Don't look now, but many well known celebrities are undergoing religious conversions--and not to Scientology or the Kabbalah:

Pinocchio, Tom Sawyer and other characters have been converted to Islam in new versions of 100 classic stories on the Turkish school curriculum.

"Give me some bread, for Allah's sake," Pinocchio says to Geppetto, his maker, in a book stamped with the crest of the ministry of education.

"Thanks be to Allah," the puppet says later.

In The Three Musketeers, D'Artagnan is told that he cannot visit Aramis. The reason would surprise the author, Alexandre Dumas.

An old woman explains: "He is surrounded by men of religion. He converted to Islam after his illness."

Tom Sawyer may always have shirked his homework, but he is more conscientious in learning his Islamic prayers. He is given a "special treat" for learning the Arabic words.

It used to seem amazing how unidirectionally multiculturalism flowed. Now it's expected.

Incidentally, I can't wait to see what sort of treatment The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged gets...

Daniel Pipes coined the phrase "Sudden Jihad Syndrome"; Hugh Hewitt identifies five deadly post-9/11 cases in the US with similiar anti-Semitic symptoms and writes that "transmission is easy, and the appearance of the violent derangement that anti-Semitic Islamist extremism produces is both sudden and deadly":

None of these five incidents is the sort of terrorist attack that we are most concerned about --the meticulously planned, coordinated attempt to cause spectacular devastation and casualties in the hundreds if not thousands. The London airlines bombing plot, like the London Tube attack, the Madrid rail attack, Bali resort bombing, and the Beslan school massacre are examples of this sort of terrorist atatck, and they rightly receive the bulk of Homeland Security's attention and analysis.

But isolated, single terrorist attacks are of great concern, and not just because of their real victims, but because of what they tell us about the spread of the hatred, and its potential to spread farther and faster than we ever dreamed.

It seems possible that we are close to a tipping point where so much anti-Semitic propaganda has been pumped into the world via new technologies and emboldened regimes and charismatic fanatics like Osama, Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad that the madness we would hope was confined to caves in Afghanistan and poor madrassas of Pakistan has in fact traveled far and at a furious pace, deep into France, now deep into London, and now we have to worry, deep into the United States.

It does not have to spread widely in American Muslim circles to provoke terrible violence by a few. There is no evidence of anything like the scale of Islamist hatred that consumes parts of France appearing in the U.S., but neither is it impossible that it will arrive here. What the five examples above underscore is that a segment of the Muslim population is susceptible to the deranging effects of anti-Western screeds from radical imams. That segment might be limited to the already deranged --the driver/killer in San Francisco and the shooter/killer in Seattle are both said to suffer from mental instability.

But the point is the segment exists, and individuals within it have killed.

What, exactly, triggered their violence?

Read the rest.

Ed Morrissey writes that Hillarycare-style healthcare is coming to California:

Previous California legislation on workers-comp protection and workplace regulation helped start an exodus of corporate headquarters for better business environments. Creating a whole new bureaucracy for health management and putting rationing decisions in the hands of bureaucrats may start a new exodus of healthy people looking for less-intrusive and less-costly tax regimes. Despite the long wait times for anything but primary care issues in single-payer nations such as Canada and the UK -- the latter of which has to destroy organs for lack of doctors to transplant them -- California wants to add to its already top-heavy bureaucracies and add more budget-busting entitlements to a budget that resembles science fiction.

Hillary Clinton tried to foist the same system onto the entire country, and the nation reacted by ending forty years of Democratic domination in the House. Perhaps the same result could come from this irresponsible social engineering project. When people start to understand that they just created a DMV for health care, California voters may just revolt against the entrenched Democratic power structure. Even the Democratic nominee for goverrnor won't endorse the Kuehl bill. Phil Angelides wanted to push more health-care mandates onto the private sector instead, a bad idea but nowhere near as disastrous as this.

Will the last business out of California please turn out the lights? Besides, another rolling blackout is due in.

Michelle Malkin and Bill Nienhuis wonder why lip gloss and hand cream are banned from commercial aviation flights--but handhend GPS units aren't.

How did Bill Clinton defeat President Bush #41 only a year after #41's poll numbers were briefly through the roof after the lighting-quick liberation of Kuwait? The media took a mild recession in 1990/91 and made it out to be The End Of The World--"The worst economy in 50 years". Bush #41's raising of taxes, breaking his "read my lips" promise on the campaign trail in 1988 didn't help matters, and created an atmosphere of distrust that led directly to Ross Perot entering the scene, creating the three-way race that allowed Bill Clinton to win the presidency without a plurality of the vote. Lorie Byrd remembers, as did I, the flipover in economic reporting that happened immediately afterwards:

in 1992...the Bush recovery was described as the worst economy in 50 years until the day after the election, when it became known as the Clinton recovery.

Bush #43 learned from his father's most obvious economic mistake and has cut taxes, leading to numerous years of ecomomic growth, once the post-NASDAQ bubble and 9/11-related downturn passed. But as Back Talk notes, once again....

You can learn more from a few informative charts than you can from reading the words of a reporter who has an agenda that is advanced, not by showing you the actual numbers, but by using bumper-sticker slogans to create the impression that things are "spiraling out of control." Oh wait, that's the phrase reporters use to characterize Iraq. Well, they don't use charts for that purpose, either (and for the same reason).

Gee, wonder why?

Paul Hacket violates Godwin's Law: "Video: Hackett calls Dan Senor 'Unterfuhrer'".

Joseph Stefano, the screenwriter of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and co-creater of The Outer Limits died last week at age 84.

Mark Steyn on 9/11 conspiracy theorists:

When I was on the Rush Limbaugh show a couple of months back, a listener called up to insist that 9/11 was an inside job. I asked him whether that meant Bali and Madrid and London and Istanbul were also inside jobs. Because that's one expensive operation to hide even in the great sucking maw of the federal budget. But the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle made a much sharper point:

"I wonder if the nuts even believe what they are saying. Because if something like 9/11 happened in Canada, and I believed with all my heart that, say, Stephen Harper was involved, I don't think I could still live here. I'm not sure I could stop myself from running screaming to another country. How can you believe that your President killed 2,000 people, and in between bitching about this, just carry on buying your vente latte and so forth?"

Over to you, Col. de Grand Pre, and Charlie Sheen, and Alan Colmes.

Read the whole thing; tin foil hat optional.

Alex Beam writes that MIT's Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen "isn't a fake scientist, he's an inconvenient scientist. No wonder you're not supposed to listen to him."

Read the whole thing.

Libertas on Paramount's firing of Tom Cruise:

Stars of Cruise’s caliber - whatever you may think of them personally - do not fall off trees, and are not easily replaced. I’m reminded (painfully) of what happened to the Lakers after they traded Shaquille - who was also expensive to keep around. Shaquille is now wearing championship bling in south Florida while the LA Kobes (previously known as the ‘Lakers’) hope to reach the 2nd round of next year’s playoffs. So Redstone and his shareholders may feel like Big Men on Campus right now, but they may be asking themselves later why they traded their cash cow away while he was still young enough to do action films. Harrison Ford can’t, Arnold can’t, Willis usually won’t, and Mel Gibson’s mostly a director these days. Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington can kick ass when they feel like it, but neither can open a film like Cruise, and neither of them have shown Cruise’s good judgement (for the most part) in picking projects. Basically there are very few action stars of Cruise’s caliber left, and the new generation isn’t producing very many.

Back in 2002, Howard Kurtz looked at a different kind of script reader:

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

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

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

This is prediction is off only slightly--the network news isn't going away: it's simply remaining as legacy programming for an aging generation that doesn't understand the Internet--but, like the superstar-driven era of Hollywood, its impact is being rapidly diluted by a Long Tail of options.

A Mr. W. Smith wrote in his analog blog 22 years ago:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.'

Today, Charles Johnson spots doublethink in action:

Watch as reporter Rob Roth says a witness heard the suspect refer to himself as a “terrorist,” then without taking a breath tells us this was not an act of terrorism.

Oceania, Eurasia, etc.

Update: Occidentality writes:

Ed Driscoll and Hugh Hewitt are both picking up on the possibility this may be an anti-Semitic hate crime. Two of the victims were pedestrians outside a Jewish center in San Francisco. Without dismissing the possibility, if this were motivated by anything other than narcissistic stress, it was probably general anti-Americanism, as his behavior suggests he was looking for any target possible, not Jewish targets in particular. As I said earlier, however, it's pathetic that Americans are reduced to reading news accounts the way the citizens of the Soviet Union once did: all tea leaves, no facts.

With Pravda, Soviet citizens relied on samizdat to spread the truth. In contrast we have Samizadata--and loads of other of blogs as well--to endrun monolithic news sources.

Of course, it's also a reminder of this quote:

As a famous Soviet dissident joke put it: "In the Soviet Union, the future is known; it's the past which is always changing."

Amazing how relevant it remains, long after the Soviet Union's demise.

Here's something to look forward to from the evening news--Glenn Reynolds writes that he can foresee "faked video of professional quality becoming a commonplace political item in the pretty near future":

the evidence of recent weeks is that journalism is rife with fakery, and that we're seeing more of it now mostly because it's easier to spot now that lots of people can examine the evidence and compare notes.

* * *

Context is key. And one of the lessons of these various affairs is that neither the photo, nor the purveyor of the photo, should be given unquestioned authority. Instead, we have to think for ourselves, and make up our own minds. Because it turns out that we can't trust, well, much of anyone.

You can hear me discuss these issues further with bloggers Charles Johnson and Dean Barnett on this TCS Daily podcast. And yes, that's really us -- not faked voices. Trust me.

Hey, if I could have afforded his royalties, I would have loved to have photoshopped in James Earl Jones' voice for mine.

Update: In a related post, Betsy Newmark and Jeff Jacoby explore Photoshopped diversity in school textbooks: "when reality conflicts with political correctness, reality gets the boot", Jacoby writes.

Ward Churchill--airbrushed or otherwise--could not be reached for comment.

Elsewhere, Q and O looks at the most pliable medium of all--text--as AP truncates the quotes from Donald Rumsfeld's latest speech virtually to the point of Dowdification.

"For as long as there are those who believe, the plastic turkey will remain forever real!"

Hugh Hewitt has a round-up of links on Ohmeed Aziz Popal, who ran over 14 people in San Francisco on Tuesday; he advises his readers to be on the look-out:

Please keep an eye out for the first MSM mention you see that this may very well be another mass casualty attack on Jewish Americans, the second in two months.

Yes, I can hear the crickets chirping, too.

Update: The Anchoress hears the sounds of silence and writes, "This is becoming an appalling habit in the press and by politicians". Meanwhile, Charles Johnson explores one way that this habit may be backfiring.

Orson Scott Card writes:

Ann Coulter's new book (which I haven't read) has a grossly inaccurate title: Godless: The Church of Liberalism. It may be true that liberalism does not accept the same God as religious conservatives. But they are certainly not godless.

How can you tell who someone's god is? You look to see whose name they invoke as the cause of all things, good or bad. By that standard, the god of the devout Left is Global Warming.

Read the rest, for the "the Psalm of Al, from which the faithful constantly quote (King James Version)".

(Via Tim Blair who sees An Inconvienent Season just around the corner.)

Dean Barnett writes that the Gray Lady has a funny sense of what the word "unharmed" means:

Here’s the New York Times’ lede in its coverage of the Steve Centanni story:

JERUSALEM, Aug. 27 — Two journalists kidnapped in Gaza were released unharmed on Sunday after being forced at gunpoint to say on a videotape that they had converted to Islam. (Emphasis added.)

Interesting locution there, “released unharmed,” no? This comes from the newspaper that believes that a Christmas crèche or a prayer uttered before a high school football game is a violation of the highest order. And yet being forced to adopt another faith at the point of a gun doesn’t rise to the level of “harm” in the Times’ judgment.

Well, it's not like they were kidnapped in Augusta.

Besides, at least the Times considers Fox employees journalists--that's more credit than many other liberals are willing to grant.

Mary Katharine Ham has some thoughts on the latest writings and retouchings from Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell:

The mainstream media’s response to the allegations from blogs has been more along the lines of Greg Mitchell’s, editor of Editor & Publisher, a trade magazine whose mission it is to cover “all aspects of the North American newspaper industry, including business, newsroom, advertising, circulation, marketing, technology, online and syndicates.”

Mitchell’s response to accusations from bloggers—instead of answering the charges and refuting evidence—was to get very defensive, claim that “rightwing bloggers” were only attempting to smear photojournalists as a group, and then proceed to smear rightwing bloggers as a group for daring to point out the dishonesty of some photojournalists, and raise questions about how business is conducted in the Middle East.

The subtext of Mitchell's rantings about the starboard side of the Blogosphere isn't just that he loathes the bloggers on the right analyzing his work--it's that he's not too crazy about journalism itself about being accountable to rightwing readers in general.

Each blog that analyzes Big Media's faults has hundreds to a few thousand readers, and for the biggest blogs, tens of thousands--to hundreds of thousands--of readers, for the simple reason that although we joke that eventually, everyone will have his or her blog, for now, there are far more consumers than authors. And every one of those readers, and the people in their circles of influence, whether they're posting within Internet forums, or simply chatting while hanging around the proverbial office water cooler, is finding out just how smug the elite media feels, especially when it's asked to be accountable.

There was more than a hint of that same attitude in the response of the L.A. Times' Michael Hiltzik (he of the sock puppetry) to Hugh Hewitt last year:

HH: If you think the L.A. Times is healthy, and you don't know why it isn't, I can't help you. I really can't. You cannot heal what you cannot get...

MH: Well, luckily, I don't think we're not turning to you for our help.

HH: What was that?

MH: I said luckily, we're not turning to you for our help.

HH: Or to people who listen to me for subscriptions, right?

MH: Well, I guess not.

HH: All right. That's what I thought.

MH: All right.

HH: Michael, thank you for that last, late-arriving, but nevertheless much welcome burst of candor. If you're listening, the L.A. Times does not want you to subscribe.

Peggy Noonan reached a similar conclusion about CBS's decision to hire Katie Couric:

Is the appointment of Katie an acknowledgement by CBS that it doesn't feel it has to care anymore about political preferences, that the existence of Fox News Channel has in effect freed up the network broadcasts to be what you and I might call more politically tendentious and they might call edgy? In a fractured media environment where everyone can have a voice, why wouldn't the broadcast networks take the new freedom as new license? After all, if America is one big niche market, liberals make up a big niche.

I'm wondering how the network news divisions are viewing the lay of the land. The answer will tell us something about the future American media environment.

Does the tone of the editor of a major house organ of the American media also tell us about how news editors in general view the lay of the land?

If so, as I've said before, welcome to the Post-Objective Media.

Sent to my inbox this morning:

On September 13, 2006, CIO Magazine and HP will present the next edition of Change Artists. Hosted by NetworkWorld's John Gallant and broadcast live on the world-wide-web, Change Artists is a program that provides you with the unique opportunity to sit at the table with F500 executives as they discuss how changing technology impacts their business.

Don't miss out! Click on the link below, and sign-up to watch the next episode featuring CEO Tom Glocer and CTO Roy Lowrance of Reuters; the world's leading provider of financial market data, and operator of the well known Reuters news service. They'll discuss how Reuters has managed to ride the wave of change - from the telegraph to radio to the Internet, and they'll answer your questions live.

Will they be providing an introductory seminar on Photoshop Clone Tool techniques?

Maybe it's just me, but if I were the CEO of Reuters, I'm not sure if the phrase "Change Artists" is something I'd want associated with my company right at the moment.

I had already planned on interviewing promiment bloggers to get their thoughts on Stephen D. Cooper's new book, Watching The Watchdog: Bloggers As The Fifth Estate for TCS Daily. But when the Reuters "Picture Kill" scandal broke via Charles Johnson and his readers, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to focus in on that issue, along with the self-proclaimed oversight role the Blogosphere plays in regards to the self-proclaimed oversight role of the legacy media.

So I was very happy to round-up Charles himself, Glenn Reynolds, and Dean Barnett of Soxblog, HughHewitt.com and The Weekly Standard.com on a conference call to discuss the topic. In other words--don't miss this one.

Update (8/27/06): Bumped to top of page.

Tom Elia has some thoughts on Anousheh Ansari, the Iranian-born U.S. citizen who is about to become the world's first female space tourist three days after the fifth anniversary of 9/11:

As the grandson myself of an immigrant from what is now present-day Iran, I can't help but notice the irony in the fact that the first female space tourist is a US citizen from Iran, a country today under an extremist Islamist leadership that would rather keep its women veiled, uneducated, and under the thumb of 11th Century fanatics than to train them to create new medicines, advance new technologies, or generally improve the lot of its people, let alone try to send one of its own people (man or woman) into space.

It's an irony that speaks volumes....

Absolutely.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Ian Schwartz writes, "This looks like a case of awful timing more than awful taste; nevertheless, it’s going to be a night to remember for NBC, the Emmys and Conan O’Brien."

Not sure if that's the disaster movie reference I'd make, but there's no doubt that NBC has definitely hit an iceberg's worth of bad PR tonight.

Update: To borrow one of the left's favorite cliches, I question the timing of this, as well.

More: Todd of Deadline Hollywood Daily adds:

The very idea that tonight's Emmy showcast on NBC was so heavily scripted that neither the network nor host Conan O'Brien could change a word of the broadcast opener is absurd. After all, isn't that the reason they invented writers? C'mon, couldn't one television academy director, or NBC executive, or show producer, much less Conan, pipe up and say, "Uh, maybe starting with a plane crash comedy skit on the same day there was an actual plane crash might be in poor taste? Let's rewrite." But, noooooooooo. Host Conan O'Brien riffed off the ABC's series Lost which was all-but-ignored by the Emmies by starting the ceremony with a filmed comedy bit in which O'Brien was seen sipping champagne aboard a jetliner. "What could possibly go wrong tonight?" he says — before the plane crashes onto an island resembling the one in ABC's drama. Today, in Kentucky, a commuter jet mistakenly trying to take off on a runway that was too short crashed into a field Sunday and burst into flames, according to media reports, killing 49 people and leaving the lone survivor -- a co-pilot -- in critical condition. Really, is there even one person at NBC with a brain left in his head?

He's right--and as Greg Tinti noted in his above-linked post, that same point can also be made about Conan's "Faux News" jokes on a day when two Fox journalists were returned after two weeks in captivity.

Update: Welcome to those clicking in via Hot Air and its Drudge Report link--please look around; there's much here you may enjoy.

A Thought: Mary Katharine Ham writes:

The Kentucky plane crash happened at 6 a.m. There was plenty of time to alter the intro of the Emmys to something more respectful. It wouldn't have been polished and post-produced, but it would have been polite.

But it occurs to me that there's actually an innocent explanation. In Diamonds Are Forever, Blofeld quipped to Bond that if he destroyed Kansas, "the world may not hear about it for years", grimly foreshadowing the famous New Yorker cover depicting how its readers on imagined the heartland (a flat, depopulated void). Show business on both coasts is an astonishingly insular and myopic world; 9/11 was an event large enough to crack its bubble; a plane crash in the middle of America American killing 50 people just isn't enough to make a ripple.

And besides--since Johnny Carson's retirement, it's not like one really expects a talk show host or his writers to have their fingers on the pulse of the world outside of the taping studio, anyhow.

Jim Geraghty writes, "It gives me no pleasure to do this, but sometimes somebody tries to pull a fast one on you, and you just have to call ‘em on it":

I can understand that having Dean’s web guy on staff can create some headaches for a candidate for the Republican nomination. But that doesn’t excuse denials to direct inquiries that contradict the facts. Even a “no comment” or “I can’t talk about this because no decision on that has been made yet,” would have been fairer. Instead, I’m told that Mele is “offering free advice” when in fact it’s the other way around, that according to the Hotline account, McCain’s people “recruited” Mele.

The clients of Mele’s firm EchoDitto, by the way, include Air America Radio, Barack Obama’s Senate campaign, the Clinton Global Initiative, Democratic gubernatorial candidate John DeStefano in Connecticut, the campaign of Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm in Michigan, NoIraqDraft.com, Rock the Vote, PurpleOcean.org which is the online activism hub of the Service Employees International Union, and Rosie.com, the personal blog of Rosie O'Donnell.

I would urge reporters who deal with Straight Talk America to double check and verify everything that they are told; it is entirely possible that what you are told by the organization, on basic matters such as who is working for them, is completely false.

I'll let others remark about the irony of this coming from an organization with "Straight Talk" in its name.

Read the whole thing.

Breaking details at Pajamas Media, and Fox itself.

Last September, when Ted Turner had this infamous exchange with Wolf Blitzer...

WB: But this is one of the most despotic regimes, and Kim Jung Il is one of the worst men on Earth. Isn't that a fair assessment?

TT: Well, I didn't get to meet him, but he didn't look...in the pictures I've seen of him on CNN, he didn't look too much different than most of the other people I've met.

WB: But look at the way he's treating his own people.

TT: Well, hey. Listen, I saw a lot of people over there. They were thin, and they were riding bicycles instead of driving in cars. But I didn't see any brutality in the capitol, or out in the DMZ. We drove through the countryside quite a bit to down to P'annumjom and Kaesong. We traveled around. I'm sure we were on a special route, but I don't see...there's really no reason...North Korea's got enough problems with their economy and their agriculture. I think they want to join the Western world, and improve the quality of life for their people, just like everybody else. And I think that we should give them another chance. It doesn't cost us anything. They already have agreements, and then North Korea never posed any significant threat to the United States. I mean, the whole economy of North Korea is only $30 billion dollars a year. It's less than the city of Detroit. It's a small place, and we do not have to worry about them attacking us.

...I wrote:

Whether it's Cuba, the Soviet Union, or Iraq, Turner's never met a totalitarian regime he didn't want to prop up with sympathetic coverage.

