a lighter note. Last night, American Idol outperformed in the ratings the Grammy's. The lesson to be drawn from this cultural first, Mark Steyn?

MS: Well, I think in a sense, that's the...anyone can be a celebrity now. That's the great...you know, Noel Coward said years ago that television is for being on, not looking at. And that was fine when you were Noel Coward, and the ordinary people...Ella Fitzgerald or Bob Hope, and the ordinary people watched you. Now, you don't have Bob Hopes and Ella Fitzgeralds and Noel Cowards, and the ordinary person has rightly figured out that he can be as good as them. And those ratings demonstrated it, compared to the Grammy's.

And there's all sorts of empowering technology available for anybody who wants to make his own records.

Man, it's like...An Army of Davids out there!

(I interviewed The Professor yesterday; expect lots more on this topic, in the not too distant future.)

Ann Althouse, a self-proclaimed political moderate, compares and contrasts discourse on the left and the right:

I'm just saying that I'm struck by the way the right perceives me as a potential ally and uses positive reinforcement and the left doesn't see me as anything but an opponent -- doesn't even try to engage me with reasoned argument. Maybe the left feels beleaguered these days, but how do they expect to make any progress if they don't see the ways they can include the people in the middle? If you look around and only see opponents and curl up with your little group of insiders, you are putting your efforts into insuring that you remain a political minority.

Or as Glenn Reynolds wrote a few years ago:

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

Indeed^TM.

Update: Steve Green, a "Falwell-tweaking, gay-marriage supporting, drug legalizing, pro-abortion, pro-immigration, anti-trade barrier, wary-of-organized-religion kind of guy" adds:

The right seems to love a good debate, and the left seems to love pissing on them for it.

Which is too bad. Jonah Goldberg recently wrote:

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Perry de Havilland of Samizdata writes:

I wrote to the Department of Culture, Media & Sport (!) back on 10th January to nominate the CCTV camera as an 'icon of England'... and they have just written back accepting the nomination.

Interesting.

Back in October, Virginia Postrel noted the key difference between US and UK security procedures:

In London, you are videotaped--and told you are being videotaped--everywhere. But you can walk into a crowded train station or an art museum filled with tourists and priceless treasures without showing anyone the contents of your bag. Even airport security is much more casual than the ritualistic shoe stripping and computer segregation of U.S. airports. I'm not convinced that either surveillance or routine search does much to prevent terrorist attacks. But, while less avoidable (at least in theory), the British way is certainly less intrusive. I'd rather be watched than searched.

At least you can make the argument that security cameras are a necessary evil. I certainly wouldn't say the same thing about England's ubiquitous speed cameras, making criminals out of otherwise innocent motorists.

LA Times media writer James Rainey profiles Michael Yon, but doesn't seem to get the difference between a one-man blog, and a multimillion dollar newspaper. Fortunately, Tim Blair is available to provide helpful assistance, kindly bridging the often unassailable gap between the legacy media and its successors.

Novelist and screenwriter Andrew Klavan (who wrote True Crime, filmed, after a PC-clean up by Clint Eastwood, and Don’t Say A Word, which starred Michael Douglas) looks at the one-sided nature of the movies playing at your local multiplex:

I can’t help feeling a little disgruntled about the movies the Academy decided to pass over. For instance, how could they ignore Heroes In The Sand, that incredibly stirring tribute to the fighting Americans who blasted the Taliban out of Afghanistan? And what were they thinking when they slighted Reason To Live, the biting drama about a once left-wing university professor who comes under fire when he accepts Jesus Christ as his savior? And what about Goodbye, You’re Out of Luck, the classy suspenser about a heroic 1950’s federal investigator who breaks up a ring of homegrown Communist spies?

Not only were these films ignored by the Academy, but their chances for critical recognition and box office success were severely hampered by the fact they were never made. Which is exactly why I didn’t see any of the Academy nominees when they first came out.

See, my problem with Hollywood is not about the movies it makes, it’s about the movies it never makes. I know we can ferret Christian symbolism out of Narnia or family values out of War of the Worlds. But let’s face it, we’re basically going begging for what ought to be the overwhelming norm: movies that dramatize the conservative beliefs, lifestyles and interests of the majority of the audience.

Because these films don’t exist, I find myself staying away from the ones that do exist, films I would probably enjoy were I not so wearied by the same cluster of agendas and ideas getting screen time over and over and over. I find myself thinking, A frustrated housewife who’s secretly a lesbian? Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. A spy who discovers America’s foreign policy is corrupt? Oh, please, not again. A victim of… something or other… triumphs in a lawsuit? Hey, maybe there’s a ballgame on TV tonight.

When opposing worldviews collide at the multiplex, it’s an exciting sign of life, a sign that the people who live in our country are being represented by the arts of the country, that they’re holding their differences up against each other as a means of national self-examination. But an endless discussion among people who all share the same opinions ultimately becomes a droning soliloquy. The Hollywood left doesn’t win any arguments by silencing the other side. In the end, they simply lose their audience.

To paraphrase Tony Hendra's brilliant riff in Spinal Tap, Hollywood's audience became much more "selective" in 2005.

But the lack of cinematic diversity is not all that new a development: last week, I pulled out my copy of MGM's Doctor Zhivago to test a new DVD player. When you consider that that 1965 picture postcard of a movie (helmed by British master craftsman David Lean) is the closest that Hollywood has ever gotten to a big screen repudiation of the Soviet Union, you begin to understand just how one-sided Hollywood storytelling has been for literally decades.

Update: Want the mathematics of it? Part Four of Chris Anderson's "Death of the Blockbuster" series is up, over at his brilliant Long Tail Website.

Was a West Coast terror plot thwarted in late 2001-early 2002? The Military Outpost quotes President Bush today:

Since Septemeber 11th, the United States and our coalition partners have disrupted a number of serious al Qaeda terrorist plots, including plots to attack targets inside the United States.

Let me give you an example:

In the weeks after September 11th, while Americans were still recovering from an unprecedented strike on our homeland, al Qaeda was already busy planning its next attack. We now know that in October 2001, Khalid Sheik Muhammed, the mastermind of the September 11th attacks, had already set in motion a plan to have terrorist operatives hijack an airplane using shoe bombs to breach the cockpit door, and fly the plan into the tallest building on the West Coast.

We believe the intended target was Liberty Tower [Library Tower], in Los Angeles, California.

Since Septemeber 11th, the United States and our coalition partners have disrupted a number of serious al Qaeda terrorist plots, including plots to attack targets inside the United States.

Let me give you an example:

In the weeks after September 11th, while Americans were still recovering from an unprecedented strike on our homeland, al Qaeda was already busy planning its next attack. We now know that in October 2001, Khalid Sheik Muhammed, the mastermind of the September 11th attacks, had already set in motion a plan to have terrorist operatives hijack an airplane using shoe bombs to breach the cockpit door, and fly the plan into the tallest building on the West Coast.

We believe the intended target was Liberty Tower [Library Tower], in Los Angeles, California.

Since Septemeber 11th, the United States and our coalition partners have disrupted a number of serious al Qaeda terrorist plots, including plots to attack targets inside the United States.

Let me give you an example:

In the weeks after September 11th, while Americans were still recovering from an unprecedented strike on our homeland, al Qaeda was already busy planning its next attack. We now know that in October 2001, Khalid Sheik Muhammed, the mastermind of the September 11th attacks, had already set in motion a plan to have terrorist operatives hijack an airplane using shoe bombs to breach the cockpit door, and fly the plan into the tallest building on the West Coast.

We believe the intended target was Liberty Tower [Library Tower], in Los Angeles, California.