And these days, North Korea is no exception. One man's Hell on Earth is another man's fun vacation getaway, as Ted describes Kim Jung Il's rotting death trap of a country to Wolf Blitzer...

And of course, as both Reuters and Octavia Nasr, CNN's senior editor for Arab affairs would say, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Stephen Spruiell of NRO's MediaBlog looks at Christiane Amanpour's recent documentary on Osama Bin Laden, airing, as Spruiell notes, just two weeks before the fifth anniversary of 9/11:

even the New York Times says that it's a little too "suffuse[d]" with "romantic awe" for the terrorist mastermind. That's sort of like Chris Rock telling you to tone down the swearing.

Good to see that even radical chic has some limits.

Betsy Newmark finds the story that's "got everything"--and then wonders why crickets are chirping in response.

Hitch could probably explain why. As could Jonah Goldberg.

Just finished listening to the really interesting Pajamas Politics Central podcast with Andrew Keen interviewing Marshall Poe, the author of a recent Atlantic article on Wikipedia:

“Wikipedia is really not an encyclopedia. It’s more like a dictionary. It has the definition, a kind of rough description, of the way we talk about everything. It’s not expert knowledge, it’s common knowledge.”

A while back, Robert McHenry of TCS reached a similar conclusion on "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia" that's also worth revisiting as you listen.

Update: "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence".

Mary Katherine Ham writes, "I Had a Feeling This Guy Was a Sweetheart".

At least in China (which is nothing new there of course): China bans strippers at funerals.

Carol Doda could not be reached for comment.

Ray Nagin, class all the way:

On a tour of the decimated Ninth Ward, [New Orleans Mayor Ray] Nagin tells Pitts the city has removed most of the debris from public property and it’s mainly private land that’s still affected – areas that can’t be cleaned without the owners’ permission. But when Pitts points to flood-damaged cars in the street and a house washed partially into the street, the mayor shoots back. “That’s alright. You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair.”

Charming. As Allah writes:

A “hole in the ground.” “Fixed.” They were the tallest buildings in the United States, where nearly 3,000 died in a savage attack against our people on our soil. At least he got the length of time right without insulting the dead.

I’m fine with criticizing the politicians for dithering over rebuilding the Twin Towers, and especially fine with criticizing that monstrosity Trump called a “pile of crap” that was supposed to replace them. But calling Ground Zero a “hole in the ground” that’s still not “fixed” is, well, about par for the course for the king of the memorial motor pool.
But you know what? Nagin can be a total failure and run his mouth all he wants. It won’t matter. He still has a constituency that’ll back him no matter how many buses he leaves parked when the next storm hits.

Meanwhile, Real Clear Politics looks at "What the Media Missed" in its coverage of Katrina--which was plenty (when it wasn't inventing plenty of stories as well).

Betsy Newmark, Jonah Goldberg and Thomas Sowell diagram the clinical symptoms that make up Wal-Mart Derangement Syndrome, and how it's impacted Andrew Young--along with many others on the left.

Mark Steyn is sitting in for Rush Limbaugh today. You can catch his last hour here, and a rebroadcast will be online later today.

Found via LGF and the The Jawa Report:

"Sometimes it's fun to play backup editor. But we'd really just prefer you did your damn job."

Muggeridge's Law posits that there is no way that satire can compete with real life for its pure absurdity. But in the 1990s, NBC's Seinfeld sitcom certainly gave the law a run for its money. In episode #85, The Hamptons, the following exchange occurred:

George: I was supposed to see her. She wasn't supposed to see me.

Jerry: So what?

George: Well ordinarily I wouldn't mind. But...

Jerry: But...

George: Well I just got back from swimming in the pool. And the water was cold...

Jerry: Oh... You mean... shrinkage.

George: Yes. Significant shrinkage!

Jerry: So you feel you were short changed.

George: Yes! I mean, if she thinks that's me she's under a complete misapprehension. That was not me, Jerry. That was not me.

While Seinfeld is no longer a part of the NBC lineup, the spirit of the show obviously lives on at the network and its offshoots, as this MSNBC headline demonstrates:

Polar bear genitals shrinking due to pollution

Shrinkage could endanger animals with already low reproduction rate

Other than George--who knew?

And evidently, these guys apparently have already suffered significant shrinkage. Not to mention, significant airbrushing.

As Allah writes, Rightwingsparkle provides "a quickie intro to the blogosphere, both left and right":

It makes a good video update to my own primers on the Blogosphere over the years. Not to mention, RWS is far easier on the eye than your humble narrator.

As the Beautiful Attrocities blog noted last year, "In the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes".

Including the second year coach of a struggling NFL franchise:

Jets running back Kevan Barlow apologized to 49ers coach Mike Nolan for comparing him to Adolf Hitler in a newspaper interview.

Barlow, who was traded from San Francisco to New York on Sunday for a fourth-round pick, made his inflammatory comments to the Contra Costa Times in Wednesday's editions. Jets coach Eric Mangini said Wednesday he has spoken with Barlow, and the player is sorry for what he said.

"I thought his comments were inappropriate," Mangini said. "After he said it, he wished he could have those words back. But he can't. Kevan has already called coach Nolan to talk to him about that, which I think is important."

Barlow was upset with the trade, mainly because Nolan assured him he wouldn't be dealt. He told the newspaper Nolan was a "first-time head coach with too much power."

"He walks around with a chip on his shoulder, like he's a dictator, like he's Hitler," Barlow told the paper. "People are scared of him. If it ain't Nolan's way, it's the highway."

After making the comments, Barlow called back to say he didn't mean to make the comparison, blaming his outburst on his emotions.

"I was kind of harsh on him, saying he's a dictator. That's bad. Saddam Hussein is a dictator," Barlow said. "I was speaking on emotion."

Gee, you think? Of course, Barlow's far from the only person these days to equate someone whose authority he doesn't respect with the very definition of absolute evil.

Michelle Malkin has details, links, and a photo of Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig in captivity, but othewise looking relatively unharmed. She adds this:

Reuters, yes Reuters, covers the muted coverage and quotes an editor who rejects the "asking for it" attitude:

"I certainly resent any suggestion that reporters here would turn their backs on a colleague in trouble just because they work for a particular media outlet," wrote Dion Nissenbaum, Jerusalem bureau chief of McClatchy Newspapers, on the Poynter site.

Good. Tell it to Bob Laurence.

Indeed.^TM

Update: Jules Crittenden of The Boston Herald has some thoughts on Laurence's anti-Fox rant.

Via Tim Blair, "The 50 worst Australian band names of all time".

(And yes, I know my headline is an awful, awful, pun. Totally INXS.)

South Park evidently gets the last laugh: Paramount leaves Tom Cruise trapped in the closet.

Update: South Park really does get the last laugh: Matt Drudge notes:

On same day Cruise breaks with PARAMOUNT, 'SOUTH PARK' creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone ink two picture deal with -- PARAMOUNT...

For our 2005 TCS Daily look at Brian Anderson's South Park Conservatives book, click here.

Great moments in Drudge headline juxtapositions:

Bob Dylan says modern music is worthless...

TONY BENNETT: 'AMERICA IS CULTURALLY VOID'...

Or as Mickey Kaus asked this past weekend:

Why does the music they play in clothing stores sound so much better than the music they play on the radio?

Of course, if you don't like what you hear on the radio, you can always roll your own...

Related: Chris Anderson of The Long Tail fame asks, "What do people really want in music?"

I think it's a fairly safe bet that if you asked a typical newspaper columnist or television producer what he thought about competition in the business world, you'd get in response some variation decrying it as "cut throat" and "the worst of capitalism" and "only harming consumers". Which makes this email to media maven Jim Romenesko by San Diego Union-Tribune TV critic Bob Laurence on the topic of the kidnapping of Fox News reporter Steve Centanni and his New Zealand-based cameraman Olaf Wiig by terrorists in Gaza all the more disgusting:

I'd like to offer a couple of possible reasons for the lack of attention given to the kidnapping of the two guys from Fox:

One is that, sadly, they are far from the first to be kidnapped, injured or killed. They are, alas, only the most recent two of many. The kidnapping or targeting of journalists in Iraq isn't the story it once was.

Second, Fox has deliberately set itself apart from other news media. Starting at the top with Roger Ailes, the Fox sales pitch has been to deride other media, to declare itself the one source of the real truth, the sole source of 'fair and accurate' news reporting. As a result, there's not a reservoir of kinship or good will with Fox on the part of the rest of the news media. You can't keep insulting people and then expect friendship when you need it.

They've made it a policy to keep a distance between themselves and the rest of the media, far beyond the usual competitive spirit, so that's where they are: at a distance.

Or as the crank TV commentator snarled in the 1980 comedy Airplane!, "Shanna, they bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash!"

Michelle Malkin adds:

First, it's "fair and balanced." Second, what news organization doesn't posit itself the best source of news in an aggressive media world? Third, Laurence and his ilk's inability to set aside contempt for, or envy of, a successful competitor during a crisis is a damning indictment that speaks for itself.

In 2004, leftwing blogger and Ned Lamont-champion Markos Moulitsas Zuniga achieved a fair amount of notoriety in the Blogosphere when, after four Americans were killed in Fallujah, he intemperately wrote:

Let the people see what war is like. This isn’t an Xbox game. There are real repercussions to Bush’s folly.

That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.

Kos has since, understandably, backpedaled from those dashed-off thoughts, but sadly, it looks like that spirit lives on in at least one corner of the liberal media.

Update: Don't miss Dan Riehl's thoughts on Laurence's spleen vent.

As Charles Johnson writes:

Andrew Bolt exposes a ridiculous Hizballah fauxtograph: Hezbollah sinks Australian warship.

Don't miss this one.

Mickey Kaus writes:

Edward Luttwak notes that:

6,821 Americans ...died to conquer the eight square miles of Iwo Jima.

That's more than twice the number of Americans who've died in the entire Iraq war. ... [Rationalization?-ed Perspective.]

More perspective, here.

Michael Medved writes that the subpar performance of Snakes On A Plane is a textbook example of his theory on R movie ratings in action. It makes particular sense given the audience that the producers should have been aiming for: the proverbial teenage male summer movie crowd:

According to many accounts, the producers of "Snakes" originally intended to make their film a PG-13 rated romp---a B-picture, shamelessly silly tale about slithering critters released in mid flight across the Pacific in order to bring down the plane and kill a key witness against a gangland kingpin. In fact, almost everything about the project suggested that it would squeeze box-office dollars out of boys between the ages of 12-and-15 like a giant boa constrictor -- but then the internet activists insisted on more racy content and an "R" rating, and the producers inexplicably followed their lead. The filmmakers went back for several days of new material--- including a scene of pot-smoking and steamy, bare-breasted sex in an airplane bathroom, and Samuel L. Jackson's notorious line: "Enough is Enough! I've had it with these mother%#@! snakes on this mother@#%! plane!"

They thereby got the R-rating they wanted, and lost the youthful audience they needed. As long ago as 1992, my book HOLLYWOOD VS. AMERICA included a groundbreaking study that showed that an R-rating hurts box office performance-- and makes it much less likely for adults-only fare to recoup its investment. More than a dozen major studies (by distinguished universities and savvy marketing firms) since my initial argument have all confirmed the phenomenon I observed: G, PG, and PG-13 films reliably and substantially outperform R - films at the box office.

The harsh rating (demanded by the bloggers and cultists who helped determine the final shape of the film) probably proved particularly punishing for this particular movie.

In other words, had Hollywood kept the film at PG or PG-13, it would have attracted its target audience in droves--but add the R-rating, and it means that teenage boys need to be accompanied by an adult--and I don't know about you, but the idea of mashing-up a gross-out horror movie with an otherwise non-descript air disaster movie gives me two big reasons to skip this film. (I worry enough as it is these days whenever I fly.)

Ace sounds like he agrees entirely with Medved's take, in language that we're censoring for our own typical PG-ish demographic:

Basically, Snakes On A Plane was juiced up with nudity and violence to satisfy a demographic -- fourteen year old boys -- who may see the movie, but they can't actually buy tickets for it, so their ticket sales go not to SOAP's tally but to some random PG movie that just happened to be playing at the same time.

To quote Otter from Delta House: Hollywood, you f***ed up. You trusted us.

Well, not all of us--I suspect I'm enjoying the film's post-mortems far more than I would the movie itself.

The New York Times runs its now seemingly annual article on Hollywood's summer of discontent. While the growth of the Long Tail will tend to decrease the number of blockbusters, it's not like Hollywood is without fault itself, as Mickey Kaus notes about Paramount's odd--to say the least--decision to hire Oliver Stone to be their director on World Trade Center:

But Stone apparently stuck to the script and didn't indulge in wacky-left conspiracizing--ed. Maybe they shouldn't have hired a director so wacky-left-conspiratorial he had to be tied down to a mediocre script lest he blame 9/11 on Michael Eisner!

No kidding.

Elsewhere, conservative film blog Libertas has a great moment in headlines: "Snakes on a Plane--the Howard Dean of Movies?"

In one sense, though, that's an incredibly cheap shot: with well over 1.5 million ticket buyers this past weekend, that's more than double the number of people who were constituents of Dean in Vermont!

Update: In contrast to Mickey Kaus, Hugh Hewitt is singing World Trade Center's praises. Just keep scrolling.

Ace makes a great point: in the past, the legacy media simply dismissed bloggers with a wave of their upturned nose. Today, they run polls in which they attempt to highlight their accuracy:

The very fact they now have to argue they're more accurate is, well, pretty big.

Before it was just assumed. Blogs were simply dismissed.

Now they have to do "studies" and write arguments to convince people they're more accurate.

Hey, would Reuters, CBS, The New York Times, the BBC, the Associated Press and Newsweek lie to you?

But don't worry, Captain Smith says there are plenty of lifeboats. And Baghdad Bob says those aren't a stream of M1 Abrams on the horizon.

Glenn Reynolds explores a strategic quagmire; James Taranto sees a way towards Peace In Our Time.

Dean Barnett stares down the abyss:

In late 1938, Winston Churchill passed a London restaurant and heard great bonhomie coming from within. Churchill said to his companion, “Those poor people. They little know what they will have to face.”

The same can now be said of American society today. Some people choose to believe that the greatest threat to our way of life is George W. Bush. These people deserve the condemnation that history will heap on them.

Others more acutely recognize the threat, but are hamstrung by their fealty to political correctness. If a major daily paper ever wrote an essay like this one, CAIR would pitch a fit. Writing pieces like this invariably brings angry rebukes from those who refuse to look into the abyss and would rather focus their considerable capacity for rage at less formidable targets than hundreds of millions of angry, dangerous people.

But an abyss is what we face. And looking away won’t change a thing.

Meanwhile, James Lileks has a bold new idea for a play--something would be a satiric look at a cutting-edge (in one sense of the word) society:

Wouldn’t be interesting to see a play about actual contemporary anti-Semites whose power extends beyond the confines of an animation studio? But you’re far more likely to see a play about the sex-doll origins of Barbie, for example. Why? Because it would shock town squares to learn that the doll with the tiny waist, long legs and hella-portion hooters might have something to do with sex. It would reexamine – nay, examine for the first time – this culture’s notions of sex, a subject no one ever dares to raise.

Some day someone may pen a biting satirical look at a government so nervous about sex and the irresistible lies of Mad Ave they banned Barbie, Western Pop music and American ads themselves.

If such a play’s performed, it won’t be in by expats in Scotland; it’ll run in Tehran after the Mullahs fall. Among the wise and brave in the west, the Red Scare and the Eisenhower Golfocracy will remain the go-to era for the modern Dark Ages, a time when talented, witty people couldn’t glibly support a collectivist blood-soaked totalitarian system without fear their boss might get the wrong idea.

Read the whole thing.

Update: This profile of Mark Steyn in New Zealand's National Business Review dovetails nicely to the above post:

In the theatrical world, one reads often about the "courage" of many artists making their own statement on international affairs in the new world. These are the types who congratulate themselves on the tremendous moral courage involved, say, in placing a crucifix in urine or some such religious offence ­ provided it is not an affront to the type of Muslim radical who might actually do something about the offence.

As Mr Steyn notes, "we've devalued language to the point where 'courage' means saying something rude about George W Bush rather than having the real courage to identify the real threat to the world we live in."

If one thinks western civilisation is collapsing from "a decadent exhaustion," as Mr Steyn puts it, echoing a strikingly similar critique put years ago by another great commentator, Malcolm Muggeridge, then one is presumably obligated to write about it.

But why would someone want to save civilisation in the first place? Couldn't the fortysomething Mr Steyn, who lives in New Hampshire with his editor wife and three children find something else to occupy himself with?

"You want to do it because you want to enjoy all those small personal pleasures like being able to walk into a piano bar in London and hear a fantastic new singer singing The Way You Look Tonight. That is one of the small pleasures of life, and it's those accumulated pleasures that are something very important and something valuable.

"Radical Islamists, of course, take the view that there are no small pleasures in life- that you can't go out dancing, you can't listen to music, you can't play sport and that earthly life is a drudgery you endure until you get to paradise. I don't look at it that way."

Fortunately, he doesn't look away, either.

Last week, Hugh Hewitt asked, what, if anything, will Arnold Schwarzenegger legacy as governor of California be remembered for?

Wally Cox isn't going to get the girl, Barney Fife isn't going to get to load his bullet, and Phil Angelides isn't going to get close to Arnold.

Arnold thus has the opportunity to get a mandate for something.

The Governator has been campaigning on infrastructure needs, which means the right to spend a lot on planning because given California's environmental laws, litigation-happy activists and the executive branch bureaucracies that Arnold has left unreformed, no major new project will actually happen. There won't be a new campus, a new connector tunnel, a new high speed train. There won't even be the conclusion of previously approved toll road in south Orange County.

Bridges will get repairs and a few widening projects will proceed. "Arnold, repairer of bridges" --this is how he wants to be remembered?

Because California is such a large map on which to work, its governor's do get remembered, for better or worse. Gray Davis was defined by the power crisis, Pete Wilson by his competent handling of major disaster after major disaster and for his embrace of Prop 187. Pat Brown was a builder, Jerry Brown a pop icon and the anti-builder, and George Deukmejian the law and order governor. Reagan, of course, was Reagan.

While California blogger Steve Frank praises his appointments of Republican judges, Chris Weinkopf writes that Arnold's legacy could be in serious danger of ending up as, ironically, the ultimate "girlie man":

Behold the new Arnold, a man bearing little resemblance to the revolutionary who toppled Gov. Gray Davis just three years ago. He’s politically compliant, eager to please, and anxious to avoid a fight. One might say . . . a girlie man.

Schwarzenegger has, in the parlance of the Left, “grown.” So has California’s government. In June, the governor signed a $131 billion budget, up 8.4 percent from the year before. Schwarzenegger’s spending plan is 30 percent larger than the one Davis approved in 2003, just before being ousted as a reckless spender.

“I don’t think the governor is a small-government Republican,” says Jon Coupal, president of California’s largest taxpayer-advocacy group, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Foundation. Or, as GOP pollster Arnold Steinberg puts it, “He’s become a chamber-of-commerce Republican.” That is, “someone who confuses big business with free enterprise.” Adds Steinberg, “He lost his populist roots a long time ago.”

Still a Schwarzenegger supporter, Coupal is quick to point out that the governor hasn’t raised taxes. But it’s unclear how much of the credit belongs to Schwarzenegger and how much belongs to California’s constitution, which requires a two-thirds legislative majority for tax hikes. The Republican minority holds just enough seats to block tax increases, as it did throughout the Davis era. Besides, with a thriving economy producing $8 billion in unanticipated revenues over the last fiscal year, there’s more than enough cash on hand to sate even the biggest of Sacramento’s big spenders.

There are also billions more in planned borrowing. Courtesy of Schwarzenegger, November’s ballot will include $37 billion worth of bonds to rebuild crumbling infrastructure that Sacramento ignored for decades while tending to a perpetually growing bureaucracy and welfare state.

Schwarzenegger, who once spoke loftily about improving California’s business climate, has also warmed up to regulation. In July, he proposed legislation that would require drug companies to provide discounts to families earning as much as three times the federal poverty rate — despite having vetoed similar legislation twice in the past.

What prompted Arnold’s change of heart is last year’s special-election debacle. Emboldened by his ability to intimidate Democrats during his first year in office, Schwarzenegger had launched a “year of reform” campaign to pass several ballot initiatives. But he took on too many vested interests at once — teachers, public-employee unions, every major spending lobby, as well the state legislature and its gerrymandered districting plan. Labor unions spent tens of millions on relentless, highly effective attack ads, and sent protesters to interrupt his every public event.

In short order, Schwarzenegger’s once-stratospheric popularity ratings crashed, and his ballot measures failed. Worse, he lost the one trump card he could bring to negotiations with Democratic legislators — his threat to take matters directly to the voters. In the special election, Democrats discovered they no longer needed to fear Arnold’s popularity.

On the other hand, as of right now, it seems pretty unlikely that Arnold will be resuming his movie career in November.

You've read the book. You've seen the Website. You've heard the podcasts (including mine). Now check out the video, which does a pretty nifty job of explaining the central thesis behind Chris Anderson's new book, in a minute and 29 seconds:

In an interview televised on Fox News with Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal, Melanie Phillips expands on some of the topics discussed in our post yesterday.

This past March, I linked to a Theodore Dalymple essay in City Journal on England's Virginia Woolf, in which the good doctor wrote:

Mrs. Woolf’s ideal college—the kind that would prevent rather than promote wars—would not be in any way elitist. It would “not [be] parcelled out into the miserable distinctions of rich and poor, of clever and stupid.” It would, rather, be a place “where all the different degrees and kinds of mind, body and soul met and co-operated.” It would be entirely nonjudgmental, even as to intellect. For her, the urge to compete does not inhere in man’s nature, nor does it result in anything other than violent strife. Henceforth, there is to be no testing oneself against the best, with the possibility, even the likelihood, of failure: instead, one is perpetually to immerse oneself in the tepid bath of self-esteem, mutual congratulation, and benevolence toward all.