Rather than use Arab hijackers as he had on September 11th, Khalid Sheik Muhammed sought out young men from Southeast Asia, whom he believed would not arouse as much suspicion. To help carry out his plan, he tapped a terrorist named Hambali, one of the leaders of an al Qaeda affiliated group in Southeast Asia called J-I [Jemaah Islamiya]. J-I terrorists were responsible for a series of deadly attacks in Southeast Asia, and members of the group had trained with al Qaeda. Hambali recruited several key operatives, who had been training in Afghanistan. Once the operatives were recruited, they met with Usama bin Laden, and then began preparations for the West Coast attack.
Their plot was derailed in early 2002, when a Southeast Asian nation arrested a key al Qaeda operative. Subsequent debriefings and other intelligence operations made clear the intended target, and how al Qaeda hoped to execute it. This critical intelligence helped other allies capture the ringleaders, and other known operatives who had been recruited for this plot.

The West Coast plot had been thwarted.

As it becomes safe to disseminate the information, I suspect we'll be hearing more and more details of further thwarted attacks.

And just as the threat of the Soviet Union was discounted during the Cold War (and anyone who dared criticize them ridiculed), expect the news of additional failed attacks to be downplayed and mocked by the left.

Update: Well, that didn't take long! Be sure to read the comments below the post; they prove the point I made above.

On the Technorati Weblog, Dave Sifry writes that "The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago".

I remember when I started this blog back in early 2002, I had to constantly explain to people what the heck a Weblog was. Don't have to do that anymore, huh?

In TCS Daily, Arnold Kling looks at the continued popularity of John Kenneth Galbraith amongst leftwing economists, despite how antiquated his theories are:

The role of entrepreneurs is one of those issues that divides people politically. If you value entrepreneurship, then it is difficult to be a statist. If you are a statist, then it is difficult to value entrepreneurship.

John Kenneth Galbraith represents the quintessential statist. If we were literally stuck on 1968, then Galbraith's The New Industrial State would still be on the best-seller list. In that work, Galbraith correctly pointed out that bureaucratic organizations are averse to risk and uncertainty. However, nearly every other major thesis in his book was wrong. Yet his view of the economy, like much of the conventional wisdom of 1968, has remained embedded in the folk beliefs of the Left.

Read the whole thing.

In another economic-related essay in TCS today, Meg Kreikemeier looks at a wide range of data pointing to robust economic growth and asks, "where were the glowing headlines about the economy"?

No sooner did I finish drafting an article on the growing popularity of video on the Web, did I come across this video on Junk Yard Blog: "Taqiyya: Anatomy of the Comic Jihad". In about 30 seconds, it provides more expository information about how the Great Cartoon Crisis of 2006 began than you'll get on any network television news broadcast.

And it's got a good beat, and you can dance to it.

(Via Michelle Malkin.)

Tim Blair notes that it hasn't been neccessary for rioting crowds in Afghanistan to actually have seen those cartoons to riot--and kill. The result has been four Afghans shot dead after crowds marched on a US military base. "Interestingly", Tim writes, "no riots were provoked by Egyptian newspaper Al Faqr‘s publication of the cartoons last October ..."

Funny, that.

Did a product review in PC Magazine give me a bum steer? Possibly--check out my newest post over at Pajamas Theater 3000.

While I was busy installing a new A/V receiver, I figured I'd also install what's frequently called "a media bridge", to allow me to play all of the Windows Media files on my computer in glorious 7.1 surround sound, rather than the small speakers of my PC. I had actually purchased a D-Link DSM-320 and a few days later, it was still sitting in the box, ready to be installed when I picked up the issue of PC Magazine devoted to video on the Web, that I had previously mentioned here.

They gave the D-Link unit so-so reviews, but raved about BuffaloTech's LinkTheater High Definition Wireless Media Player, giving the issue's editor's choice award. OK, I can take a hint: the D-Link unit went back to Best Buy, and since they didn't have the BuffaloTech player, I drove down the road to Micro Center and bought it.

Boy, that was fun: it took forever to get the unit to talk to my computer, but I expected this segment of the process to be finicky. Once I did get them talking, that part worked great: the BuffaloTech unit and the A/V receiver sounded dynamite together, and my Windows Media audio files never sounded better.

But the BuffaloTech unit also comes with a progressive scan DVD player, and I thought--well, I'll kill two birds with one stone: I'll make this my primary DVD player, one that I can also play Windows Media through.

So I popped in a DVD to test it out. It wouldn't play. Would. Not. Play. Wouldn't detect the disc; it just ground to a halt.

So I got on the phone to BuffaloTech HQ in Austin, Texas. While they advertise 24 hour tech support, at 1:00 AM on a Sunday morning, there's either one guy manning the phone's who's very busy (probably dealing with other LinkTheater purchasers), or he's off visiting the local Burger King, or he's asleep.

So after about a half-hour or so, I bailed and called again during the day. Other than hearing the exact same on-hold music as the night before (much as I love Dave Brubeck's classic Time Out album (the one with "Take Five"), knowing you'll be hearing it endlessly while on-hold somewhat ruins the experience), that part worked great: quickly got somebody who was knowledgeable, friendly, and suggested I upgrade the firmware and see if that would get the DVD player working. And it did. Yay!

So I spent each night for the next week happily watching DVDs. Except...at least once, each disc would fast-forward several frames. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Black Rain each seemed particularly affected, speeding up several times during the movie. But no disc seemed completely immune: Capt. Kirk would skip a word here and there. Dr. Zhivago would lurch forward once or twice during the movie wildly while gesturing. Audio would occasionally speed-up, then resume normal speed.

Last night I picked up a new copy of Lost In Translation at Borders. Virgin, pristine, right out of the shrink-wrap. And about halfway through, it did the same thing. And nobody messes with Bill Murray in town! (To paraphrase one of the good Dr. Venkman's great riffs in Ghostbusters.

This afternoon, I was on the phone to Austin again. They told me there was nothing they could suggest, other than take the unit back and get a refund. So I did, thinking it was a bum drive, and I get another unit. Micro Center was out of stock, but I looked on Amazon to see if they sold the unit.

They did. But one of their customer reviews had this to say:

Some weird glitches. About 8 minutes into "Liar Liar" Jim Carrey started walking twice as fast and speaking really quickly in a high-pitch. I tried watching several times and the same thing happened at the same point in the movie every time.

And that happened to me as well: each weird speed-up would repeat exactly. (In retrospect, I noticed several of the other glitches this fellow was referring to, but they weren't as severe as the intermittent speed-up/dropped frames thing.)

Does that mean that every unit has this problem, or that PC Magazine hyped a faulty product? In both cases, probably not--the tech support person said that he hadn't heard of any similar cases, and the magazine review obviously didn't mention anything about it. But that was more than enough for me to move to multimedia plan B.

Which is? I'll tell you in a few days. This could be interesting.

Update: Faster than a speeding bullet! The same night a week and a half ago that I couldn't get the DVD play to work, I first emailed a request for tech support to BuffaloTech before eventually calling. The response to that email arrived in Outlook today (2/9/06). Speedy, guys!

Speaking of show trials, Betsy Newmark looks at the case of an 18-year-old girl who was sentenced to death in Iran because she unintentionally killed the man who had tried to rape both her and her niece:

So, let me see if I have this straight. If a woman or a girl is raped, she is sentenced to death for committing "acts incompatible with chastity". And if she fights back, and escapes rape by killing her attacker, she is also to be sentenced to death. There's no information about what happens to the rapists, but I suspect that they're not getting the death penalty. So waht incentive is there for men not to rape women if the penalty will fall on the victim? What a travesty of a government.

Amnesty USA is upset because these are minors who are going to be put to death. How about being upset because rape victims are being put to death? Being over 18 wouldn't make this penalty any less heinous.

Sadly, Amnesty's credibility on Middle East issues evaporated in direct proportion to its ever-growing case of BDS.

Lee Harris writes that President Bush's critics have manged to turn the old Soviet "show trial" concept on its head, turning Coretta Scott King's memorial into what Harris calls a "show funeral", in which, "instead of properly honoring the memory of the dead, the occasion is deliberately exploited for its propaganda value":

Carter, for example, used the opportunity to insinuate that Bush's "domestic spying" was like the spying done by the FBI on Dr. King. Carter commiserated with the King family for having been subjected to such an ordeal at the hands of their government, and, by implication, he also commiserated with those Americans who had been subjected to Bush's domestic surveillance. But does this analogy honor the memory of Dr. King and his movement?