Of course, it is a mistake to suppose that a hypothetical future state of perfect toleration means toleration in or of the present: far from it. Mrs. Woolf would not let her opponents, or those who think differently, live in peace: on the page after the last marked by Michel Leiris, she gives full expression to her slash-and-burn concept of cultural renewal: “No guinea of earned money should go to rebuilding the college on the old plan. . . . [T]herefore the guinea should be earmarked ‘Rags. Petrol. Matches.’ And this note should be attached to it. ‘Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willows. And let the daughters of educated men dance round the fire and heap armful upon armful of dead leaves upon the flames. And let their mothers lean from the upper windows [before, presumably, being burned to death] and cry “Let it blaze! Let it blaze! For we have done with this education!”’”

This incendiary passage, Mrs. Woolf insists in her very next sentence, is not mere empty rhetoric: though she subsequently retreats a little from her incitement to arson by pointing out the self-defeating nature of that crime, insofar as the college she was proposing to burn down was necessary to train women to be able to earn the guinea of discretionary income with which to buy the materials to burn it down in the first place. What a dilemma! The passion, if not the logic, of her argument is clear and perhaps casts a new light on the deliberate destructiveness of the motives that lay behind her literary innovations. She was nothing if not a great hater of all that had gone before her.

She was far from alone back then in her hatred for tradition, of course. And seemingly little has changed since Woolfe wrote her "Rags. Petrol. Matches." manifesto back in 1938. In yesterday's The Australian, Simon Nixon writes that British "progressives" have largely been marking time since. Of course, these days, they've been getting help from some allies who'd like nothing more than to finish the job that Woolf and company started:

Plenty of people in Britain feel angry about Iraq and Lebanon but don't feel the urge to blow themselves up in planes and trains. Even allowing for the anger felt by fellow Muslims, it is still a big step to volunteer to strap on a suicide bomb.

The British political system offers a far more effective way to change government policy. You can vote the government out. So why do young Muslims embrace terrorism rather than democratic politics? How can people born and educated in Britain feel so alienated from its culture and values? The snag is that many never fully engage with British culture and values. Muslims make up the majority in many towns and in most big cities there are large Muslim enclaves. Even if the multiculturalists were to change their minds on the need for integration, it would be too late. Muslim leaders are demanding more separation from mainstream society, not less.

They want bank holidays for Muslim festivals and sharia law courts to rule on family matters. They may well get it. They are helped by the remarkable ambivalence of the liberal Left towards British culture and values: to Christianity, British history, free markets and free trade.

Above all, the Left is deeply suspicious of the institutions in which those values are embedded, starting with the family and extending via churches, schools, businesses, clubs, right through to parliament and the monarchy. To the Left, Britain's social institutions are bastions of privilege that must be remodelled or destroyed to make way for multiculturalism. The resulting cultural war has left British society brutalised and infantilised, and wide open to attack.

Why should British Muslims respect a culture that has no respect for itself? They are quite rightly horrified by the degeneracy of much of what passes for British culture today - the soaring teenage pregnancies, the rampant drug use, the violent city centre no-go areas on a Friday and Saturday night - and they don't want any truck with it. They see that multiculturalism quickly becomes no culture, which makes them all the more determined to hang on to their own.

And they see - as I saw in Birmingham last year - a Left-liberal elite that is so craven in its desire to appease minorities that it has lost the resolve to confront the dangers it has unleashed.

In Tech Central Station this weekend, James Pinkerton wrote, "as we have seen so often in the past century, lefty politics have a way of boomeranging, generating unintended consequences of the bitterest kind". Nowhere is that more obvious than England's multicultural meltdown.

"West Virginia Airport Evacuated Due to 'Suspicious Liquid'"--Mary Katharine Ham has details.

Details of yesterday's aviation weirdness, here.

Allah observes that of Time's "holy trinity of bloggers":

Please note: Ana Marie Cox is now the only one...who hasn’t floated a bats**t conspiracy theory on the magazine’s website. And she’s “the dumb one.” It’s Sullivan and Joshy Rolled-Eyes, the “serious” political thinkers, who have taken to using an esteemed newsweekly as a bullhorn to minimize terrorism. But say this for Marshall: at least when he’s dogpaddling through the fever swamp, he doesn’t pause intermittently to lecture his readers about what “true conservatism” means.

Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, the Professor adds:

THE SUGGESTION, which doesn't seem to be tongue-in-cheek though it's not clearly serious either, that Cheney and Rumsfeld are sabotaging democracy in Iraq so that they'll have a free hand to level Iran with no pesky nation-building, seems pretty out-there to me. Bush's critics are one of his greatest assets, as C.J. Burch said a while back.

Indeed^TM.

Duane Patterson looks at the latest utterings of our 39th president.

If you're unfamiliar with Jimmy's post-presidential odyssey and you'd like a quick primer, Check out Jay Nordlinger's classic "Carterpolooza" from a few years ago.

In its review last November of Theodore Dalrymple's Our Culture, What's Left Of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, the latest anthology of his brilliantly perceptive essays, Canada's National Post wrote:

Elite opinion-makers (the "mandarins" in his subtitle) have created an easygoing culture that tolerates just about anything. It abandons traditional values without replacing them and then wakes up surprised to find that millions of young people don't much care about the civilization that makes life bearable.

To focus on just a slice of that "easygoing culture that tolerates just about anything" in action, the Media Research Center catches a recent Washington Post article that's astonishingly positive towards "Freegans":

Out: the media showing homeless people scrounging for food in dumpster as an indictment of the economy under conservative presidents.

In: the media showing middle class young people scrounging for food in dumpsters as an indictment of capitalism’s success.

Washington Post staff writer Megan Greenwell devoted her article on the front page of the August 16 Metro section to the new trend for young liberal dumpster divers.

Prince Frederick, Md teen Bryan Meadows “considers himself a ‘freegan,’” Greenwell wrote, describing the term as “a melding of the words ‘free’ and ‘vegan’” because Meadows “tries not to contribute to what he sees as the exploitation of land, resources and animals wrought by commercial production.”

Greenwell, a Berkeley, Calif. native, later dumped the quotation marks around “freegan” as she continued her story.

“The number of freegans in the D.C. region is anybody’s guess, but the ranks appear to be growing,” Greenwell insisted, citing anecdotal evidence. The Post writer also blamed “disillusionment with the Bush administration’s environmental policies” that have “pushed some young people to everyday forms of protest.”

But Greenwell didn’t just cite everyday bored left-leaning suburban teens. She also turned to an editor from a liberal Christian magazine, Ryan Beiler of Washington, D.C. who defended his dumpster-diving as a protest of “corporate farming practices” and in reaction to “the absurdity of how the American economy works.”

What the Columbia University graduate left unmentioned was that three months earlier, Beiler wrote a virtual how-to guide for his magazine entitled “The Tao of Dumpster Diving.”

“Dumpster diving works best in pairs,” Beiler advised readers of his May 2006 article. “One person climbs into the dumpster or stands on the side, tossing aside bags of regular trash while searching for the mother lode – bags full of overstocks discarded en masse.”

While Greenwell briefly alluded to “trespassing laws” and mentioned that a risk of dumpster diving includes “confrontation to police,” she didn’t include any law enforcement officials or inform her readers of any criminal penalties a so-called “freegan” can rack up when foraging for expired foodstuffs.

When a similar, and equally non-judgemental story about "freegans" and their dumpster diving exploits ran on the AP wire last Thanksgiving, TigerHawk wrote, "Give thanks that your politics don't compel you to do this".

Or give column space promoting those who do, simply as a protest against the bourgeoisie.

Courtesy of James Lileks, the "Angel of History" pays a visit to Fidel Castro:

"Eventually it will come down to this, my friend: History will note that the people in the American jails at the tip of this island ate better than the average Cuban."

Read the whole thing.

I have a podcast interview with Stephen D. Cooper, the author of a new book on the short, but rather potent history of the Blogosphere, titled, Watching The Watchdog: Bloggers As The Fifth Estate, online at TCS Daily.com.

It's the first of a two-part series. The second part features an interview with three ra^ther prominent members of "The Fifth Estate", which you won't want to miss.

Update: Power Line's Scott Johnson also has some thoughts on Professor Cooper's new book.

I have a piece on what to look for in a computer monitor, in this month's Videomaker magazine. In the "dead tree" version, it accompanies an extensive buyer's Guide; click here to read the article itself online.

Charles Johnson writes, "We knew this was coming: Ahmadinejad says Hezbollah victorious", adding:

The amazing part is that Hizballah claims to be both victor and victim—and the mainstream media are doing their best to support both mutually exclusive positions.

Elsewhere, Andrew Stuttaford links to a piece in the Daily Telegraph in which Michael Nazir-Ali, the Church of England's Bishop of Rochester asks:

So how does this dual psychology--of victimhood, but also the desire for domination--come to infect so many young Muslims in Britain?

In the passage excerpted by Stuttaford, Nazir-Ali looks at one reason that Theodore Dalrymple also explored in depth as one of the causes of last fall's Paris riots.

Update: More dual psychology here, as Val Prieto, guest-blogging at Michelle Malkin's, spots San Franciscans praising the famously pro-gay Fidel Castro:

I've coined a term for people like the ones in the San Francisco and Harlem celebrating fidel castro's birthday: Vicarious Communists (or Marxists, or Socialist or fidelistas. The terms are interchangeable.)

In a similar vein, Fred Siegel's Weekly Standard piece on H.L. Mencken and the psychology behind his anarcho-authoritarianism is also worth exploring.

Dennis Prager writes:

Here are some of the tough questions Mike Wallace asked one of the vilest leaders on earth today: What he thinks of President Bush, why he is concerned about how his jacket looks on television and what he does for leisure. Never once did he challenge Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's attacks on America -- such as America's loving war, seeking to be an imperial power or oppressing its own people.

When asked about his statements that the Holocaust is a "myth," Ahmadinejad replied, "What I did say was, if this is a reality, if this is real, where did it take place?" Wallace did not respond to the leader of a country saying "if" the Holocaust "is real" with a single question. But he probably laughed more with Ahmadinejad than any American news reporter has ever laughed on camera with the president of the United States.

If CBS wanted anything more than ratings and Wallace wanted to be more than a "useful idiot" (Lenin's phrase for the Western journalists and academics who supported Soviet Communism), here are some questions he should have asked Ahmadinejad:

Read the rest.

In his latest TCS Daily column, Glenn Reynolds looks at the current low ebb of elite journalistic credibility:

I had hoped that increased scrutiny from bloggers would make the press more honest, but so far there's no sign of that. And bad or dishonest reporting is destructive and unpatriotic (note that reporting bad news honestly is not, a distinction that dishonest media defenders sometimes try to elide). Can a free press survive if the public concludes that it's in the business of purveying politically motivated propaganda on behalf of civilization's enemies? And, if this kind of thing keeps up, will people be able to resist coming to such a conclusion? The press often responds to business scandals by noting that misbehavior by businessmen is likely to undermine support for free enterprise and lead to public demands for free enterprise. I fear that the same dynamic may lead to reduced support for a free press, and to demands for government regulation of reporting in wartime.

In the meantime, we have to hope that the market will correct the problem before things get that bad. Perhaps newspapers will be less willing to use photos and stories from AP and Reuters when those stories are likely to be lies, and, and I strongly suspect that readers will be less likely to trust newspapers when they run stories that are exploded as propaganda. It's not too late for the press to save itself yet. But it's getting close.

And CBS--once again--isn't exactly raising the bar with what it considers acceptable journalism.

Update: Bernard Goldberg has some thoughts about both his former fellow "Tiffany Network" employee and his most recent interviewee:

Even at age 88, Mike is still Mike, which is another way of saying he's still the best out there. But after watching his "60 Minutes" interview, I came away thinking that Mr. Ahmadinejad understands us a lot better than we understand him. Over the years, dangerous men like him have learned how to play the media game. They have gotten quite sophisticated. I'm afraid we haven't. Unfortunately, "Mike Wallace on line one" doesn't scare anybody in Tehran.

That's OK. Mike just wanted some pillow talk, anyhow.

Another Update: Betsy Newmark and Power Line have additional non-softball questions for Ahmadinejad.

Stephen Green--tanned and ready, if not entirely rested--is back behind the bar at VodkaPundit and is having more fun than Hugo Chavez can shake a giant wooden phallic symbol at. So click on over, already!

Have a Kleenex or ten ready, but don't miss Ed Morrissey's look at "Saint Maximilian Kolbe, A Saint For Our Times".

(Sorry for the lack of posting--a couple of big projects are temporarily pushing wall-to-wall blogging to the backburner.)

In the ContraCosta Times, David Harsanyi writes:

You'll often hear the left lecture about the importance of dissent in a free society.

Why not give it a whirl?

Start by challenging global warming hysteria next time you're at a cocktail party and see what happens.

On TV's version of M*A*S*H, Frank Burns unwittingly captured the Bobo attitude perfectly when he quipped, "Individuality is fine, as long as we all do it together."

Incidentally, I've been meaning to link to this superb Julia Gorin essay on the topic, but never got around to it and this seems like a great post to hang it off of.

(Both found via Tim Blair.)

Adnan Hajj's infamous "fauxtograph" was so crudely modified that a group of bloggers could break it down and tear it apart within the space of a few hours (ahh, good times, good times, as Jonah Goldberg might say). But In TCS Daily, Rand Simberg asks, "what if the photographer was as good with photoshop as the web professional who exposed him?"

What if he knew how to fake the photo in such a way that it would not only be not obvious, but difficult to discern that it was a fake? As tools advance -- and the recent spate of CGI movies from Hollywood and other film centers should demonstrate this explosion of technology -- and people, including unscrupulous and ideological people, learn to use them, it will in fact be much more difficult to know whether or not a published picture accurately represents the event that it purports to show.

How, then, to know if a published photo is, in a paraphrase of the old commercial, real, or Memorex?

There are no obvious easy solutions to this problem, other than the traditional ones for validating evidence -- chains of custody. Press photographers could be required to use certified cameras that time stamp pictures in an encrypted way that doesn't permit modifying the stamp. They could go to accredited image processors who would verify the validity of the original picture from the camera (perhaps even uploading it to a certified notary storage site), and describe any image processing they performed, at risk of loss of accreditation if they pull any funny business. This would, of course, come at a cost, in both dollars for the intermediary and (more importantly for the news business) timeliness. Unfortunately, in the wake of this and other news bias scandals, any news organization that doesn't pull in the reins on its stringers and freelancers, and implement a solution like this, is going to suffer in credibility as time goes on.

And of course, it's not just an issue for the MSM. If the blogosphere wants to continue to build its own credibility, and self-publish home-grown photos (and videos) as part of its own increasing range of reporting, it will have to institute similar measures. Like many problems, this may in fact represent an enormous market opportunity.

When Ra^therGate broke in 2004, Glenn Reynolds astutely noted that the Blogosphere's biggest weakness in the eyes of the MSM is actually its best feature:

The world of Big Media used to be a high-trust environment. You read something in the paper, or heard something from Dan Rather, and you figured it was probably true. You didn't ask to hear all the background, because it wouldn't fit in a newspaper story, much less in the highly truncated TV-news format anyway, and because you assumed that they had done the necessary legwork. (Had they? I'm not sure. It's not clear whether standards have fallen since, or whether the curtain has simply been pulled open on the Mighty Oz. But they had names, and familiar faces, so you usually believed them even when you had your doubts.)

The Internet, on the other hand, is a low-trust environment. Ironically, that probably makes it more trustworthy.

That's because, while arguments from authority are hard on the Internet, substantiating arguments is easy, thanks to the miracle of hyperlinks. And, where things aren't linkable, you can post actual images. You can spell out your thinking, and you can back it up with lots of facts, which people then (thanks to Google, et al.) find it easy to check. And the links mean that you can do that without cluttering up your narrative too much, usually, something that's impossible on TV and nearly so in a newspaper.

(This is actually a lot like the world lawyers live in -- nobody trusts us enough to take our word for, well, much of anything, so we back things up with lots of footnotes, citations, and exhibits. Legal citation systems are even like a primitive form of hypertext, really, one that's been around for six or eight hundred years. But I digress -- except that this perhaps explains why so many lawyers take naturally to blogging).

You can also refine your arguments, updating -- and even abandoning them -- in realtime as new facts or arguments appear. It's part of the deal.

This also means admitting when you're wrong. And that's another difference. When you're a blogger, you present ideas and arguments, and see how they do. You have a reputation, and it matters, but the reputation is for playing it straight with the facts you present, not necessarily the conclusions you reach. And a big part of the reputation's component involves being willing to admit you're wrong when you present wrong facts, and to make a quick and prominent correction.

When you're a news anchor, you're not just putting your arguments on the line -- you're putting yourself on the line. Dan Rather has a problem with that. For journalists of his generation, admitting an error means admitting that you've violated people's trust. For bloggers, admitting an error means you've missed something, and now you're going to set it right.

What people in the legacy media need to ask themselves is, which approach is more likely to retain credibility over time? I think I know the answer. I think Dan Rather does, too.

Well, if Dan does know the future of journalism, it's playing it awfully close to his Brooks Brothers grey flannel vest. But otherwise, that is a safe prognosis for the future of journalism, both MSM, and DIY.

Early in 2004, after winning the nod as the Democrats' candidate for the presidency, John Kerry boldly shouted to President Bush, "BRING. IT. ON." But in August of 2004, Kerry ended up personally asking President Bush to...Make. Them. Stop--make the Swift Boat Vets stop attacking him. And you could argue that it was at this moment that Senator Kerry lost the election, because he couldn't bother to defend his record in the wake of his former colleagues reminding modern voters of Kerry's early 1970s duplicity while in the Naval Reserves. Instead, Kerry ended up whining about the Swift Vets' opposition to his candidacy to his primary opposition, the incumbent president, inadvertently increasing President Bush's stature as a result.

Flash-forward to today--after, as Glenn Reynolds' notes, Ned Lamont's television ad producer and chief cheerleader Jane Hamsher dubbing his opponent "Rape Gurney Joe" and portraying him in blackface, it takes a huge amount of chutzpah for Ned to ask Joe to dial down the language:

Democratic Senate nominee Ned Lamont, the anti-war candidate who toppled Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut primary, says he was surprised by Lieberman and Vice President Dick Cheney’s claims that his victory could embolden terrorists.

“My God, here we have a terrorist threat against hearth and home, and the very first thing that comes out of their mind is how can we turn this to partisan advantage. I find that offensive,” Lamont said in an interview Sunday with The Associated Press.

After British officials disclosed they had thwarted a terrorist airline bombing plot on Thursday, Lieberman warned that Lamont’s call for a phased-withdrawal of troops from Iraq would be “taken as a tremendous victory” by terrorists.

Cheney on Wednesday had suggested that Lamont’s victory might encourage “the al-Qaida types” who want to “break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task.”

‘Seemed almost orchestrated’

Lamont said Lieberman’s swipe at his candidacy “sounded an awful lot” like Cheney.

“It surprised me,” he said. “It seemed almost orchestrated. It’s sort of demeaning to the people of Connecticut ... I thought the senator and the vice president were both wrong to use that attack (strategy) on the voters of Connecticut.”

The Lieberman camp Sunday brushed aside Lamont’s comments.

As well they should. Now that they've kicked Lieberman out of their party, the modern Democrats are the party of international pacifism, but at home, they're still the party that fights the dirtiest for an election. On some level--especially after his campaign's own antics, Ned knows this--but like Kerry two years ago, he doesn't seem to realize how weak he's making himself look by trying to play the losing "Make. Them. Stop." card when Lieberman points out the obvious. (And as Orrin Judd notes, "Way to keep a storyline that's hurting you going and to remind voters that Senator Lieberman is with the Administration against terrorism.")

Like the old Mad magazine "Spy Versus Spy" series, AP has caught fellow Hezbollah public relations arm wire service Reuters in the act of laying out random children's' toys amongst bombed-out rubble to heighten the emotions of their photos, as Betsy Newmark observes.

(Elsewhere, Allahpundit explores a far uglier use of props--that, sadly, at this point, isn't all that surprising.)

"Baghdad Bob" became infamous after shouting about Saddam's glorious crushing of the invading infidels, even as American tanks were visibly arriving into Baghdad unscathed, and seemingly visible within the same minicam's viewfinder that was videotaping Bob. The Blogosphere is rapidly having a similar effect on several news sources, but right now, especially on Reuters. Which makes sense--those who are bending reality into the worst pretzel shapes are usually the easiest to catch in the act.

Update: Speaking of bending reality, check out this video of "Green Helmet Guy" directing a photo shoot of a dead baby being placed into a Lebanese ambulance--but not before the best camera angles are chosen:

All of which begs the question that Mark Steyn asked on his Website:

Here's a question for western news organizations: If Israel is so obviously such a disproportionate bloodthirsty murderous savage beast, why is it necessary to fake the evidence?

I'm not holding my breath waiting for a response.

More: Green Helmet Guy is all over this EU Referendum post, appropriately titled, "The Corruption of the Media".