Let's make a simple thought experiment to find out.

Suppose al-Qaeda had decided to air its grievances against the United States by holding a massive peaceful "sit in" at the Twin Towers on 9/11. Suppose Islamic terrorists, instead of blowing up innocent human beings, had vowed only to use civil disobedience. Suppose Osama bin Laden, like Dr. King, had struggled with all his might to keep his organization from turning to bloodshed and violence. Would Bush have felt the need to launch a domestic surveillance program on such a pacifistic movement? Maybe; maybe not. But the fact that al-Qaeda embraces violence and celebrates terrorism -- doesn't this small detail destroy the basis of Carter's analogy? If you can equate bin Laden with Martin Luther King, and al-Qaeda to King's non-violent movement, then, by all means, go ahead and draw the same analogy that Mr. Carter drew about Bush's domestic surveillance program. If, on the other hand, you cannot equate the two, then Carter's analogy becomes at best ridiculous and at worst obscene.

If it were actually possible to equate the two, Carter would be the man to do it: As Jay Nordlinger thoroughly documented in his great "Carterpalooza" piece in 2002, from Tito and Ceausescu to Yasser Arafat to Kim Il Sung to Daniel Ortega, Carter's never met a terrorist or dictator he didn't openly admire.

Almost a year after Brian Anderson's nifty book on the topic was published [Of course you think it's nifty, you're mentioned in it!--Ed], England's far left Guardian discovers America's South Park Conservatives.

Michelle Malkin writes the Cartoons That Dare Not Be Viewed ran in an Egyptian newspaper back in October--without incident:

Freedom for Egyptians notes that the Forbidden Cartoons were published in Al Fagr, an Egyptian newspaper last October. Cairo-based blog, Rantings of an Egyptian Sandmonkey, has scans of the paper with the cartoons and asks:

"Guess we will have to Boycott Egypt now as well, huh?"

Heh.

Yesterday, Hugh Hewitt hosted a roundtable discussion on the Cartoon Intafada, involving himself, fellow radio talkshow hosts Michael Medved and Dennis Prager, and from Evangelical Outpost, Joe Carter. You can read a transcript, and/or listen online, here. Here's an excerpt, with some amazing statistics--or at least speculation--from Dennis Prager:

HH: I have a question for all three of you. I'm going to start with you, Dennis Prager. What percentage of Islam worldwide do you think is now radicalized?

DP: I would say...I would say at least 20%.

HH: And of the remaining 80%, how much of that do you think is susceptible to radicalization?

DP: Half. I'll give you an example.

HH: Please.

DP: I don't just draw these out of thin air. The Egyptian pilot who brought down the Egypt Air airline in an act of suicide and murdered everybody aboard?

HH: Right.

DP: The Egyptian government and people and press all backed the idea that it was Boeing's fault, and that it was an American plot to blame the Egypt Air pilot. The ability to self-criticize in that part of the world right now is as close to zero as I have seen in my lifetime.

Absolutely. And needless to say, read or listen to the rest.

Update: Glenn Reynolds has numerous related links (there's a shocker, huh?), including this observation from Austin Bay:

"The Danish 'Cartoon War' is an information warfare operation conducted by Islamist terror groups and at least two Middle Eastern dictatorships (Syria and Iran)."

A reader of Michelle Malkin spots CNN's newest riff:

CNN is not showing the negative caricatures of the likeness of Prophet Mohammed because the network believes its role is to cover the events surrounding the publication of the cartoons while not unnecessarily adding fuel to the controversy itself.

Fine. Don't ever run the photo that accompanies this article again, boys. Or as John Hinderaker writes, "That would explain why CNN didn't show the Abu Ghraib photos".

(2000 CNN article via Charles Johnson.)

Update: Jim Geraghty notes a similar hypocrisy from the New York Times:

So - the New York Times writes about the Danish cartoon controversy, and includes a photo of demonstrators... and one other photo. The caption:

Chris Ofili's "Holy Virgin Mary" was at the center of controversy when shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999.

Yup, it's the Virgin Mary depicted in elephant dung painting.

What a bunch of wimps. They'll run photos of art that offends Christians from seven years ago in a heartbeat, but they won't dare run a cartoon that could offend their Muslim readers.

I wonder why.

Meanwhile, the former chief executive of the BBC, and an admitted atheist, wants to know why Islam is covered much less skeptically by the BBC than Christianity is:

Will Wyatt, the chief executive for three years until 1999, examined the site on religion and ethics and found that it was “written as fact” that Mohammed met an angel.

The site states: “One night in 610 he was meditating in a cave on the mountain when he was visited by the angel Jibreel who ordered him to ‘recite’... words which he came to understand were words of God.”

The site, seemingly written by a devout Muslim, stated without reservation that Mohammed was “generally accepted as the true, final prophet of God”.

Mr Wyatt, an atheist, said that he had no axe to grind, and was struck by how much more different - “and accurate” - the BBC’s description of Christianity was, where the birth of Jesus was mentioned as being “believed by Christians” and that Jesus “claimed” that he spoke with the authority of God.

A BBC spokesman said: “We will have a look at the wording on the site.”

And then do absolutely nothing differently.

Ever since she wrote Gulag in 2003, Anne Applebaum has been one of my favorite authors, and I've linked several times to her column in the Washington Post. Which is why I'm as disappointed as Ed Morrissey is with her misreading of Newsweek's infamous "Koran in the Can" scandal last year. As Ed writes:

Perhaps Applebaum has hung around American newsrooms too long to notice the difference, but editorial cartoons express opinion, while news reporting is supposed to deliver facts. Newsweek didn't publish a cartoon of a GI flushing a Qu'ran down a toilet. They reported as fact that American soldiers had done so, with the thinnest of sourcing and without attempting to corroborate the information. Newsweek didn't investigate at all -- they just took the word of a single source and put it in their magazine.

The right-wing blogosphere defends the freedom of the press to express opinons, when labeled as such, and to report facts when delivering news. It doesn't mean that people can't criticize either action when necessary. No one in the "right-wing blogosphere" argues that the American media shouldn't investigate the government, but we certainly argue that such investigations should be done properly, without endangering national security, and reported fairly with properly corroborated allegations, if and when they are to be made.

This is yet another of the tiresome examples of writers at the Post attempting to appear reasonable by finding some basis on which to attack all sides of a controversy. Applebaum's reach exceeds her grasp on this point, and she made up for it by trying to rewrite the Newsweek debacle by turning it into a debate on the First Amendment -- a conflict that never arose when Newsweek botched its reporting. It's just another form of pandering, no less than the capitulations she decries earlier in her essay by the media outlets who issue statements of "respect for Islam" that would never appear about any controversy involving Christianity or Judaism.

Or as James Lileks said last night:

here are three belief systems that the media won’t ridicule: Islam, Scientology, and Astrology.

I doubt whether Muslims would enjoy the company.

Update: John Hinderaker has some thoughts on Appplebaum's article as well.

The New York Post sounds as angry at Jimmy Carter, as, well, The Simpsons once were:

Jimmy Carter may or may not have been the worst president of the 20th century — history will have the final word on that — but his disgraceful performance yesterday at Coretta Scott King’s funeral marks him as the most shameless.

Maybe of all time.

There is, after all, a time and place for everything — but not for Carter.

Read the whole thing.

Update: Ed Morrissey has some thoughts on President Bush's appearance at King's funeral yesterday, along with his relationship with the NAACP.

This just in: The seething Midwest street explodes after prominent quasi-religious icon slandered in cartoon!

Update The Jewish street just exploded as well...

Jim Geragthy, who as the proprietor of National Review Online's TKS Blog, knows a thing or three about the genre, has some thoughts in The Washington Times on the growing role of bloggers in politics:

From the lefty bloggers, one would never know that polls showed Samuel Alito was supported by about 53 percent to 55 percent of Americans, and opposed by only 27 percent to 30 percent. Democrats in Bush-supporting red states couldn't dare support a filibuster of a popular nominee, and every Republican senator except Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island knew the political wind was at their backs -- and even Chafee couldn't bring himself to support a filibuster of a qualified, well-liked nominee.