Mark Steyn makes an absolutely spot-on observation in his latest essay for Maclean's, connecting modern anti-Semitism with its pre-World War II predecessor. For centuries, Steyn writes, Jews in Europe were stereotyped as "sinister rootless cosmopolitan types unbound by allegiance to whichever polity they happened to be residing in":

So, after the Second World War, the ones who were left became a more or less conventional nation state, and now they're hated for that. But all the hoo-ha about Holocaust denial (and granted, from President Ahmadinejad to Mel Gibson's dad, there's a lot of it about) has obscured the fact that the world has re-embraced, with little objection, an older form of anti-Semitism. Israel is, in effect, subject to a geopolitical version of the same conditions endured by Lazarus the Jew in Anthony Hope's Strelsau. The Zionist Entity is for the moment permitted to remain in business but, like Aaron Lazarus, it's not entitled to the enforceable property rights of every other nation state. No other country -- not Canada, not Slovenia, not Thailand -- would be expected to forego the traditional rights of nations subjected to kidnappings of its citizens, random rocket attacks into residential areas, and other infringements of its sovereignty.

* * *

These are dark times for the world: we are on the brink of the nuclearization of ancient pathologies. It's a very strange feeling to read 19th-century novels and travelogues and recognize the old psychoses currently re-emerging in even more preposterous forms. I'm a bit behind in responding to the gazillion Jews-are-to-blame-for-everything emails, but when I do I usually say I take a relaxed view of hatred but take my advice and don't get over-invested in it. There's a very sharp short book by Andrew Roberts called Hitler And Churchill: Secrets of Leadership and, as you go through it, you realize that the key difference between the two is that the prime minister had a very shrewd understanding of what the Führer was like and the Führer had absolutely no clue about the prime minister. To Hitler, Churchill was "that puppet of Jewry": he didn't offer that as a bit of rhetorical red meat for the Saturday-night Nuremberg crowd, but as a serious analysis in the privacy of his study. That's the problem with full-blown Jew-hatred: it's not just a toxic frosting on what may otherwise be a perfectly agreeable cake, so much as a reliable indicator that your entire worldview has been infected. Which is why it doesn't usually work out so well for the Jew-haters. "I have a premonition that will not leave me," wrote Eric Hoffer, America's great longshoreman philosopher, after the '67 war. "As it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us."

Definitely read the whole thing, which was found via Peter Burnett of The Brothers Judd, who adds:

As with anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism defies a clear, objective definition. It must always be explored, pondered and reflected upon, but it is too protean to pin down in the sense of trying to state exactly where it stops and starts. The frequently-heard and increasingly tiresome argument about whether criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic or not almost always misses the point deftly made here by Mr. Steyn. The Arab world has done a stupendous job in persuading most of Europe and much of North America that the grand reconciliation between the West and the Islamic world hinges upon “settling” their dispute with Israel, and that such a resolution will keep us all safe and prosperous. As most of them don’t even bother to hide that they mean never recognizing Israel’s legitimacy and ultimately occupying or even destroying it, is it not a fair question to ask why such irrationality continuously falls on so many receptive ears?

It's also worth re-reading James Bennett's 2003 essay on the Holocaust, and the lasting impact of continental Europe's "self-administered lobotomy", as Bennett calls it, on whatever culture of its own that remains.

Back on July 4th, Michael Medved wrote that the toxic cocktail of transnationalism mixed with punitive liberalism have caused American elites to disparage their country, a far cry from the left of most of the 20th century:

Contemporary followers of Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill view the entire American experience as a disgrace, even a crime. They stress the nation’s guilt in committing “genocide” against Native Americans, enslaving millions of Africans, stealing Mexican land, despoiling the pristine environment, oppressing working people everywhere, and blocking progressive change with an imperialist foreign policy. One Jake Irvin of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington recently told the Wall Street Journal: “My political belief is that the U.S. is a horrendous empire that needs to end.”

In contrast, the radicals and revolutionaries of the past cloaked themselves in patriotic symbols and proclaimed their desire to call the nation back to its own highest ideals. From Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas to Paul Robeson and Abbie Hoffman, these agitators proudly quoted Jefferson, Lincoln, or Tom Paine, and agreed with the nation’s mainstream that Americanism (at least as they defined it) represented the “last, best hope of earth.” Even the Communist Party USA unblushingly honored national heroes: when they dispatched their fighters to support fellow Stalinists in the Spanish Civil War, the volunteers called themselves “The Abraham Lincoln Brigade” not the “Vladimir Lenin Brigade.” Stalin’s personal friend Paul Robeson achieved mainstream popularity with his “Ballad for Americans,” treating the Revolutionary War as a heroic struggle – not a malevolent conspiracy by greedy slaveholders (as it’s often portrayed today).

Despite his personal dalliance with the Communist Party, composer Aaron Copland crafted loving tributes to the American spirit, achieving vast popularity with works from his nationalist period (“Appalachian Spring,” “A Lincoln Portrait,” “Rodeo,” “Billy the Kid”), inventing a distinctive musical language of pioneers and open spaces without nods to multiculturalism or self-pity. Woody Guthrie, another embattled radical, proudly penned “This Land is Your Land,” an unblushing love song to his native soil.

Today’s radicals feel embarrassed by the leftwing flag-waving of 70 years ago, and insist that Americans should feel guilty rather than proud of their nation’s past and its role in the world. Cindy Sheehan, who became a worldwide celebrity by exploiting her son’s combat death in Iraq, recently posted a heart-rending rant on Michael Moore’s website, declaring: “I often have to ask myself why we, as Americans, so blindly follow our leaders down this path of violent destruction, and it has always been so. From the genocide and virtual extinction of our native population to dehumanizing black people so they could be used as human chattel and still be oppressed, even today, to still be the only so-called ‘civilized nation’ that executes people…Before we can change the world we have to look in our hearts and change ourselves. Before Casey was KIA in Iraq I led the life of rampant consumerism that wreaked havoc on my soul and the environment.”

Her personal guilt conforms to Colorado University professor Ward Churchill’s belief that the people who died in the World Trade Center could rightly be classified as “little Eichmanns” who deserved their violent, painful demise. Like Sheehan, he goes back to America’s “original sins” – maltreatment of Indians and enslavement of blacks- to argue against any sense of pride or patriotism for what this nation accomplished.

But it isn't just elites in the arts or academia who lack pride in the US. In today's Opinion Journal, Michael Barone writes that everyday Democrat voters have largely lost faith as well:

The Connecticut primary reveals that the center of gravity in the Democratic Party has moved, from the lunch-bucket working class that was the dominant constituency up through the 1960s to the secular transnational professional class that was the dominant constituency in the 2004 presidential cycle. You can see the results on the map. Joe Lieberman carried by and large the same cities and towns that John F. Kennedy carried in the 1960 presidential general election.

Ned Lamont carried most of the cities and towns that were carried by Richard Nixon. In Stamford, where Joe Lieberman grew up the son of a liquor-store owner, and where there are still sizeable blue-collar and black communities, Mr. Lieberman won with 55% of the vote. In next-door Greenwich, where Ned Lamont (like former President George H.W. Bush) grew up as the scion of an investment banker family, and where the housing values are now among the highest in the nation, Mr. Lamont won with 68% of the vote. If Mr. Lamont wins in November, he will be just one of several members of a Democratic caucus who have made, inherited or married big money.

* * *

The working class Democrats of the mid-20th century voted their interests, and knew that one of their interests was protecting the nation in which they were proud to live. The professional class Democrats of today vote their ideology and, living a life in which they are insulated from adversity, feel free to imagine that America cannot be threatened by implacable enemies. They can vote to validate their lifestyle choices and their transnational attitudes.
In the mid-20th century the core constituencies of both the Democratic and the Republican Parties stood foursquare for America's prosecution of World War II and the Cold War. Today, as the Connecticut results suggest, it's different. The core constituency of the Republican Party stands foursquare for America's prosecution of the global struggle against Islamofascist terrorism--and solidly on the side of Israel in its struggle against the same forces. The core constituency of the Democratic Party wants to stand aside from the global struggle--and, as the presence of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton at Mr. Lamont's side on election night suggests, is not necessarily on the side of Israel.

Or as Barone concludes, "It's not your father's Democratic Party".

Back in February, I quoted Tom Wolfe from 25 years ago on the press assuming "the moral tone of a Victorian gentleman". I wrote:

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.

* * *

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.

Get a load of the photos Zombie shot today of the "Stop the US-Israeli War Rally" in San Francisco. Charles Johnson writes:

Zombie documents the insanity in San Francisco.

There’s no other way to describe this. But you won’t see any of these images in the mainstream media.

Especially not Zombie's first photo. This past week, Dean Barnett wrote:

Has there been a disquieting whiff of anti-Semitism in the anti-Lieberman campaign?

Yes. For some reason, Lieberman’s opponents decided it was appropriate to tar the Senate’s most prominent Jew with Nazi-like rhetoric. Kos tagged an entry on Lieberman with the label “Vichy Democrats.” Allah has pointed out that someone started calling Lieberman’s campaign workers the LieberYouth. And I don’t know exactly what Jane Hamsher meant with that black-face piece of artistic commentary, but it wasn’t nice.

No kidding--add it all to Mike Wallace's whitewash of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ("An anti-Semite, an anti-Jew...anti-Jew? No...") and the signage photographed in San Francisco, and Chris Matthews' stereotyping Lieberman as "the schmaltzy ethnic guy, the Uncle Tonoose", and it really does feel like the left is partying like it's 1939.

And as I've written before, I fear that with November elections--and their aftermath--looming, the worst is yet to come.

Ed Morrissey notes that New York TImes editor Bill Keller has lied about delaying publication of its paper's NSA surveillance story until after the 2004 election, because he feared it would help President Bush:

Left-wing pundits and bloggers have insisted that Keller spiked the story to keep George Bush in office. Keller, however, has a different take on his decision. He insists that the news would have likely helped Bush rather than hurt him, and the public support for this program after its delayed revelation last December supports that analysis. John Kerry and the Democrats had castigated Bush for the lack of visible effort to find and track terrorists, and the program's exposure would have forced Kerry to recant and suddenly argue that Bush had been too enthusiastic about fighting terrorism, a tough pirouette to execute in a grueling presidential campaign.

In the end, the final version of the story got prepared just days before the election, and Keller argues that a release at that point would have been "unfair" to all parties. It took several weeks for all of the political dust to settle once the article did come out. He may have a point, but then two related events took place: he delayed the release for over a year, and then Keller lied about the timing when he published it.

Calame asked Keller why he lied, although Calame didn't quite put it that way. Keller says he used "inelegant" wording in his description, but clearly Keller wanted to keep that information secret. Besides, Keller's job as editor depends on his use of words and the judgement of what and how to communicate. It's clear that Keller wanted to keep people from learning that he had the chance to publish this before the election, and he deliberately did not. Why lie? He depends on the Left for his readership, and his reluctance to publish the article when Bush was vulnerable will likely lose his readership.

Keller has destroyed what's left of his paper's credibility. He lied to everyone about the timing of this publication, baldly and publicly. It also damages the credibility of everyone associated with this story. After all, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau certainly knew that the story was ready before the November 2nd election -- and yet they chose to play along with Keller's lies that the decision to spike it was in December 2004 rather than October and November.

The Paper of Record managed to utterly destroy the trust it still had left with readers across the political spectrum with this story.

Go back and reread that first sentence by Ed that I quoted. It seems utterly astonishing that far left readers believe that the Times would be sympathetic to President Bush--especially after the 2004 admission from its then-ombudsman admitting the paper's longstanding biases, and this recent cri de coeur from its publisher. On the other hand, it does speak volumes for the speed at which Al Gore's "Rightwing Media Bias" meme has spread through the cocoon.

How today's New York Times would have covered World War II. As Baron Bodissey writes, "This is a Joke. Almost."

I think Jeff Goldstein has the right idea:

Sometimes, when Israel has ostensibly surrendered its strategic advantage and the US is ostensibly making feints toward a return to foreign policy “realism,” I like to go to the mall and by myself something velour.

So if anybody needs me, I’ll be shopping for 1982. With any luck, maybe I’ll catch an Asia reunion concert, too.

Me, I'll take 1985 or 1986: the Gipper in the White House, Miami Vice at its peak, MTV before the rot sat in, M Magazine (the thinking man's Esquire!) still being published, Hollywood before political correctness shrunk it down to size, a bull market in ascendancy--what's not to like?

No velour for me, but a single-breasted double-vented peak lapelled navy blue chalkstripe Ralph Lauren power suit from the era would fit the bill nicely. Preferably with working sleeve buttons. And maybe a pair of Ray-Bans, in case Sonny Crockett needs backup. Or maybe an Alexander Julian sweater--in case Heathcliff Huxtable needs a wingman in the maternity ward.

The end times truly are here: NBC's David Gregory and MSNBC's Tucker Carlson were each spotted on TV this past week getting down and getting funky.

Sorry, I don't have a punch line for this. Maybe when the image of two prominent network commentators doing the Electric Pundit Boogaloo finally wears off, I'll think of one.

Update: Betsy Newmark has some related thoughts:

And even if Carlson turns out to be one of the most gifted, natural dancers since Fred Astaire, can this help him win street cred on his MSNBC show?

I dunno--I never miss Paula Abdul's op-eds in the New York Times, myself.

The Media Research Center has just released a report on why Hollywood invariably portrays businessmen as heavies in its movies and TV shows--despite the fact that Hollywood is one of the largest, most financially successful industries on the planet. While the obvious and cliched answer is "because the writers, directors and actors are all lefties who hate capitalism, even as it allows them to purchase another Porsche Prius to park in front of their mansion", there's much more to it than that, of course.

This past December, we looked at "The Ever-Shrinking Cinematic Storytelling Complex", in which political correctness and special interest groups have severely limited Hollywood's choices for bad guys, lest they risk an assault of negative press releases, bad PR and violate the politically correct Prime Directive. Or as Edward Jay Epstein wrote at the time:

Why don't the movies have plausible, real-world villains anymore? One reason is that a plethora of stereotype-sensitive advocacy groups, representing everyone from hyphenated ethnic minorities and the physically handicapped to Army and CIA veterans, now maintain liaisons in Hollywood to protect their images. The studios themselves often have "outreach programs" in which executives review scripts and characters with representatives from these groups, evaluate their complaints, and attempt to avoid potential brouhahas.

Finding evil villains is not as easy as it was in the days when a director could choose among Nazis, Communists, KGB, and Mafiosi. Still, in a pinch, these old enemies will serve. For example, the 2002 apocalyptic thriller Sum of All Fears, based on the Tom Clancy novel, originally had Muslim extremists exploding a nuclear bomb in Baltimore. Paramount decided, however, to change the villains to Nazis residing in South Africa to avoid offending Arab-American and Islamic groups. Yet, even if aging Nazis lack any credible "outreach program" in Hollywood, they can no longer be credibly fit into many contemporary movies. "The list [of non-offensive villains] narrows quickly once you get past the tired clichés of Nazis," a top talent agency executive pointed out in an e-mail. "You'd be surprised at how short the list is."

For sci-fi and horror movies, there are always invaders from alien universes and zombies from another dimension, but for politico-thrillers, the safest remaining characters are lily-white, impeccably dressed American corporate executives. They are especially useful as evildoers in foreign-based thrillers, since their demonization does not run the risk of gratuitously offending officials in countries either hosting the filming or supplying tax and production subsidies. The "Mission Impossible" franchise replaced the Russian and Chinese heavies that populated the TV series with, in Mission Impossible 2, a WASPish-looking financier who controlled a pharmaceutical company that unleashed a horrific virus on the world in the hopes of cashing in on the antidote. Here, as in other movies in this genre, businessmen's killings are not just figurative. Unlike other stereotype-challenged groups, CEOs and financiers, lacking a connection with the studios' outreach programs, have become an essential part of Hollywood's new version of the axis of evil.

If you're in a multimedia sort of mood, this exceptional TCS Daily video podcast on "The Creative Class vs. Capitalism", featuring Michael Medved, Lanny Davis, James Pinkerton, Dan Gainor and TCS editor Nick Schulz is well worth your time. As I wrote when it first went online, if you do choose to watch it, do not miss Michael Medved's Grand Unified Theory of Hollywood, about an hour into the program.

TigerHawk asks:

So, if an existential war against Islamo-fascism is as inevitable as World War II became after the appeasement of the 1930s, what event would be necessary to motivate the United States to militarize its society and economy to fight that war? What event, if any, would militarize Western Europe?

This is strictly off the top of my head, so take it with a grain of salt. But here's my very initial take.

If 9/11 didn't cause President Bush to militarize America's society and economy, I can only assume that it would take, God forbid, a nuclear blast, or the successful completion of something on the order of what the terrorists captured this past week had planned. But even then, as we've seen with our efforts in Iraq, it would only be a matter of time before the elite media and the left (sorry to be redundant) began to second-guess any military efforts, and undermine them.

As for continential Europe, forget it. I concur with Jonah Goldberg's assessment of the extent that the level of America's Cold War-era protection of western Europe has allowed their collective welfare states to grow so large that they've sapped their countries' armies:

By taking their defense for granted for so long, too many of our allies believe that talk can get them everything they need. Like the kid living off his Chevron card, they've come to believe the world is like a giant college campus, where conflicts may erupt in the form of debates and shouting matches but violence is simply "against the rules," and where being asked to pay your own way in the world seems an absurd injustice.

And as Mark Steyn wrote in 2004:

For more than a week now, American friends have asked me why 3/11 wasn't 9/11. I think it comes down to those two words you find on Holocaust memorials all over Europe: "Never again." Fine-sounding, but claptrap. The never-again scenario comes round again every year. This very minute in North Korea there are entire families interned in concentration camps. Concentration camps with gas chambers. Think Kim Jong-Il's worried that the civilised world might mean something by those two words? Ha-ha.

How did a pledge to the memory of the dead decay into hollow moral preening? When an American Jew stands at the gates of a former concentration camp and sees the inscription "Never again", he assumes it's a commitment never again to tolerate genocide. Alain Finkielkraut, a French thinker, says that those two words to a European mean this: never again the führers and duces who enabled such genocide. "Never again power politics. Never again nationalism. Never again Auschwitz" - a slightly different set of priorities. And over the years a revulsion against any kind of "power politics" has come to trump whatever revulsion post-Auschwitz Europe might feel about mass murder.

That's why the EU let hundreds of thousands of Bosnians and Croats die on its borders until the Americans were permitted to step in. That's why the fact that thousands of Iraqis are no longer being murdered by their government is trivial when weighed against the use of Anglo-American military force required to effect their freedom. "Never again" has evolved to mean precisely the kind of passivity that enabled the Holocaust first time round. "Neville again" would be a better slogan.

So the real question is, what will it take to militarize the allies in the Anglosphere we already have: Britain and Australia? (Canada's new prime minister might be willing to join in, but I suspect after decades of Trudeaupia, its military is probably about the shape that most of Old Europe's is in.)

As I said, an absolutely horrific attack might do it--but possibly not even that.

"Fredo, you're nothing to me now. You're not a brother, you're not a friend. I don't want to know you or what you do. I don't want to see you at the hotels, I don't want you near my house. When you see our mother, I want to know a day in advance, so I won't be there. You understand?"

--Michael Corleone

To follow up on our post last night, add another prominent Democrat who's giving their 2000 vice presidential candidate and three term senator the cold shoulder. Here's Bill Richardson and Joe Lieberman on the presidential campaign trail in September of 2003:

Lieberman, holding a glass of red wine, receives Richardson in the living room. They, too, are old friends. They worked on the 1992 Democratic platform together. They hug. "I'm not drinking alone," Lieberman tells Richardson as the governor is handed a glass. They clink.

"I wore this to curry favor with you," Lieberman says, pointing to a New Mexico pin on his lapel. "You also saw that I spoke a little Spanish in [the debate]."

"I thought that was Yiddish," Richardson says, and slaps Lieberman's right triceps.

"I love Bill Richardson," Lieberman says in a brief speech a few minutes later. "When the good Lord created Bill Richardson, he threw the mold away."

Richardson raises his glass to Lieberman, the last Democratic running mate, who, in turn, raises his glass to the man who might be the next.

Well, that didn't work out for Bill, did it? And it while these men may still profess their "love" and respect for each other, business is business, as Tammy Bruce notes:

All the polls, from the beginning, made it clear that Joe would win in a three-way general race, but the party hacks just couldn't risk upsetting Soros or their far-left Puppet Masters.

Now, in the ultimate bending-over for the party, Bill Richardson, Friend of Bill and Governor of New Mexico, has asked Joe Lieberman to "step aside" and not run as an independent.

Richardson calls on Lieberman to step aside:

[Richardson] called Lieberman "a good friend of mine" and a "true public servant."

But he said in a statement Thursday that he was backing Ned Lamont, the man who defeated Lieberman in this week's Democratic primary.

"I look forward to supporting Ned as he fights to help Democrats take back the Senate, and I call on Joe Lieberman to respect the will of the voters and step aside," Richardson said.

Uh. Yeah. Right. The will of the voters? That would be determined in November, Guv. For being the "pro-choice" party it's fascinating how that doesn't apply to elections and candidates. Obviously, the Dems know they cannot beat Joe, so they want him to surrender. They've been hanging out with the French too long. And gee, the party hacks did so much for him during the primary, I betcha he'd just love to do whatever they ask of him now. Not.

The Dems now have a rather slimy bed they've made, and they're all going to have to deal with it. But, as is the usual case for Friends of Bill and the nihilistic foundation he left behind, these same people don't want to deal with the repercussions of their actions--whether it be sexually assaulting a woman, lying to the American people, or eating one of their own--who happens to be the better person, the better candidate, and ultimately, the winner.

If Lieberman does win as an independent in November (and early polls favor him, though the key word is early), it will be very interesting to see what his relationship will be with his former party, and who makes the first efforts to bridge this exponentially widening gap.

First it was just another cheesy Super Bowl ad. But as The Anchoress notes, in retrospect it served as a grim foreshadowing of Presbyterian fascism!

(I wonder if they like their 72 raisins dipped in Miracle Whip?)

Back in March, when Slobodan Milosevic assumed room tempature, Austin Bay described the progression of his ideological beliefs moving "from red to brown" as the Cold War ended:

Milosevic orchestrated the Serb-Croat war and crafted the Serb strategy of “creeping aggression.” He was also the bully behind “ethnic cleansing” in eastern Bosnia. He epitomized the move from “red to brown” in eastern Europe– moving from Communist to ultra-nationalist fascist as the Cold War ended.

Earlier, as World War II transitioned into the Cold War, the career path of Nobel Literature Prize-winning German author Gunter Grass jagged in the opposite direction, as Mona Charen writes:

How disgusting. We now learn that Soviet-appeasing, Western-despising, America-detesting Nobel Literature Prize-winning German author Gunter Grass was a member of the Waffen SS in his youth. Grass earned his lofty reputation by indulging every fashionable far-left cliché of his time. Europe’s elite opinion shapers rewarded this with the Nobel Prize and he received kow tows throughout his long and verbose career.Victor Davis Hanson has the details.

He now reveals that he did not just serve the German Wehrmacht in World War II (obviously millions did so both voluntarily and involuntarily) but in the SS, the unit hand-picked for atrocity work; Holocaust a specialty.

Did he believe that his anti-Americanism somehow expiated the sin of Nazism? That’s certainly the way Europe’s elites would see it. For those not sunk in total moral obtuseness however, Grass career betrays his consistency. He went from being a participant in one tyranny to being an apologist for another – all the while heaping scorn on the humane power that opposed them both.

Austin added this in his post about Milosevic:

The Nazis and Communists both knew they were cut from the same hideous human mold. They both share a disdain for liberalism and a disregard for human life. They are also permanently anti-American. Hitler called the US cowboys– remember that next time you hear the US “cowboy” disparaged. You can see these traits displayed by the Stalinists still among us.

And as I wrote at the time, it's almost like the two ideologies are intertwined...

Update: Tim Blair spots Grass being dubbed "the country’s moral guide for decades" by the press and responds thusly:

Germany’s “moral guide”, was he? Tough gig.

Heh! Indeed. ^TM

What does it take to be considered anti-Semitic, especially by the legacy media?

Mel Gibson rightly earned the world's contempt when he spouted off phrases such as ""F*****g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." during his DUI bust late last month. But if you're Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a bit more work is involved--in fact, a lot more work is involved. You can say things such as this:

TEHRAN, Iran - Iran’s hard-line president called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and said a new wave of Palestinian attacks will destroy the Jewish state, state-run media reported Wednesday.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also denounced attempts to recognize Israel or normalize relations with it.

“There is no doubt that the new wave (of attacks) in Palestine will wipe off this stigma (Israel) from the face of the Islamic world,” Ahmadinejad told students Wednesday during a Tehran conference called “The World without Zionism.”

“Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury, (while) any (Islamic leader) who recognizes the Zionist regime means he is acknowledging the surrender and defeat of the Islamic world,” Ahmadinejad said.

Ahmadinejad also repeated the words of the founder of Iran’s Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who called for the destruction of Israel.

“As the imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map,” said Ahmadinejad, who came to power in August and replaced Mohammad Khatami, a reformist who advocated international dialogue and tried to improve Iran’s relations with the West.

And you can combine such hatred with a megalomania which would make even Mel Gibson or your average Hollywood mogul blush:

Prague, 29 November 2005 (RFE/RL) — According the report by baztab.com, President Ahmadinejad made the comments in a meeting with one of Iran’s leading clerics, Ayatollah Javadi Amoli.

Ahmadinejad said that someone present at the UN told him that a light surrounded him while he was delivering his speech to the General Assembly. The Iranian president added that he also sensed it.

“He said when you began with the words ‘in the name of God,’ I saw that you became surrounded by a light until the end [of the speech],” Ahmadinejad appears to say in the video. “I felt it myself, too. I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed there, and for 27-28 minutes all the leaders did not blink.”

Ahmadinejad adds that he is not exaggerating.

“I am not exaggerating when I say they did not blink; it’s not an exaggeration, because I was looking,” he says. “They were astonished as if a hand held them there and made them sit. It had opened their eyes and ears for the message of the Islamic Republic.”

And you can deny the Holocaust ever happened:

Ahmadinejad last week questioned whether the Nazi destruction of 6 million European Jews during World War II occurred and said Israel should be moved to Europe. He also provoked an international outcry in October when he called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”

But Wednesday was the first time he publicly denied the Holocaust. Touring southeast Iran, Ahmadinejad said that if Europeans insist the Holocaust happened, then they are responsible and should pay the price. ...

Today, they have created a myth in the name of Holocaust and consider it to be above God, religion and the prophets,“ Ahmadinejad told thousands of people in the southeastern city of Zahedan.”

And say this:

BERLIN (Reuters) - Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Germans they should no longer allow themselves to be held prisoner by a sense of guilt over the Holocaust and reiterated doubts that the Holocaust even happened.

In an interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine, Ahmadinejad said he doubted Germans were allowed to write “the truth” about the Holocaust and said he was still considering traveling to Germany for the World Cup soccer tournament.

“I believe the German people are prisoners of the Holocaust. More than 60 million were killed in World War Two ... The question is: Why is it that only Jews are at the center of attention?,” he said in the interview published on Sunday.

“How long is this going to go on?” he added. “How long will the German people be held hostage to the Zionists?... Why should you feel obligated to the Zionists? You’ve paid reparations for 60 years and will have to pay for another 100 years.”

Oh, and this, too:

"The Zionists think that they are victims of Hitler, but they act like Hitler and behave worse than Genghis Khan," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday. He was quoted by the Iranian News Agency.

(But how can Ahmadinejad think Israel is acting like Hitler if he doesn't think the Holocaust occurred? Must be all those Israeli road building programs, I guess...)

So after all that, Mike Wallace, fresh off a one-on-one interview with Ahmadinejad, goes on Sean Hannity's radio show, and has this astonishing exchange with the host:

MW: He (Ahmadinejead) is not trying to project an image. Look, it's very difficult. I know...I found it difficult to understand, but the more that I sat there, and the more time that I spent with the man, he is...I'm not suggesting...he despises, if you will...oh, he doesn't despise, but he doesn't like the United States. He doesn't like the United States for the reason that it's supporting the Zionist entity. He doesn't talk about Israel.

SH: So you don't think he's an anti-Semite?

MW: He himself, an anti-Semite, an anti-Jew...anti-Jew?

SH: Yes.

MW: No, I don't.

Golden Yellow Fluffo, indeed. I'd love to know what actually would have qualified for anti-Semitism in Wallace's book--maybe Mel should skip Oprah and sit down with Mike if he wants the media to believe he's cleaned up his act. Or at least get the starring gig on CSI: Tehran.

And Victor Davis Hanson is spot-on: welcome back to the 1930s. Although without Fred Astaire and Duke Ellington to soften the endless appeasement and cynicism by the world's "liberal" elites.

Found via the Professor, Madison Avenue adjusts to the new reality: brutal opression of women, the sudden crushing of 80 years of growing equality that has been the sine qua non of the Bush-Cheney White House.

We can only assume that burkas will be next.

(White cotton burkas. And Clorox will get their stains out as well...)

In June of last year, Ed Morrissey wrote:

NBC's Brian Williams extended the concept of moral equivalence into the territory of the absurd in tonight's installment of the NBC Evening News. The new anchor discussed the story about Iranian president-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's possible involvement in the 1979 American embassy takeover in Teheran and subsequent hostaging of its staff. As I argued earlier, Williams noted that even if true, it wouldn't make much difference in how we interact with the Iranian government, which supported the takeover and quickly co-opted it themselves.

However, as Dread Pundit Bluto noted, Williams instead argued that the British likely faced the same dilemma after the creation of the United States. After all, Williams says, one can easily confuse people like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi with George Washington:

The White House and most official branches of government are ducking any substantive comment on this story, and photo analysis is going on at this and other news organizations. It is a story that will be at or near the top of our broadcast and certainly made for a robust debate in our afternoon editorial meeting, when several of us raised the point (I'll leave it to others to decide germaneness) that several U.S. presidents were at minimum revolutionaries, and probably were considered terrorists of their time by the Crown in England.

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

Additionally, according to Wikipedia (so take it with a grain of salt), the word "terrorism" actually post-dates the American Revolution:

The term "terrorism" comes from the French word terrorisme, which is based on the Latin verb terrere (to cause to tremble), [17] It dates back to 1795 when it was used to describe the actions of the Jacobin Club in their rule of post-Revolutionary France, the so-called "Reign of Terror". Jacobins are rumored to have coined the term "terrorists" to refer to themselves. The English word "terrorism" was popularized in English when it was used by the conservative Edmund Burke, an outspoken opponent of the French Revolution in general, as well as the Terror. Acts described as Jacobin Club "terrorism" were mostly cases of arrest or execution of opponents as a means of coercing compliance in the general public. According to Juegensmeyer, they were public acts of destruction which inflicted a public sense of fear due to the lack of military objectives.

But Williams can't help making the same sort of moral equivalency when it comes to the US and terrorists. On today's Hardball, Williams was interviewed by Chris Matthews. Matthews asked:

"Here we have maybe 24 people who have lived in London and England and the free world for all these years that become citizens, subjects of the Crown, and, yet, after having gotten to know us, they want to kill themselves to hurt us. Isn't that an even deeper conundrum here than the chemicals being used in these attacks?"

Williams responded:

"And that, Chris, that last aspect, the willingness to take one's own life -- I always tell people there are guys on our team like that, too. They're called Army Rangers and Navy Seals and the Special Forces folks and the first responders on 9/11 who went into those buildings knowing, by the way, they weren't going to come out. So we have players like that on our team."

Mark Finkelstein of Newsbusters corrects Williams--not that he'll ever hear the message or change his, of course:

Wrong. Our people are highly trained to accomplish their mission in a manner that gives them the best possible chance of survival. Yes, they heroically assume great risks, knowingly putting their lives on the line. But it is grotesquely mistaken for Williams to suggest that their commanders are sending them on suicide missions. To compare them with terrorists-- often young, confused people being exploited by cynical masters who send them to their deaths--is disgraceful.

But it's nothing new for Williams, sadly.

Update: MSMathematics!

Update (8/11/06): Brian dissembles here, coins new phrase:

Comments I made during a live interview with Chris Matthews last night have been aggressively misunderstood in the hours since.

Just to add to the aggressive misunderstanding, Jed Babbin, sitting in for Hugh Hewitt today pointed out an earlier example of Brian's equivalency, comparing the allied coalition's carefully controlled bombing of Baghdad's government and military buildings in March of 2003, with the mammoth destruction inflicted upon all of Dresden in 1945.

Teddy Kennedy on Joe Lieberman at the Democrats' 2000 convention:

Earlier Tuesday night, Sen. Edward Kennedy strode to the podium to make comparisons between his brother, President Kennedy, who received the Democratic nomination in Los Angeles in 1960, and Gore. "How proud (John Kennedy) would be of Al Gore and our party and the new barrier of bigotry we are breaking down with the choice of Joe Lieberman as the next Vice President of the United States."

Jesse Jackson at the same convention:

In an evening dedicated to not only carving out the Democrats' positions, but introducing voters and viewers to Gore, Jesse Jackson praised the vice president for his selection of a running mate.

"The long arm of justice reaches neither for the political left nor the political right, but for the moral center," Jackson said in his measured cadence, running through a list of traditionally Democratic issues and heralding Gore and Lieberman as "America's dream team of the Democratic Party."

Jackson noted marked distinctions between the Gore-Lieberman ticket and the their Republican rivals, Texas Gov. George W. Bush and former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.

"In selecting Joe Lieberman, Al Gore has brought the sons and daughters of slaves and slavemasters, together with the sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors. He raised the moral chin bar. When a barrier falls for one of the locked out, it opens the doors for all."

But hey, that was then, and this now. BDS changes all:

Lieberman’s senate colleagues are wasting no time throwing their combined support behind Lamont, in a move they hope will stifle Lieberman’s independent ambitions.

“I pledge my enthusiastic support for (Lamont) in November,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy said in a statement. “Ned is fighting to take our country in a new direction, both at home and abroad. His victory last night was a clarion call for change. Connecticut voters turned out in record numbers to change a failed policy in Iraq, to call for health care for all Americans, to fight for a truly independent judiciary and much more.”

As for Jackson:

"We're campaigning across the state for a big turnout on Tuesday," Jackson said, referring to Lamont's Democratic primary against incumbent Sen. Joseph Lieberman. "What is at stake is the direction of our country and its priorities."

The event turned into a full-fledged political rally, with supporters for both Lamont and Lieberman chanting for their respective candidates. Lamont shook hands with the Lieberman crowd as well as with his own constituents.

Recent polls show Lamont has a slight lead heading into the primary. The race has garnered national attention, with some prominent Democrats upset with Lieberman's backing of President George W. Bush on the Iraq War.

Jackson called Lieberman a good man, but said he had wandered away from the principles of the Democratic Party.

"His embrace of Bush's position before the war was a challenging one, but his continued embrace is incomprehensible," Jackson said.

"The idea of Iraq was based on the false premise of weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda connections, and the threat that never was the case. Now we've lost lives, and money, and honor. The price we're paying for the war in Iraq is that we no longer have the resources to invest in Hartford, Middletown, Bridgeport, New Haven. We are losing abroad and suffering at home."

Jackson complimented Lamont's dedication to a comprehensive medical plan, universal pre-kindergarten education and "big ideas that make sense."

Uh-huh. David Limbaugh puts it all into perspective:

But these Democrats, perhaps unwittingly, are just reinforcing what we've been saying about them: They have no constructive solutions and no policy agenda other than to oppose and trash President Bush and "his war." Reid and Schumer admitted as much when they essentially dismissed Lamont's role in the election, saying it was "a referendum on the president more than anything else."

Liberal Slate magazine confirmed this Democratic mindset in an article following the July debate between Lieberman and Lamont by conceding that "Lamont is less a candidate than he is a conduit" for the expression of displeasure against Lieberman for supporting Bush on the war.

Hopefully, Democrats will continue to glean the wrong message from this election and believe they can rely exclusively on an anti-Bush wave to carry them to victory instead of resuming their long lost role as a credible party offering an alternative agenda. Such ill-begotten and delusional smugness is exactly where we want them to be going into 2006.

We'll see. But along with this, in the meantime, I can't help but wonder what Lieberman thinks of his "colleagues" today.

Update: Related thoughts from Ed Morrissey.

More: Jonah Goldberg writes that "Lieberman fascinates political junkies because he's an outlier, like an albino rhino or the last of the Mohicans. And his loss doesn't usher in a new reality so much as confirm the familiar one":

Sure, Lieberman's 52% to 48% defeat was a very big deal politically. Looking at the dozen election cycles prior to 2006, political scientist Larry Sabato points out that among about 400 separate Senate races, only three incumbents were felled by primary challenges. That one of them was the Democratic Party's vice presidential nominee just six years ago is amazing. But Lieberman's loss is a bit less dramatic given the Democratic Party's evolution over the last quarter of a century. Lieberman was always sui generis — a hawkish, culturally right-of-center Democrat from a blue state.

As many have noted, the only reason he could get away with his Bill Bennett-esque sermonizing is that he's an Orthodox Jew. For many liberals, when white Christian politicians talk about God, it's scary. When Jews do it, it's quaint. No Christian national Democrat has talked so openly and sincerely about God and traditional values in decades (a point acknowledged by the Democrats' so far insufficient efforts to re-energize their evangelical outreach). President Clinton came the closest, but liberals could overlook it because they suspected that he really didn't mean it.

As for Lieberman's hawkishness, it seemed anachronistic — and just plain odd. He supported Bush on the war more forcefully than many Republicans, justifying his refusal to criticize the president on grounds that politics should stop at the water's edge, particularly during a war. That's sweet, but rumors that such restraint is a respected American political tradition are greatly exaggerated. It was a lack of such restraint by Sen. George McGovern that created the latter-day Democratic Party, from which Lieberman sticks out, sore-thumb-like, today.

Read the whole thing. (As the fellow would say who probably sent you here.)

Another Update: Duane Patterson has some thoughts of his own on the cold shoulder Lieberman will be facing from now until November:

You've got to wish you were a fly on the wall in the Senate offices in the upcoming weeks and months, especially on the Democratic side.

As expected, virtually all of the Democratic Senators have dropped their "good friend" from Connecticut like a bad habit. Makes you wonder how the next three months are going to play out. Can you imagine Ted Kennedy passing Joe Lieberman by in the hall and immediately looking down to see where his feet disappeared to? Or John Kerry riding up the elevator with Joe and just staring silently at the floor numbers?...or even waiting to make sure he catches the next one instead?

The Senate has now become a microcosm of old Europe, and in this example, Joe Lieberman has become Israel. I'm not talking about the Senate in an anti-Semitic way, mind you. I'm merely saying the public attitude of the Senate towards Lieberman is going to be polite, cordial, and generally supportive where necessary, so long as he is in office. But behind the scenes, just like in old Europe, many Senators are going to be grumbling amongst each other and wishing that Lieberman, like old Europe feels about Israel, would just go away.

Newsbusters writes that the news media isn't immune to a rush of Nedrenaline, either:

It's fascinating how fast the roles have switched in the DNC Media's take on Ned Lamont. Today's front page in the WashPost printed the headline "Democratic Leadership Welcomes Lamont." Next to that, a promotional headline: "Will Lieberman Hurt or Help Democrats?" They're not asking whether Lamont as a Democratic poster boy will hurt or help Democrats. Overnight, Lieberman has gone from party stalwart to independent pariah in the wilderness. You might expect the Democrats to switch horses like they're changing socks like party politicians. But it ought to be more surprising that the "objective, mainstream media" follows suit (or sock) so slavishly.

Why?

Update 8/11/06: Add another "old friend" of Joe to the list of those who are now cutting and running on him.

In the bold tradition of former CBS anchorman Dan Rather cooing to Saddam Hussein, Mike Wallace of CBS meets Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to whisper sweet nothings in his ear at a mutual love-in:

Of Ahmadinejad, Wallace said, "He's an impressive fellow, this guy. He really is. He's obviously smart as hell."

Wallace said he was surprised to find that the Iranian president was still a college professor who taught a graduate-level course.

"You'll find him an interesting man," he said. "I expected more of a firebrand. I don't think he has the slightest doubt about how he feels ... about the American administration and the Zionist state. He comes across as more rational than I had expected."

* * *

"He's actually, in a strange way, he's a rather attractive man, very smart, savvy, self-assured, good looking in a strange way," Wallace said. "He's very, very short but he's comfortable in his own skin."

As John Hinderaker writes, "What is this, a Tiger Beat interview?" Did Wallace ask Ahmadinejad to "be good to us", as Barbara Walters once said on-camera to a newly-elected Jimmy Carter?

The real "tell" from Wallace, as "Cardinalpark" of TigerHawk notes, is this:

What I found most shocking wasn’t that Wallace found Ahmedinejad in some way charming or attractive (though I’ve heard he is relentlessly chided for BO) – it was his voluntary reference to Israel as the “Zionist State”. That is a socialist and islamist way of referring to Israel as a creature of imperialism and it makes plain to me that Wallace sympathizes with Ahmedinejad’s anti-Zionism (at the very least). His use of that phrasing is, I think, telling – akin to Richard Cohen’s refernce to Israel as a “mistake.” Really appalling. Of course, we know that Saddam didn’t have long to last after the Rather interview, so maybe this bodes well...

We can only hope.

In the meantime, keep up those fine, hard-hitting standards, CBS!

Update: Tammy Bruce writes that Wallace has found his soulmate in Ahmadinejad: "I think he's in love", she writes, adding, "If anyone thinks CBS's bias is just against President Bush and not against this nation in general, CBS apparently wants to disabuse you of that notion right away":

It speaks volumes that Mike Wallace has nicer things to say about Iran's Jew-hating genocidal Islamist maniac than he does about President Bush.

I suppose they thought they would be giving a platform to Ahmadinejad, but it seems like we've learned a heck of a lot more about Wallace, CBS and Viacom than we ever imagined we would.

Truth be told, after witnessing this exchange on TV in the late 1980s, I learned everything I wanted to about Wallace.

Incidentally, last December, Chris Wallace was strongly questioning his father's competence--or lack thereof.

Cheesecake Update: Well, there's a first: I think Josephine Baker just tracked back to this post...

Ahh, this brings back memories...

(Via Riehl World View.)

At a press conference today, a CAIR spokesman apparently said, "We do not associate Christianity with fascism".

Well, give them credit for getting that one right. Of Nietzsche's famous 1882 aphorism, "God Is Dead", Tom Wolfe once wrote:

Nietzsche said this was not a declaration of atheism, although he was in fact an atheist, but simply the news of an event. He called the death of God a "tremendous event," the greatest event of modern history. The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years. But before you atheists run up your flags of triumph, he said, think of the implications. "The story I have to tell," wrote Nietzsche, "is the history of the next two centuries." He predicted (in Ecce Homo ) that the twentieth century would be a century of "wars such as have never happened on earth," wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt; but they would still be racked by guilt, since guilt is an impulse instilled in children when they are very young, before the age of reason. As a result, people would loathe not only one another but themselves. The blind and reassuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods: "If the doctrines...of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal, doctrines I consider true but deadly"--he says in an allusion to Darwinism in Untimely Meditations --"are hurled into the people for another generation...then nobody should be surprised when...brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers...will appear in the arena of the future."