In the Miers case, it could be argued that bloggers on the right saved the president from making a critical mistake, and nudged him onto the path that ultimately led to a enormously significant part of his presidential legacy. But bloggers on the left are pushing their party into a difficult wilderness. The angry "net-roots" denounce any Democrat for deviating from their agenda, without a moment's thought of trying to run for re-election with a liberal record in West Virginia, North Dakota or Nebraska.

Republicans can find strength and success by listening to their like-minded bloggers; Democrats can find strength and success by ignoring theirs.

I think it's safe to say that Michael Barone would agree with that last observation.

(Via Laura's Miscellaneous Musings)

Stay grounded on planet earth--otherwise this could be your future, too.

Michelle Malkin looks at the politicized funeral for Coretta Scott King (complete with video); Lorie Byrd and The Anchoress have some further thoughts.

Interesting take from Glenn Reynolds:

Why does this keep happening? Part of it, I think, is that the Democratic Party is in a state where it finds it hard to get national TV coverage except when someone dies. I think that their behavior reflects another forlorn hope for regeneration. I guess looking at policies is out of the question, though.

Update: Ian Schwartz links to my original post on the Wellstone funeral from three and a half years ago--8,000 or so posts later, to be honest, I completely forgot that I had blogged it.

Another Update: While the article that this post links to isn't about the King funeral, it seems very much related, at least to me.

One More: Glenn Reynolds updates his post with a link to Jay Redding, who asks, "Can we have some dignity, please?" and responds:

Apparently not. And this post by Eric Muller only serves to underline the very point it attempts to refute. The problem with today's Democrats is that they try to invest the naked hunger for power with the dignity of the civil rights movement, a dignity that they no longer possess because it was based on a self-discipline that they no longer possess.

Emphasis mine--because I think that's a spot-on observation. Instead, as Jay Redding wrote:

The Democrats are learning from the worst of the Republican Party during the Clinton Administration. One would think given that they were on the other side that they would do better. Then again the sad state of American politics makes me think that the idea of being able to put partisanship aside for one gorram moment is just too much to ask of some people these days.

Coretta Scott King was the wife of one of the greatest leaders of this century, a man who transformed American society for the better. She herself was a great and dignified woman. She deserved a better send-off than that.

Exactly.

While screedy leftwing dinosaurs like Helen Thomas continue to prowl the halls of power in Washington, bloggers such as Power Line's Paul Mirengoff, pinch-hitting for Pajamas Media, are shaking things up:

A veteran Senate GOP staffer who requested anonymity offered this observation about the significance of the Durbin-Mirengoff exchange:

"The mainstream news media that covers Congress is tightly controlled by the House and Senate press galleries and they would never be so aggressive in pressing a Member of Congress. So this was big, it was unprecedented to have a blogger asking such questions. We need more bloggers up here asking questions because they aren't controlled by the galleries."

I agree, the more bloggers are covering Congress, the more likely it is that Members will be asked and, as Durbin discovered today, have to answer questions they never expect to hear from mainstream journalists.

It is exactly the kind of aggressive, don't-let'em-off-the-hook questioning by Mirengoff that I have long lamented as being a thing of the past among establishment media journalists. They are either afraid to ask the tough questions, or they don't know the tough questions.

So come on up to Capitol Hill, bloggers!

Sounds good to me! Meanwhile, Power Line's John Hinderaker writes:

It occurs to me that in all the years that Ted Kennedy and Dick Durbin have stood before microphones on Capitol Hill, answering questions posed by the Washington press corps, they might never have had to answer a question asked by someone who wasn't a fellow Democrat. This may, indeed, have been a watershed moment.

Naturally Durbin attempted to deflect the question with a "where are you from"-style question, which (as we've noted before) is rather silly these days: given how rapidly news disseminates, where it starts off is much less important than its actual content.