The European totalitarians who proceeded Nietzsche certainly believed that God was dead, and therefore very much felt free to exploit all sorts of "barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods". Mussolini was an atheist (and former communist) who eventually sought an uneasy and expedient alliance with the Vatican, and Hitler's secretary, Martin Bormann certainly didn't associate Christianity with National Socialism. As John Lukacs wrote in The Hitler of History:

Bormann, in a party directive, included a sentence, "Christianity and National Socialism are not reconcilable." Hitler ordered the removal of that sentence, and the instant cancellation of the directive. Yet at the same time, and often during the war, he told his circle that the business of taking the churches to task would have to wait until the end of the war. Then they would be properly dealt with, and German youth would be liberated from their influences.

As early as 1935, Karl Polanyi, a Hungarian socialist economist wrote:

In Germany National Socialism is setting up definitely as a counter-religion to Christianity. The Churches are suffering oppression, not for some unchristian rivalry with the secular power, but because, in spite of all compromise with the world, they have not ceased to be Christian. The State is attacking the religious independence of the Protestant Churches, and, when they succeed in asserting their independence, it calmly proceeds to secularise society and education. Even the Roman Church is under heavy fire in Germany. There is reason to doubt whether the Lateran Treaty in Italy has fulfilled her expectations. Where she seemingly holds her own, as in Austria, her position is both politically and morally more than precarious.

Our picture may seem to over-stress the importance of the German developments and to ignore the fact that the struggle between Fascism and the Churches is far from general.

Undoubtedly, the Roman Church follows a different line of policy in different countries; and even in one and the same country the attitude of the various Christian communities to the Fascist Party State varies. In the encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno, the Pope opened an avenue of compromise with Fascist sociology; though this happened before the victory of National-Socialism, it left no doubt about the direction in which Rome was eventually prepared to take its bearings on the future. Its experiment with a kind of Catholic Fascism in Austria proves this conclusively.

But these instances of the Catholic will to compromise seem rather to enhance than to diminish the significance of the German Church conflict, the seriousness and the reality of which should not be underrated.

Of Hitler himself, in early 2002, Dave Shiflett wrote:

"It is through the peasantry that we shall really be able to destroy Christianity," [Hitler] said in 1933, "because there is in them a true religion rooted in nature and blood." His countrymen would have to choose: "One is either a Christian or a German. You can't be both."

Indeed, he understood all too well that Christianity, in the long run, was his enemy. "Pure Christianity — the Christianity of the catacombs — is concerned with translating the Christian doctrine into fact. It leads simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely wholehearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics." Switch a few words around and you'd think you were listening to Joseph Stalin. And like Stalin, Hitler believed history was on his side: "Do you really believe the masses will ever be Christian again? Nonsense. Never again. The tale is finished... but we can hasten matters. The parsons will be made to dig their own graves."

That promise was to come true in a frightful number of cases. Polish Christians felt the full force of the persecution, as historian John Morley reminds us. "In Poland, both Jews and Christians were objects of Nazi oppression and manipulation." The clergy were a chief target: "In West Prussia, out of 690 parish priests, at least two-thirds were arrested, and the remainder escaped only by fleeing from their parishes. After a month's imprisonment, no less than 214 of these priests were executed... by the end of 1940 only twenty priests were left in their parishes — about three percent of the number of parish priests in the pre-war era." The toll of murdered Polish priests would rise into the thousands; their Protestant counterparts (though a much smaller group) fared no better, with many members of the clergy perishing in the camps.

The Rutgers site's presentation is entitled "The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches," and it notes a deep hatred of Christianity throughout the higher echelons. "Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked to meet this situation [church influence] by complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion." Their assault was massive: "Different steps in that persecution, such as the campaign for the suppression of denominational and youth organizations, the campaign against denominational schools, the defamation campaign against the clergy, started on the same day in the whole area of the Reich... and were supported by the entire regimented press, by Nazi Party meetings, by traveling party speakers."

None of which is to suggest that Christians were uniformly opposed to Hitler, or that some did not actually embrace the Reich. The lesson from Rutgers, however, is that Hitler was no altar boy, acting on behalf of the Christian faith. Indeed, his hope was to be its undertaker — which was another of his profound miscalculations, and should not be forgotten today.

Glad to see that CAIR hasn't...

Allahpundit channels the ghost of Niccolo Machiavelli:

How badly does the GOP want Ned Lamont to win? Badly enough to publicize this fact.

Meanwhile, the Professor has the "Best. Lamont. Spin. Ever". And a link to one of several Libertarians for Lamont! (Because extremism in the defense of nutmeg is no vice! Or...something like that.)

Charles Johnson has the early details.

Elsewhere, Tim Blair throws caution to the wind and suggests a group who may be behind the plot. Other than a few scattered incidents I can recall from my school days, they wouldn't be my own first choice for a terror organization, but I admire his ability to quickly reach a conclusion and run with it...

Update: Lorie Byrd of Wizbang has an extensive and ongoing round-up of events as further details emerge.

Another Update: Paramount has done its best to tighten Oliver Stone's tinfoil hat this week, but that doesn't mean that others aren't taking up the slack...

More: This is satire, but the real official response from England will no doubt be along similar lines.

The first half of Peter C. Glover's essay in TCS Daily covers much of the same ground made in the post below, but it's followed by some great observations on the press and its critics:

A Pew People and Press poll in 2003 revealed two key facts. Firstly, that 90 percent of mainstream US journalists voted Democratic and held predominantly liberal views. The spectrum of liberal views of mainstream media journalists in America thus in no way reflects the predominantly conservative views of the general public. But even more relevant is the admission by most journalists that ideological preference (bias) does influence their news reporting.

The tradition of British print journalism also owes much to a frank admission towards being Left or Right on the political spectrum. Yet such organs of the fourth estate have served the British people -- and the world -- well for centuries. Sadly, this clarity is today being subverted in the crush to be perceived as on the "centre-ground" of public opinion. The "centre-ground" is the most well-trodden trod sod of God's earth for today's politician -- and, it seems, journalist. And yet openly acknowledging ideology as a factor in news reporting and analysis does nothing to hurt ratings or detract from news consumers trust.

[Too bad the legacy media doesn't buy into the old slogan of the Syms menswear chain: "An Educated Consumer Is Our Best Customer"--Ed]

Which brings me full-circle to the relationship between the MSM and the Blogosphere. The Blogosphere is here to stay. Technology has already settled the argument. But for all the suspicion of the MSM, it is plainly the case that the Blogosphere is no threat to it. Rather, in the tension between the paid and unpaid journalist, the real winner is the news consumer -- oh yes, and truth. The MSM clearly needs the Blogosphere to challenge it to keep up its standards - and recover public trust. Conversely, the Blogosphere cannot function without the MSM and its resources.

What we need to see end is an end to the kind of attitude exhibited by a BBC Breakfast TV News report just two days after the Reuters exposé. It not only exonerated news agencies like Reuters as mere dupes of fraudsters like Hajj, it also went on to attack the upstart "culture of right wing American bloggers". That would be the same "culture" that has been so successful in preserving journalistic integrity in the mainstream - when the MSM failed to do so.

BBC and NYT editors may resent the freedoms of the Blogosphere. But the reality is where the PC-nature of MSM culture is demonstrably failing the news consumer, the Blogosphere is proving a highly effective truth watchdog against propaganda.

As Jacques Ellul warned, "The propagandist uses a keyboard and composes a symphony." It seems he's also learned to use Photoshop.

In the age of postmodernism, that's not at all surprising. But as with text-based fabrications, I wonder how many other Photoshoped lies have already flown under the radar.

Update: Allah's spot-on, as usual:

About two weeks after Rathergate broke in September 2004, the same rag that published this load ran a cover story about the political Rashomonization of America. Facts were no longer objectively true or false, it seemed, but true or false depending upon which ideology one subscribed to. Barbarians at the gates of reality, we were. And now here’s Poniewozik, reality-based gent that he is, hittiing that same note.

Media scandals driven by right-wing bloggers sure do bring out their protective side when it comes to the truth, isn’t it? And the more hard, objective, documentary evidence of malfeasance we have, the more adorably defensive they become. We’re never so “destructive” of “the truth,” it seems, as when we have the truth most clearly on our side.

One of the definitions of postmodernism is that no one worldview is the Truth--that everyone is entitled to his own reality. (Remember Governor's McGreevy's "My truth" resignation speech a couple of years ago?) As Allah notes, it's amazing how that sort of diversity gets tossed out the window at light speed, when the MSM's collective worldview is called into question.

Another Update: Should Reuters be investigated? Really interesting Pajamas podcast with Roger L. Simon interviewing Caroline Glick, Cliff May and Thomas Lifson.

In the 1990s, Eddie Adams, the Pulitzer Prize winning AP photographer who took the infamous and widely seen photo of South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting his prisoner had a change of heart over the damage his photo had caused its subject. Adams would eventually write in Time magazine, "Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation".

If you're new to the whole Reuters photo scandal, and want to quickly get up to speed, Zombietime.com has a superb, heavily illustrated primer on the various techniques of photo manipulation that have been deployed by Reuters' photographers in the Middle East. Or as Mark Steyn wrote this week:

Here's a question for western news organizations: If Israel is so obviously such a disproportionate bloodthirsty murderous savage beast, why is it necessary to fake the evidence?

Good question--in the meantime, don't miss Zombie's essay and its accompanying photos.

Update: Related thoughts--and photos--from Mary Katharine Ham.

Another Update (9/10/06): Chalk this one up to "GMTA": Brent Bozell uses the Eddie Adams story as the opening to his latest op-ed.

Neo-Neocon gets down and gets linguistic:

I hereby propose a new term for Democrats who remain in the party but are hawkish on security and foreign policy matters: paleodems. It lacks the heavy baggage of "neocon," and it's more descriptive as well, because such people are not conservative in most senses of the word (nor am I, by the way). It also retains a reference to the Democratic Party, reflecting the 20th century history and tradition of that party as muscular on defense.

Of course, I may be too late, because paleodems are becoming an endangered species. If extinction occurs, the "paleo" prefix becomes even more apropos.

Is there hope for the Paleodem? Don't miss Neo's postcript.

More Reuters Photoshoppery caught! Though there's a very slim chance this could a parody.

(Via Watcher of Weasels)

Update: More faux-fauxtography here, via Riehl World View.

WARNING: If you've seen the original, put down any beverage you're holding and make sure its content are properly digested before clicking on this.

Jeff Goldstein writes:

It seems some in the legacy media are entering into that next phase of narrative manipulation—a redefining of terms in order to 1) provide revisionary cover for its ideological fellow travelers, and 2) to fabricate and then facilitate a bandwagon effect. For instance, The New York Times this morning editorializes on the Lamont victory this way:

The rebellion against Mr. Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates. They are the voters who have been unnerved over the last few years as the country has seemed to be galloping in a deeply unmoderate direction.

An “uprising” of “moderates”? Come now.

Read the whole thing--and then read Ace of Spades' very much related thoughts.

The Media Research Center notes:

Twice on Tuesday, CBS News correspondent Trish Regan labeled as "infamous" the embrace, derided as "The Kiss" by supporters of Connecticut Senate hopeful Ned Lamont, between President George W. Bush and incumbent Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman in the well of the House after Bush's 2005 State of the Union address. Regan didn't attribute the characterization to Lieberman's opponents. She stated it as fact. On the Early Show she explained over brief video of the event: "Ned Lamont has used this now infamous kiss to his advantage on campaign buttons and television ads, suggesting Lieberman is just too cozy with the President." Then on the CBS Evening News, Regan asserted over the same video: "His campaign has used images like this now infamous kiss."

The primary definition of infamous, according to Merriam-Webster is "having a reputation of the worst kind : notoriously evil". Is there anyone who's not a political junky (in other words, someone who doesn't read a blog like this) and lives in one of 49 states not called Connecticut who's either aware of this moment, or thinks it's "notoriously evil"?

Byron York writes that he's doomed:

If you lose a campaign and then come around two, or four, or six years later to challenge the man who beat you, that’s one thing. If you lose a campaign and keep running as if you hadn’t lost, that’s another. From now on, every day that Lieberman campaigns, he will be reminded that he has already lost to the man he is running against. Lamont’s supporters won’t let him forget it, and Lamont himself will be happy to point it out. In his concession speech, Lieberman said, “Tomorrow is a brand new day” and promised a “new campaign to unite people of Connecticut, GOP, Democrat and independent.” But tomorrow is now today, and the race might look different to Connecticut voters.

Back in 2000, in an entirely different context, Republicans cast the Gore-Lieberman team as “Sore Loserman.” GOP anger was directed at Al Gore, who would not admit that he had lost the presidential election. At least Gore’s loss was excruciatingly, historically close. That’s not the case with Lieberman today. He lost by three and a half percentage points, with no question about the results. This time, it might be Democrats holding those “Sore Loserman” signs.

John McIntyre writes that he's not:

Incredibly, for a sitting three-term Senator who just lost to a political neophyte, in many ways Lieberman is the guy who comes out of the primary with momentum. A month ago it was not unreasonable to assume that Lamont would have received a significant boost from a win, but the polls seem to indicate Lamont peaked near the end of July. Bill Clinton's July 24th visit may have been more of a turning point than was commonly thought at the time. In my pre-election analysis I suggested that Lieberman's distance from 40% would be the best tell on how the three-way would shakeout. With his very solid 48.2%, Lieberman is in an extremely strong position to win in November.

Nationally, the images from last night are a disaster for the Democratic Party. Perched behind Lamont during his victory speech were the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, grinning ear to ear, serenaded by the chant of "Bring Them Home, Bring Them Home." For a party that has a profound public relations and substantive problem on national security, these are not exactly the images you want broadcast to the nation.

Meanwhile, Dean Barnett updates his Lieberman/Lamont FAQs accordingly.

Update: The tie-breaker is in: Dick Morris writes that "Joe Will Rise Again".

And since it's from Dick Morris, the verdict is obvious: Joe's doomed.

Brendan Loy and Dean Barnett are live blogging the returns from the Liberman/Lamont race. Early results favor Lamont, but Barnett is feeding off the intense excitement of the early official results:

According to the Connecticut Secretary of State’s website, right now the voting is deadlocked 0-0.

Can you feel the excitement? This is going to be the best liveblog ever!!

Whoa--way too much election energy for me (especially as I need to head out anyhow), but click over to their sites early and often.

Roger Goodell, the son of former Sen. Charles Goodell (R-NY), replaces Paul Tagliabue:

"We've had the two greatest sports commissioners in the history of professional sports, Paul Tagliabue and Pete Rozelle, and I was fortunate to work for both of them," Goodell said. "I look forward to the challenge and thank them again for their confidence."

Tagliabue served 17 years, and during that time the league's revenues have skyrocketed. The NFL will collect about $10 billion in TV rights fees during the next six years, and enjoys labor peace with the players' association.

"Replacing Paul was not easy, and I think we've done a great job in selecting Roger," said Redskins owner Daniel Snyder. "The NFL is a complex business. Finding the right person to keep it on course was critical, and we did it."

It's tempting to say that he can continue the programs that Tagliabue and Rozelle pioneered, and keep them on auto-pilot. But as Pete Rozelle discovered in the 1980s, at some point, he'll definitely be challenged by forces within and outside the game.

Five years ago today, Instapundit set-up shop. Over the past couple of years, the number of blogs that the Technorati search engine tracks has skyrocketed, from a few million to now, over 50 million. Which means, of course, that tens of millions of joined the blogging revolution. Still, one new blog stands out amongst all the others. It has that certain "extra something", as Hunter S. Thompson would have said.

I'm talking, of course, about The Green Helmet Guy's new Weblog. He's everywhere--including, now, the Blogosphere. And it's about time.

When the average person thinks of SWAT, chances are, this is what comes to mind. But last month, Radley Balko of the CATO institute issued a blockbuster 100 page report titled "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America" and an accompanying interactive map showing the dramatic rise of SWAT teams being deployed for routine police work. He has no beef with SWAT's original purpose: breaking up hostage situations, and the like. But using SWAT to serve warrants and breaking up illegal poker games? That's a different matter.

Don't miss my podcast interview with Radley, online today at TCS Daily.

Mickey Kaus thoughtfully goes SUV shopping for the just-back-from-vacation Professor:

Glenn, your new car is ready.

Heh, indeed. Watch the whole thing.

Jason Apuzzo of Libertas reviews Oliver Stone's new World Trade Center:

Let me say finally that some conservatives have been saying exceedingly silly things about this film. They’ve implied it’s ‘right wing,’ that it’s something like John Wayne’s Back to Bataan or Flying Tigers, or something. It isn’t. Stone and Parmount’s film is much too cautious and measured in what it’s saying to be compared with the sort of films Hollywood was making in the 1940’s. This isn’t a war film, it’s a rescue film. And let’s be honest: as glad as I am Stone made the film, it’s not like anyone ever doubted the bravery of the police or firemen in the first place.

So to fellow conservatives I say: please be realistic about this. Don’t expect Oliver Stone to be directing Rumsfeld: A Hero’s Road to Bagdad anytime soon. He will not be lecturing at The Heritage Foundation, nor guest-hosting for O’Reilly. Please understand what you’re dealing with here: Oliver Stone is a veteran, and he’s made a film respectful toward those who serve their country in times of need. That’s all.

And perhaps, given the present climate in Hollywood, that’s a great deal.

Given what I and others in the Blogosphere wrote about Hollywood last year, that seems fair. Read the whole thing.

Update: James Pinkerton writes that "'World Trade Center' takes an enormous subject and makes it seem small". And he notes that all of the recent efforts by the film's publicity team to court conservative pundits may have just gone up in smoke:

On Monday, after months of being good, Oliver Stone fell off the de-politicized wagon. USA Today's Anthony Breznican, clearly irked at Stone's political closed-mouthedness, did his best to tempt Stone to take a swig of the ol' 200 proof conspiracy juice. Phrases that crept into Breznican's article -- "the apolitical surface of the film has earned Stone unlikely support from right-wing pundits" -- were a clear signal that the reporter was trying to "out" the director.

When Breznican asked Stone how he could avoid the political implications of 9-11, Stone did his best, at least for awhile to follow his apolitical mantra: "That's another issue beyond the confines of this film," adding that the movie is "just about those two men and women and that Marine and what they did that day with the rescue team."

But finally, Breznican got his way, asking Stone if the movie is an endorsement, therefore, of President Bush. Stone took the bait: "Bush makes Nixon look like St. Augustine," the filmmaker answered, recalling the saint best known for his detailed confessions. "At least Nixon had some intelligence and a conscience .... Bush is The Manchurian Candidate." Concludes Breznican, having finally gotten his quarry to say what he really thinks of Bush: "Stone is not a fan."

It will be interesting to see what happens now, with the film opening tomorrow. Every interviewer is going to want Stone to explain/expand his comments to Breznican. And if that happens, all the hard p.r. work to get the film positioned as centrist will go up in the smoke of Stone's vaporous politics.

Color me unsurprised: when it comes to his post-JFK career, Stone's always been its worst Natural Born Killer.

One of the most astonishing exchanges in recent memory from an editor of a political journal, to his counterpart on the other side of the aisle in talk radio and journalism occurred last week. The conversation was between Martin Peretz, the editor of the center-left New Republic, and Hugh Hewitt, his counterpart on the center right, on Hugh's popular radio show:

HH: Do you want the Democrats to win majorities in the House or the Senate, Martin Peretz?

MP: I'm...I'm appalled by some of the people who would become head of Congressional committees.

HH: Is that a no?

MP: Uh, but I'm also appalled by some of the shenanigans...

HH: But is that...I've got five seconds. Is that a no, Martin Peretz?

MP: It's a cowardly refusal to answer.

HH: (laughing) Okay. We'll carry it on, later. Martin Peretz, thanks.

(You can hear the original audio here, if you like.) In The Wall Street Journal's online Opinion Journal, Peretz clarifies his fears:

If Mr. Lieberman goes down, the thought-enforcers of the left will target other centrists as if the center was the locus of a terrible heresy, an emphasis on national strength. Of course, they cannot touch Hillary Clinton, who lists rightward and then leftward so dexterously that she eludes positioning. Not so Mr. Lieberman. He does not camouflage his opinions. He does not play for safety, which is why he is now unsafe.

Now Mr. Lamont's views are also not camouflaged. They are just simpleminded. Here, for instance, is his take on what should be done about Iran's nuclear-weapons venture: "We should work diplomatically and aggressively to give them reasons why they don't need to build a bomb, to give them incentives. We have to engage in very aggressive diplomacy. I'd like to bring in allies when we can. I'd like to use carrots as well as sticks to see if we can change the nature of the debate." Oh, I see. He thinks the problem is that they do not understand, and so we should explain things to them, and then they will do the right thing. It is a fortunate world that Mr. Lamont lives in, but it is not the real one. Anyway, this sort of plying is precisely what has been going on for years, and to no good effect. Mr. Lamont continues that "Lieberman is the one who keeps talking about keeping the military option on the table." And what is so plainly wrong with that? Would Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be more agreeable if he thought that we had disposed of the military option in favor of more country club behavior?

Finally, the contest in Connecticut tomorrow is about two views of the world. Mr. Lamont's view is that there are very few antagonists whom we cannot mollify or conciliate. Let's call this process by its correct name: appeasement. The Greenwich entrepreneur might call it "incentivization." Mr. Lieberman's view is that there are actually enemies who, intoxicated by millennial delusions, are not open to rational and reciprocal arbitration. Why should they be? After all, they inhabit a universe of inevitability, rather like Nazis and communists, but with a religious overgloss. Such armed doctrines, in Mr. Lieberman's view, need to be confronted and overwhelmed.
Almost every Democrat feels obliged to offer fraternal solidarity to Israel, and Mr. Lamont is no exception. But here, too, he blithely assumes that the Palestinians could be easily conciliated. All that it would have needed was President Bush's attention. Mr. Lamont has repeated the accusation, disproved by the "road map" and Ariel Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza, that Mr. Bush paid little or even no attention to the festering conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. And has Mr. Lamont noticed that the Palestinians are now ruled, and by their own choice, by Hamas? Is Hamas, too, just a few good arguments away from peace?

The Lamont ascendancy, if that is what it is, means nothing other than that the left is trying, and in places succeeding, to take back the Democratic Party. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters have stumped for Mr. Lamont. As I say, we have been here before. Ned Lamont is Karl Rove's dream come true. If he, and others of his stripe, carry the day, the Democratic party will lose the future, and deservedly.

While Karl Rove the strategist may be licking his chops, a Lieberman loss does not sound like it would please Richard H. Shriver, who served both the Ford and Reagan White Houses:

I spent a good portion of my life working to eliminate or replace one-party systems in the world. So it is with mixed emotions I watch the Democratic Party continue to lop off its nose in order to spite its face.

Is it too soon to predict the result will be a one-party system in the US? Not if you are following political events in Connecticut.

The most current evidence of the Democratic Party's self-destruction is the Democratic primary race for the US Senate in Connecticut, pitting 3-term veteran Joseph Lieberman against antiwar candidate Ned Lamont.

According to local polls, Lamont will win the primary forcing into play Lieberman's defensive move of forming his own party to be on the ballot one way or another in November. The token Republican candidate, Alan Schlesinger, will garner 8% - 15% in the general election, and for a variety of reasons, may even withdraw; Lieberman is expected to win in a three-way (and more-so in a two-way) vote in November, thus depriving the Democrats of an important seat in the Senate.

Lieberman will win because Republicans will vote for this Democrat in droves. Republicans see Lieberman as a statesman, whether or not one agrees with all of his votes. Democrats are turning their backs on one of their few stars. History may elevate Lieberman to the status of "Great American", an elected official who has been remarkably true to his principles and who has a track record of sponsoring, advocating and voting for sensible, responsible US policies on issues that really matter, like national security.

Lamont, on the other hand, is an American made rich via inheritance who, like Sen. Edward Kennedy and some other leaders of the Democratic Party, has turned his back on some of the very institutions that helped make his father (and him) rich in the first place, such as low taxes and a strong defense policy. While his backers claim he is a successful businessman, he will not release his tax returns so there is no way to back up this claim. Meanwhile, Lamont has embarked on futile effort to make a single-issue campaign into a multi-issue campaign by paying lip service to a panoply of liberal causes. This delights his immediate followers and the liberal fringe, but dismays some political realists -- including Bill Clinton who is supporting Lieberman.

As Peretz writes:

The blogosphere Democrats, whose victory Mr. Lamont's will be if Mr. Lamont wins, have made Iraq the litmus test for incumbents. There are many reasonable, and even correct, reproofs that one may have for the conduct of the war. They are, to be sure, all retrospective. But one fault cannot be attributed to the U.S., and that is that we are on the wrong side. We are at war in a just cause, to protect the vulnerable masses of the country from the helter-skelter ideological and religious mass-murderers in their midst. Our enemies are not progressive peasants as was imagined three and four decades ago.

If Mr. Lieberman goes down, the thought-enforcers of the left will target other centrists as if the center was the locus of a terrible heresy, an emphasis on national strength. Of course, they cannot touch Hillary Clinton, who lists rightward and then leftward so dexterously that she eludes positioning. Not so Mr. Lieberman. He does not camouflage his opinions. He does not play for safety, which is why he is now unsafe.

In a post on Friday, National Review editor Rich Lowry paints a grim picture for Lieberman--hopefully, he's wrong; if not this Tuesday, then in November.

Related: "Confirmed: Lieberman campaign didn’t coin the term 'LieberYouth'".

Update (8/8/06): Astonishingly, ABC's Cokie Roberts sounds like she agrees with Peretz.

Meanwhile, guest blogging for Hugh Hewitt, Dean Barnett has the answers to the the Top Ten Lieberman/Lamont questions. And finally, Mickey Kaus steps back from the Lieberman/Lamont race to look at the bigger picture: the future of the Democrats.

More: Brendan Loy explores the apparent denial of service (DoS) attack that took down the Lieberman website--and its email--today.

Background here. Details of the above dispatch from Reuters here, here and here.

Update (2:41 PM PDT): Here's a trip down memory lane, to try to explain how we got to this point. To start, let's begin with this National Review piece by Tom Gross, which sets up how Reuters was historically viewed by the average reader:

Many people still think of Reuters as the Rolls-Royce of news agencies. Just as the House of Morgan was once synonymous with good banking, Reuters has long been synonymous with good news-gathering. In 1940, there was even a Hollywood film about Paul Julius Reuter, the German-Jewish immigrant to London who as early as 1851 began transmitting stock-market quotes between London and Paris via the new Calais-Dover cable.

His agency quickly established a reputation in Europe for being the first to report scoops from abroad, such as of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Today, almost every major news outlet in the world subscribes. Operating in 200 cities in 94 countries, Reuters produces text in 19 languages, as well as photos and television footage from around the world.

As with so many things in the world, that began to change on September 11th, 2001. So let's look at the immediate period after 9/11, back when the majority of Americans believed Osama bin Laden when he took the credit for 9/11, before a third peeled off into the Oliver Stone/Michael Moore/Kevin Barrett conspiracy ozone. As James Taranto wrote last year, linking to his own immediate thoughts after 9/11:

Far more dangerous than the hard anti-Americanism of the far left (and some elements of the far right) is the moral relativism that prevails among Western liberal elites, especially in journalism. Exhibit A is Reuters. As we noted on Sept. 24, 2001:

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

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

Or as Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs put it in 2002:

Let’s see. Osama Bin Laden has called for the death of Jews and Americans, and said it was his duty to acquire nuclear weapons for a holy war against the West. His organization is responsible for numerous terror attacks. He turned Afghanistan into an unprecedented training ground for international terrorism. He’s on videotape gloating over the 9/11 atrocities.

But to Reuters, he’s merely a “dissident.”

Reuters, at times, has seemed particularly chummy with terrorists, as Ynet News spotted last year, referring to terrorist Zakaria Zubeidi:

Zubeidi, who heads Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Jenin, has been named by security officials as a key figure in organizing terror attacks on Israeli civilians.

Zubeidi’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades have claimed responsibility for more than 300 terror acts in the last five years.

But to Reuters, he's a buddy to appear in their in-house joke videos:

A Reuters spokeswoman confirmed the video’s existence, but said the London-based news organization is “not associated with any group or faction in any conflict.”

The screening, which occurred in a Jerusalem restaurant last March, involved the showing of a video during a private party.

"The video's theme was what Israel would be like in 10 years," said an Israeli government official who attended the party and viewed the video.

"All of a sudden, at the end, there is Zakaria Zubeidi, playing the head of Reuters. Zubeidi was sitting in Reuters' Jenin office, saying he was Reuters’ chief,” the official said.

The party included guests from the BBC, ITN, the Independent newspaper, and French journalists.

"They all thought the video was hilarious," the official said. He added that only a few individuals did not seem amused during the screening.

"They were laughing; they thought it was very funny, he said.”

Which seems more than a little odd, considering the pressure that such affiliations put on their stringers. Back to the Tom Gross NRO piece:

Reporters of course can’t be everywhere at once. The increased speed of the Internet and the demand for instant, 24-hour TV news coverage means that the world’s news outlets rely heavily on Reuters and the AP, which in turn rely on a network of local Palestinian “stringers.” Virtually all breaking news (and much of the non-breaking news) on CNN, the BBC, Fox, and other networks comes from these stringers.

Such stringers are hired for speed, to save money (there is no need to pay drivers and translators), and for their local knowledge. But in many cases, in hiring them, their connections to Arafat’s regime and Hamas count for more than their journalistic abilities. All too often the information they provide, and the supposed eyewitnesses they interview, are undependable. Yet, because of Reuters’s prestige, American and international news outlets simply take their copy as fact. Thus non-massacres become massacres; death tolls are exaggerated; and gunmen are written about as if they were civilians.

As Ehud Ya’ari, Israeli television’s foremost expert on Palestinian affairs, put it: “The vast majority of information of every type coming out of the area is being filtered through Palestinian eyes. Cameras are angled to show a tainted view of the Israeli army’s actions and never focus on Palestinian gunmen. Written reports focus on the Palestinian version of events. And even those Palestinians who don’t support the intifada dare not show or describe anything embarrassing to the Palestinian Authority, for fear they may provoke the wrath of Arafat’s security forces.”

One Palestinian journalist told me that “the worst the Israelis can do is take away our press cards. But if we irritate Arafat, or Hamas, you don’t know who might be waiting in your kitchen when you come home at night.”

And yet, to Reuters, Hamas and the fortunately very late Arafat are the good guys! Last week, blogger Ace of Spades presciently noted that the use of pro-Palestinian stringers in the Middle East by Reuters and other news agencies was bound to eventually cause them big problems:

The American media is setting itself up for a massive scandal. One day, it will in fact come out that they are guilty of willful blindness and a deliberate avoidance of asking their stringers tough questions to maintain their own plausible deniability.

And they'll have to answer some hard questions, such as, "If you're so vigilant against being 'used' by the American government for its 'propaganda,' why are you so blithely nonchalant about being worse-used by America's enemies?"

Many of Steven Glass' colleagues looked back and wondered how they'd been fooled by his fabrications for so long. Apart from the outlandishness of some of his stories, he also had an uncanny knack for getting the Killer Quote that tied together a piece or summed it up in one pithy, bullet-point sentence. We should have known no one gets that lucky so consistently, they said later.

The American media seems to be an employing a possible Army of Steven Glasses, and yet they're more than willing to pretend they don't know what's going on so long as those suspiciously-dramatic front-page pictures keep coming back from the foreign stringers.

Enter Charles Johnson, who did much to uncover the use of false memos by CBS's Mary Mapes and Dan Rather in September of 2004 in their attempt to influence the last presidential election. Johnson's blog Little Green Footballs has served, since 9/11, as a sort of clearing house of information about the Middle East that PC-obsessed "Big Media" considers too hot or too-PC to touch. He has long been in a thorn in the side of Reuters, to the point where in May of this year, a Reuters employee, apparently in their London office, issued a death threat to him. (While not publicly naming the employee, Reuters claims that he has been "suspended".)

This post about RatherGate, as it quickly became known in the Blogosphere, is worth flashing back to, as it highlights much of the same techniques used yesterday to demonstrate that the photo by Reuters stringer Adnan Hajj was a fabrication. The discovery of Rather's forged memos (allegedly from the early 1970s) actually didn't begin in the Blogosphere--it began on FreeRepublic.com, whose bulletin board technology actually predates the World Wide Web. But once the "Freeper" whose handle is "Buckhead" posted that he suspected the memos that CBS used were false, the Blogosphere went to work as a collective fact-finding team.

Eventually, this lead to LGF's Charles Johnson to simply fire up Microsoft Word into its default settings, retype the text of the document, print it out, place his version on top of a printout of CBS's version and noticed they were fake. In other words, there was no typewriter, electric or manual, that could do the sort of font-setting that we take for granted today with modern PC word processing programs and accompanying laser printers. Simultaneously, numerous other members of the Blogosphere came forth with their own knowledge of typography and its accompanying hardware both modern and 35 years ago, to rapidly discredit CBS.

A similar thing happened yesterday, as Johnson first spotted the Photoshopping in Adnan Hajj's photo of Beirut covered in multiple plumes of black smoke, and other members of the Blogosphere and message boards went to work analyzing the photo.

Unlike the all-knowing omniscience Americans seemed to grant Walter Cronkite during his heyday, I view the "Big Three" network TV anchormen of the past 50 years as little more than news readers; dramatists hired for their stentorian tones. it's their producers that write their copy--as even Cronkite himself has since admitted. And while Rather is infamous for trying to cover up an all-too-human and perfectly understandable bias with feints of "objectivity" (much like Reuters, collectively), I tend to agree that his biggest mistake in 2004 was circling the wagons; as Andrew Sullivan noted at the time:

The original mistake was not a firable offense. But the digging in surely is. It seems to me that when a news anchor presents false information and then tries to cover up and deny his errors, he has ceased to be a journalist. I'd like to say that Dan Rather needs to resign from his profession. But, judging from the last few days, he already has.

Reuters, to the credit, claim they "shall not be accepting or using pictures" taken by Adnan Hajj, their stringer. While it doesn't place any blame on their editors or other gatekeepers for letting the photo through, it's at least a slightly better first step than CBS's.

But given Reuters' shoddy recent history, as 9/11 and subsequent events illuminate, they've got their work cut out for them, if they wish to regain the trust of many of their readers, in the era of the Blogosphere. Again, it's worth harkening back to something that was written about RatherGate, this time by Glenn Reynolds in 2004:

I think there are some important lessons for Big Media -- and for everyone else -- in the rise of the blogosphere. They stem from the fact that bloggers operate on the Internet, where arguments from authority are difficult since nobody knows whether you're a dog.

In short, it's the difference between high-trust and low-trust environments.

The world of Big Media used to be a high-trust environment. You read something in the paper, or heard something from Dan Rather, and you figured it was probably true. You didn't ask to hear all the background, because it wouldn't fit in a newspaper story, much less in the highly truncated TV-news format anyway, and because you assumed that they had done the necessary legwork. (Had they? I'm not sure. It's not clear whether standards have fallen since, or whether the curtain has simply been pulled open on the Mighty Oz. But they had names, and familiar faces, so you usually believed them even when you had your doubts.)

The Internet, on the other hand, is a low-trust environment. Ironically, that probably makes it more trustworthy.

That's because, while arguments from authority are hard on the Internet, substantiating arguments is easy, thanks to the miracle of hyperlinks. And, where things aren't linkable, you can post actual images. You can spell out your thinking, and you can back it up with lots of facts, which people then (thanks to Google, et al.) find it easy to check. And the links mean that you can do that without cluttering up your narrative too much, usually, something that's impossible on TV and nearly so in a newspaper.

(This is actually a lot like the world lawyers live in -- nobody trusts us enough to take our word for, well, much of anything, so we back things up with lots of footnotes, citations, and exhibits. Legal citation systems are even like a primitive form of hypertext, really, one that's been around for six or eight hundred years. But I digress -- except that this perhaps explains why so many lawyers take naturally to blogging).

You can also refine your arguments, updating -- and even abandoning them -- in realtime as new facts or arguments appear. It's part of the deal.

This also means admitting when you're wrong. And that's another difference. When you're a blogger, you present ideas and arguments, and see how they do. You have a reputation, and it matters, but the reputation is for playing it straight with the facts you present, not necessarily the conclusions you reach. And a big part of the reputation's component involves being willing to admit you're wrong when you present wrong facts, and to make a quick and prominent correction.

When you're a news anchor, you're not just putting your arguments on the line -- you're putting yourself on the line. Dan Rather has a problem with that. For journalists of his generation, admitting an error means admitting that you've violated people's trust. For bloggers, admitting an error means you've missed something, and now you're going to set it right.

What people in the legacy media need to ask themselves is, which approach is more likely to retain credibility over time? I think I know the answer.

Does Reuters? Given the post-9/11 track record of Big Media in general, Dan Rather's stonewalling to this day, and Reuters' cozy relationship with terrorism, I tend to doubt it. But going forward, I'd very much love to be proven wrong.

Update: Welcome Little Green Footballs and Michelle Malkin readers! Please look around--I suspect there's much here that you'll enjoy.

Late Update (8/9/06): If you're new to the whole Reuters photo scandal and its enormous scope and implications, Zombietime.com has a superb, heavily illustrated primer on the various techniques of photo manipulation that have been deployed by Reuters' photographers in the Middle East. Don't miss it.

Whew! After all of that intense Photoshop wonkery, how 'bout a more benign use of digital effects in action?

Fatboy Slim's "Weapon Of Choice"--you've seen the video...

...Now check out the cartoon:

As Perry de Havilland of Samizdata writes, "take a look at this and make of it what you will", adding, "Truth is all in the editing it would seem".

When Haskell Wexler shot Medium Cool, he had no idea how just interchangeable fact and fiction could be in front of a camera, and behind an editing table.

Update: Could this be an example of Pallywood's equivalent of Industrial Light & Magic's post-production department at work? Maybe it's just my aging eyeballs, but I'd like further proof, if possible. However, it's certainly not looking good for Reuters (terrorism's favorite wire service!) in the early going.

Another Update: OK, I think I'm convinced. In this blinking close-up gif, in addition to the square white concrete building being reproduced identically, the building next to it, which has a much more complex roofline (notice the angular cupola or whatever that structure on the roof is) is also reproduced identically. That looks very much like a Photoshop copy & paste job to me--and these pro photographers agree.

Michelle Malkin examines the Reuters "photo" (sorry, just borrowing a pair of Reuters' quotation marks--they've got lots of 'em), and looks at additional Big Media Photoshoppery.

Note (8:52 PM): This post began at 1:40 PM PDT with the Pallywood video clip; I'm bumping it to the top of the Webpage because of the updates on the doctored Reuters photo, which is the much more timely news here.

Update (9:19 PM): Scroll halfway down to post #217 in this Free Republic thread, where a "Freeper" created a negative image version of the photo. It really makes the copy & paste duplication in the apex of the two clouds of "smoke" that much more obvious.

Update (9:36 PM): Ed Morrissey (as usual) makes a great observation here:

This isn't just one reporter and a producer going nuts at a network news division. This shows that Reuters has either complete incompetents as editors or that the entire British wire service has chosen one particular side in this war. Check all the links in Charles' post, and try to keep from laughing out loud at how utterly stupid Reuters considers its customers to be.

Like New Shimmer, why can't both options be equally possible? Clearly, Reuters' photo editors, whom one assumes would be up on the latest Photoshop tricks and tweaks, are incompetent on some level if they let a photo like that onto the 'Net. And personally, I'd say that these two items indicate rather clearly which side the entire British wire service has chosen.

Update (10:56 PM): Publius Pundit writes, "A special correspondent who works for Reuters sent me this photo from the series, which I believes corroborates Reuters’ story. Judge for yourself"...

Late Update (2:08 AM 8/6/06): Rightwinged.com also goes negative--that is, inverts the colors of the photo for some interesting results.

Last Update (8:18 AM 8/6/06): Picture Kill!

Details of the above dispatch from Reuters here and here. Much more coming later, in this post.

Note (4:47 PM 8/6/06): Huge detailed update now online.

Architecture And Morality writes that 40 years after Le Corbusier's death, one of his unbuilt buildings has recently been completed:

A rather significant event occurred in the world of architecture in the last year—at least from the point of view of this writer. In the city Firminy-Vert, a historical mining community in France, a church initially designed by Le Corbusier was completed. It is the fourth Le Corbusier structure to have been realized in this town, the result of the architect’s fruitful relationship with its post-war mayor. The Church of Saint Pierre was realized by one of Le Corbusier’s numerous acolytes, Jose Oubrerie, who collaborated with the master architect in the last years of his life during the early 1960’s. More than 40 years after his death, the church is finally complete, and in spite of Oubrerie’s own influences, the design of the church of Saint Pierre is remarkably consistent of Le Corbusier’s later works.

A&M notes though, that while the form is pure Corbu, some of the detailing has changed:

Many details in the design were the result of stricter building codes, as well as Oubrerie’s own aesthetic predilections, but the rest of the structure combines formal elements that have become the trademarks of Le Corbusier’s most celebrated projects, such as his monastery at La Tourette, his Assembly building in Chandigar, India, as well as from his Chapel at Ronchamp du Haut.

And that updated detailing is probably a good thing. In The Master Builders, Peter Blake's hagiographic look at Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright, Blake quotes Eero Saarinen, who called Corbu one of architect's great "form givers". But as dramatic as Corbu's forms were, his detailing was frequently slipshod. (In contrast to Mies--there's a reason why the aphorism "God is in the details" was universally attributed to him.)

Architecture And Morality writes that it's not that unusual for a building to go up after an architect's death. However...

It is rare to build based on plans from several decades before, often because it requires another architect to interpret the design intentions of the original designer, divining on what he was thinking. The best way at ascertaining this kind of intangible information was to rely on an architect’s protégé. Frank Lloyd Wright, who surrounded himself by many sycophantic apprentices who lived and worked in his large private compounds in Wisconsin and in Arizona, produced dozens upon dozens of architects who mastered and internalized his style so as to be indistinguishable from Wright’s own work.

I remember that shortly after the Wall fell and Berlin was re-unified, there was some talk of building Mies's epochal Friedrichstrasse office tower, modernism's first all-glass skyscraper. It exists only in drawings and models (I've seen Mies's large, original conte crayon drawing in New York's Museum of Modern Art, which displays it from to time, and it's a powerful vision.) Fortunately, as the example of Corbu's church in Firminy-Vert illustrates, it's never too late.

The John Locke Foundation's blog seems obsessed at the moment with, well, cringe-inducing lyrics from the last 30 years or so of pop songs.

Just keep scrolling--if you can take it.

Gerry Garibaldi writes:

Since I started teaching several years ago, after 25 years in the movie business, I’ve come to learn firsthand that everything I’d heard about the feminization of our schools is real—and far more pernicious to boys than I had imagined.

In a very much related column, Mona Charen adds:

[A]cross the nation, public school students are being indoctrinated in "health" classes and other venues to treat their families with skepticism and to regard traditional mores as "dysfunctional." Liberals have achieved what the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci only dreamed about: They have completed "the long march through the institutions" and now control the commanding heights of the culture. Conservatives are going to have to figure out the same trick if they do not want to see the country drift irrevocably to the left.

While liberal teachers preach, conservative parents must teach their own kids to become screenwriters, journalists, professors, teachers and producers. The rallying cry of Gramsci's acolytes was "Capture the culture." Ours should be "Recapture the culture."

While I agree completely, in terms of mass culture, I fear it's obviously far too late. On the other hand, mass culture has become increasingly fractured over the past 25 years. As James Lileks said when I interviewed him last November:

With mass culture and mass media now fractured (not the least of which was via the Internet and the Blogosphere), Lileks wonders if there’s enough of any common culture left to allow for such retrospective japery, "other than making fun of the fact that we really lack a common culture", he says.

"In one respect, I like this", he understandably adds. "I like the fact that there are so many culture opportunities out there, that the monoculture no longer charges the whole show. But the death of the monoculture means that there is a less of a sense of common identity, and how that plays out is something that we are going to learn in the next ten to 15 years.

That has positive benefits to conservatism, which, (and I'm far from the first to note this), has numerous ties that help glue its followers together: faith, family, love of country, etc. That's a far cry from the modern state of "anything goes" leftwing nihilism (and its '60s/'70 Mobius loop and accompanying nostalgia) that began to replace New Deal-style liberalism shortly after JFK's death.

That the bonds on the right haven't been entirely erased since the late 1960s is proof of how strong these connections are. And, fortunately, an increasingly demassified culture, even if still dominated by the left, makes them that much harder to further weaken.

Hopefully.

Sister Toldjah writes:

OUCH. Brian at Iowa Voice has a link rundown of racist Democratic remarks, made not just by politicians, but by their prominent supporters.

You've probably seen some or all of these comments before, but seen back to back, they're that much more damning.

Ann Althouse has some thoughts on Kevin Barrett, the 9/11 conspiracy theorist who is a part-time instructor at the University of Wisconsin's Madison campus. Patrick Farrell, the campus provost, won't fire Barrett, but he doesn't want him to take advantage of the enormous PR platform his incendiary views are creating. She quotes this excerpt from the Chicago Tribune:

"[I]f you continue to identify yourself with UW-Madison in your personal political messages or illustrate an inability to control your interest in publicity for your ideas, I would lose confidence ... ,"...

Announcing his decision on July 10, Farrell declared, "We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas."

Farrell said he wanted Barrett to know that he could reconsider his decision if he did not meet expectations. He said Barrett has "modestly made some efforts" to cut down on publicity.

"I was trying to be fairly careful to not inhibit his privilege of speaking freely," he said. "My point was that he should be aware as he exercises those rights there may be a time when I have to rethink the assurances he has given me about his ability to separate his opinions from what happens in the classroom."...

Farrell scolded Barrett for identifying himself as a UW-Madison instructor in e-mails in which he challenged others to debate his theories. The provost said the challenges suggest "that you speak for the university -- precisely what I told you was inappropriate in that context."

Ann replies:

When I go on radio or TV, I am introduced as a professor at the University of Wisconsin, whether I'm talking about law or politics or culture or some other topic I presume to blab about. It's never even occurred to me that stating this true fact -- where I work -- means that I "speak for the university" or that listeners might be confused into thinking that I do. You'd have to think ordinary people are idiots to believe that they think Kevin Barrett is speaking for the university when he spews his offensive theory. The problem is not confusion about whom he speaks for, but the embarrassment to the university that he thinks what he thinks and he teaches here. How can you justify suppressing this factual information of great public interest?

I don't think it's that unreasonable for the public to presume that Barrett is speaking on behalf of the university, in the sense that his statements imply that they're within the accepted bounds of discourse allowed by the university. As Roger Kimball of The New Criterion wrote last year:

Academic life, like the rest of social life, unfolds within a frame of rules and permissions. At one end, there are things that one must (or must not) do; at the other end, there is rule of whim. The middle range, in which behavior is neither explicitly governed by rules but is not entirely free, is that realm governed by what the British jurist John Fletcher Moulton, writing in the early 1920s, called “Obedience to the Unenforceable.” It is a realm in which not law, not caprice, but virtues such as duty, fairness, judgment, and taste hold sway. In a word, it is the “domain of Manners,” which “covers all cases of right doing where there is no one to make you do it but yourself.” A good index of the health of any social institution is its allegiance to the strictures that define this middle realm. “In the changes that are taking place in the world around us,” Moulton wrote, “one of those which is fraught with grave peril is the discredit into which this idea of the middle land is falling.” One example was the abuse of free speech in political debate: “We have unrestricted freedom of debate,” say the radicals: “We will use it so as to destroy debate.”

The repudiation of obedience to the unenforceable is at the center of what makes academic life (and not only academic life) today so noxious. The contraction of the “domain of Manners” creates a vacuum that is filled on one side by increasing regulation—speech codes, rules for all aspects of social life, efforts to determine by legislation (from the right as well as from the left) what should follow freely from responsible behavior—and on the other side by increased license. More and more, it seems, academia (like other aspects of elite cultural life) has reneged on its compact with society. What, as Lenin memorably asked, is to be done?

* * *

The bright side of the Ward Churchill affair was the fact that public scrutiny brought dramatic, if local, changes. The melancholy side of the affair lay in the fact that the scrutiny had to be enormous and unremitting and that, as the media’s attention wandered so did the public’s interest. If real change is going to come to academic culture, criticism must be ceaseless, pointed, and deep. It is not enough to expose Ward Churchill. The academic culture that breeds and rewards such figures—and their name is legion—must be exposed for what it is: a thoroughly politicized rejection of the principles that inform liberal learning.

Provost Farrell has clearly identified that he's got a problem on his hands. But he's made precisely the wrong judgement, of course. As Althouse writes, if it's acceptable to inflict Barrett's conspiracy theories on UW's students, why isn't it acceptable to allow him to speak to the world at large, via the media? And if that latter is unacceptable because it puts the university in a bad light, what does it say about Barrett's classes, themselves?

EU Referendum looks at the propaganda techniques involved to frame a tragedy for maximum western sympathy and positive spin for Hezbollah.

Update: Much more at Pajamas HQ; meanwhile, Power Line notes:

The Jerusalem Post reports that the IDF is looking into allegations, first raised by bloggers, that the alleged civilian deaths at Qana may have been, at least in part, staged.

* * *

Some of the suggestions made by bloggers seem far-fetched; on the other hand, as we have noted several times, there are a number of distinctly odd aspects to the events as presented by Hezbollah and the press. Hopefully, between the IDF and the Red Cross, the truth will emerge.

Good to see.

Theodore Dalrymple looks at teen mothers in England:

As the report makes clear, and as I have found from clinical experience, the girls regarded pregnancy and the resultant baby as an answer to existential problems. The young women came from broken, violent, chaotic, and loveless homes; they hated school because it seemed pointless; their only employment prospects were in the lowest-paid and most monotonous jobs.

A baby, then, answered all their prayers. It was a constant focus of interest and an object upon which they could lavish their hitherto thwarted desire to love and be loved. They also found that, thanks to welfare, their financial position actually improved after having given birth, provided only that the child’s father did not live with the mother or work to earn his living—whereupon, of course, all state benefits stopped, casting the young family into poverty.

The young mothers also reported that having babies fulfilled a desire for “independence,” a word used without irony in the report. This language is evidence that the British character has changed utterly in the last 60 years. Where once even the poorest people would have thought it a disgrace and humiliation to depend on public welfare, such handouts of taxpayer money by the state now constitute the very conception of independence for a considerable proportion of the population. Indeed, welfare recipients almost all call the day on which they receive their dole “the day when I get paid.”

In not a single case—at least, as far as one can deduce from the report—did a mother wonder whether she was reproducing the conditions from which she was, for understandable reasons, fleeing.

Read the whole thing.

Cliff May looks at the unseen villains in Oliver Stone's upcoming World Trade Center:

The WSJ’s Brian Carney disagrees with KLo, me and several others writing in this space regarding Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center.

He argues that it “is the story of 9/11 as experienced by the men on the ground as it occurred. As far as it goes, it does ample justice to the rescue and emergency workers who were present on that day. They did not know, could not know, who brought down the towers or why. The question is whether ‘World Trade Center’ goes far enough when it comes to shaping our understanding of what happened.”

It does not, Carney believes, because “there are no villains in Mr. Stone's movie. Nicolas Cage's John McLoughlin and Michael Pena's Will Jimeno could have been trapped by an earthquake or an accident. … ‘World Trade Center’ tells a powerful story about the basic goodness so many people felt and acted on in the wake of a heinous act. But to the extent that it omits any direct reference to the crimes that made those good deeds necessary, its version of the truth is incomplete.”

Here’s where we differ: Stone’s film does contain reference to those villains and those crimes. The references are few and they are subtle but they are there. And they struck me as powerful and persuasive

There is the fireman in Wisconsin who makes clear that what happened was not an earthquake or other natural disaster but the work of “bastards.” Another character says that this crime must be “avenged.” (Not understood, not prevented from happening again but “avenged.” You don’t avenge a typhoon.)

And finally there is the marvelous character of David Karnes. When he hears about what has happened in lower Manhattan, he puts on his old Marine uniform. His first mission is to rescue those still trapped in the rubble. After that, he will take up arms. He knows a war has begun and that he has a duty to fight it. The audience now knows this, too.

At the end of the film, we learn that Karnes went on to serve two tours in Iraq.

Does that tell us all we need to know about the enemy? Of course not. But it’s a good start – without any misguided attempt to “humanize” the barbarians, without any self-flagellation about why they hate us.

No, the film doesn’t tell us much about this enemy, who he is, how he thinks, what we wants and what will be necessary if we seriously intend to defend ourselves from him.

As soon as I read that, I flashed back to James Bowman's review of Francis Ford Coppola's extended director's cut reissue of his late-1970s opus, Apocalypse Now Redux from 2001:

We never meet a single Vietnamese, for instance, who is not a victim of the Americans. Whom does [Coppola] suppose was shooting back? He keeps the enemy out of sight in order to make the American military effort—which seems to consist mainly of blazing away at the forest or the tall reeds along the banks of the river, or else innocent civilians—look not only futile but crazy. Like the phantasmagoria of the trip upriver, like everything else in the movie, the phantom enemy is designed to show us the futility, the insanity of the war. The enemy is everywhere and nowhere. It is insane to try to fight him.

Coppola kept the enemy largely off-screen because he was, on some level, highly sympathetic to them. (He wasn't alone in Hollywood: while Coppola was shooting Apocalypse, his protégé, George Lucas, was transforming the Vietcong into Luke Skywalker and the rest of the good guy heroes in Star Wars.)

Certainly for Oliver Stone, keeping the terrorists off-screen in World Trade Center helps to hide, shall we say, an inconvenient truth or two--not the least of which are his own sympathetic views of terrorism's heart of darkness.

Update: Betsy Newmark asks a related question:

It's always been somewhat of a mystery why so many on the left just loooooove their man in Havana.

Fortunately, of course, Stone could never be accused of that...

If you have access to Photoshop or any of its innumerable competitors, you too can join the few, the proud...the Hezbollah Media Relations Department!

(The inventor of the phrase is currently on vacation, but I think this qualifies as a "What Would Bugs Do?" sort of idea.)

The great Victor Davis Hanson writes:

When I used to read about the 1930s — the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Germany, the appeasement in France and Britain, the murderous duplicity of the Soviet Union, and the racist Japanese murdering in China — I never could quite figure out why, during those bleak years, Western Europeans and those in the United States did not speak out and condemn the growing madness, if only to defend the millennia-long promise of Western liberalism.

Of course, the trauma of the Great War was all too fresh, and the utopian hopes for the League of Nations were not yet dashed. The Great Depression made the thought of rearmament seem absurd. The connivances of Stalin with Hitler — both satanic, yet sometimes in alliance, sometimes not — could confuse political judgments.

But nevertheless it is still surreal to reread the fantasies of Chamberlain, Daladier, and Pope Pius, or the stump speeches by Charles Lindbergh (“Their [the Jews’] greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government”) or Father Coughlin (“Many people are beginning to wonder whom they should fear most — the Roosevelt-Churchill combination or the Hitler-Mussolini combination.”) — and baffling to consider that such men ever had any influence.

Not any longer.

Our present generation too is on the brink of moral insanity. That has never been more evident than in the last three weeks, as the West has proven utterly unable to distinguish between an attacked democracy that seeks to strike back at terrorist combatants, and terrorist aggressors who seek to kill civilians.

It's also worth noting the similarity between not only the leaders of the 30s and today, but the everyday left as well, as Jonathan Last wrote last year:

In 1933, the Oxford Union - a debating society and one of the strongholds of liberal elite opinion - held a debate on the resolution "this House will in no circumstances fight for king and country." The resolution passed. Margot Asquith, one of England's leading liberal lights, wrote that same year, quite sincerely: "There is only one way of preserving peace in the world, and getting rid of your enemy, and that is to come to some sort of agreement with him. . . . The greatest enemy of mankind today is hate."

Churchill disdained the new liberalism, mocking one of his opponents as part of "that band of degenerate international intellectuals who regard the greatness of Britain and the stability and prosperity of the British Empire as a fatal obstacle. . . . " So deep was this liberal loathing of empire that even as the first shots of World War II were being fired, Churchill's private secretary, Jock Colville, witnessed at a theater "a group of bespectacled intellectuals" who, to his shock, "remain[ed] firmly seated while 'God Save the King' was played."

These elites could see evil only at home. The French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir did not believe that Germany was a "threat to peace," but instead worried that the "panic that the Right was spreading" would drag France, Britain, and the rest of Europe into war. Stafford Cripps, a liberal Labor member of Parliament, feared not Hitler, but Churchill. Cripps wrote that after Churchill became prime minister he would "then introduce fascist measures and there will be no more general elections."

In an important sense, the British Empire's strength failed because its elite liberal citizens stopped believing in it.

Sound familiar?

Found via Jeff Jarvis, Rebecca MacKinnon has harsh words for Columbia Journalism's Nick Lemann's recent New Yorker essay:

I can't read his mind and I haven't asked him, but it wouldn't be surprising if Lemann has been feeling somewhat on the defensive lately - and somewhat in need of explaining to students why they should fork out what amounts to a year's salary for many people in order to get a journalism degree. With this context, Lemann's choice of focus makes more sense, but it also makes me wonder why he chose to avoid addressing the objectivity debate in his New Yorker piece, choosing instead to focus on the comparative quality of amateur vs. professional reporting. In my observation, the most popular bloggers are valued less for the quality of their reporting (when they even do any original reporting) but rather for their authenticity of voice and openness about their political views: when you read Glenn Reynolds, he makes it very clear that he falls somewhere on the libertarian side of right wing. When you read Nick Lemann, you can only guess at his politics as Chris Nolan does, and he won't answer questions if you ask him in person. Which then leaves him and much of the journalistic profession open to all kinds of accusations of hidden political bias and dishonesty. Which in turn leads to a call from the more angry corners of the blogosphere for a reformation. This loss of public faith in American journalism's claim to objectivity - and the question of what should be done about it - is the real story in my view. If people don't trust you, it doesn't matter how impeccable your reporting is, does it? That's what's happening today - the good work of many excellent journalists is being unfairly dismissed as biased by many Americans because of this loss of trust. What should journalism as a profession do about it? Tell those who don't trust in our professionalism that they're ignorant fundamentalist rednecks and if they were smarter they'd realize we're really great reporters after all who really do deserve all those Pulitzers and Peabodys? Hmmm.. great idea... I'm sure that will work...

Well, it would be right in line with those reporters who suggested immediately after November of 2004 that foreign correspondents be dispatched to the red states. Along with those journalists who actually made the trek and reported from, say, Alabama or Texas sounding much like Marlin Perkins air-dropped into the Wild Kingdom.

Earlier this week, I wrote:

Stanley Kubrick never directed a crime drama after his classic The Killing in 1956. (The thinking man's Tarantino movie!) But the look and feel of the new Miami Vice, with its surreal documentary atmosphere and moral ambiguity, seems a bit like what the Barry Lyndon through Full Metal Jacket-era Kubrick would have directed had he been handed the original script for the Vice episode "Smuggler's Blues".

I think I was more right than I knew at the time:

Movies came later, when the Madison campus began offering its first courses in film history and film theory. [Michael Mann] signed up and liked what he saw. But his real inspiration came with the 1963 release of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. “It said to my whole generation of filmmakers that you could make an individual statement of high integrity and have that film be successfully seen by a mass audience all at the same time,” he says. “In other words, you didn’t have to be making Seven Brides for Seven Brothers if you wanted to be a part of the commercial film industry, or be reduced to niche filmmaking if you wanted to be serious about cinema. So that’s what Kubrick meant, aside from the fact that I loved Kubrick and he was a big influence.”

And it's evident--though, like I said, Vice feels (and let's remember we're talking about the big screen remake of a 1980s TV series here) much more like the ambiguous, slightly aloof Kubrick films of the 1970s and '80s than the Strangelove and earlier Kubrick.

"We're not being sexist here," my friend insisted. "It's not that looks matter per se. It's just that beautiful women are always on the cutting edge of social trends. Remember how many beautiful women were in the anti-war movement twenty years ago? In the yoga classes fifteen years ago? At the discos ten years ago? On Wall Street five years ago? Where the beautiful women are is where the country is headed."

Or as The Currency Lad writes today, "Alright brutal soldiers of the swinish Zionist entity, detain me already!"

(Guys--especially--make sure you follow his links; found via Tim Blair.)

I'm not sure if Andrew Sullivan is still holding himself out as a conservative, though I'm sure he'll be called a conservative blogger for time immemorial. But last Friday, as Mickey Kaus wrote (scroll down), "The range of Sullivan-approved discourse gets smaller and smaller!"

And it's gotten even smaller, as Dean Barnett and James Lileks note. If Sullivan's still a conservative, what is acceptable under his personal definition is the polar opposite of President Reagan's: it's the smallest of small tent conservatism.

Last Christmas, Umberto Eco wrote:

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

Robert Bove of The New English Review links to a recent Howard/Ohio University poll that claims:

More than one-third of Americans suspect federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East, according to a new poll.

The survey also found that 16 percent of Americans speculate that secretly planted explosives, not burning passenger jets, were the real reason the massive Twin Towers of the World Trade Center collapsed.

The national Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll of 1,010 adults also found that anger against the federal government is at record levels, with 54 percent saying they "personally are more angry" at the government than they used to be.

Widespread resentment and alienation toward the national government appears to be fueling a growing acceptance of conspiracy theories about the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Robert adds, "It would have been illuminating if the survey also had asked respondents where they get their news". Rush Limbaugh had the best punchline of all, though:

"When Elvis hears this--it'll kill him!"

Heh, indeed.^TM

Update: Some further thoughts that are very much related from ShrinkWrapped. And John Gibson adds that it's all about the BDS:

The truth is: People don't believe the 9/11 story because they hate George Bush and don't believe anything he says.

If he says Usama did 9/11, they don't believe it. If he says the Twin Towers were felled by two hijacked jetliners, they don't believe it. If Bush says there were 19 hijackers and they took four airliners and crashed all four in the largest attack on American soil ever, they don't believe it.

So now we have one-third of the American people as blinded by hate as many Europeans and many Canadians and many Arabs. They're so blinded they cannot see or hear the hundreds if not thousands of experts who have told them exactly what happened on 9/11.

Instead they rush to so-called evidence and so-called investigations that are much closer to alien spaceships than they are to observable and verifiable fact.

On September 11th, as my wife and I sat glued to the TV and our computers watching the nightmarish events and their immediate aftermath unfold, I leaned over to her and said, "You just know that there will be people who believe this is all a fake"--or some grand conspracy. I had no idea at the time just how quickly they'd come out of the woodwork--or their astonishing quantity.

Bret Stephens writes, "How do you spot an anti-Semite? Ask about Israel":

Among those who held the most negative views of Israel, some 60% also believed that Jews engaged in shady financial practices, and more than 70% thought that Jews had too much business power. Whatever the respondents' religion, nationality, sex or income level, the more intense their dislike of Israel, the likelier they were to be anti-Semitic. Altogether, 56% of those harboring strong anti-Israel feelings were also anti-Semitic. (For the record, the survey found that Spain was the most anti-Semitic country in Europe, with 22% of respondents qualifying as anti-Semites, while Denmark and the Netherlands, at 8%, were the least.)

This does not mean, of course, that even the most strident opponents of Israel are necessarily anti-Semites. But in a telephone interview, Mr. Kaplan explained the significance of his findings this way: "Say you're at one of those anti-Israel rallies. Say you ask them whether they are anti-Semitic. Say all of them say no. Statistically speaking, more than half of them are lying."

Read the whole thing.

In his great article today in NRO, Noah Pollak wrote:

Because it is impossible for television reporters to obtain hard, reliable information from terrorist organizations, journalists are structurally forced to do almost all their interviewing on the Israeli side.

Of course, if they want interviews, just call Hezbollah's PR department--complete with business cards!

Pamela of Atlas Shrugs is in Israel this week, photo, video and audio blogging on the Gaza border with the IDF. Just keep scrolling.

Chris Anderson's post (see below) about digital movie making echoes many of the same points producer/guitarist Nile Rogers once noted about digital music making:

The old restrictions in technology forced us to do things right. It forced us to have to make decisions. It forced us to spiritually be so in tune with the other people that magic had to happen. It made you step up to the plate, whereas now, when I go to play on someone's record I feel uncomfortably free-and I almost hate that. I can actually play on a record all day long and do ten different solos and take all these different approaches to the rhythm and all this kind of stuff. And then the producer has to look at all this work like a film-they have to go back and edit and figure out which bits they want to use. Whereas in the old days, when a person hired me to work on a record, I had to get it right, right there. You had to play great, you had to be smokin', and there was no way that they could fix it and make it better.

When I played on Michael Jackson's last record, I knew what they were going to do, so I said, "Hey, Michael, here's like a billion ideas. I'm going to play all this cool s***, and you go off and do it." So I didn't have to write it, so to speak. I didn't have to give them the definitive, perfect, guitar part; I gave them lots of definitive, perfect guitar parts, and they decided which ones to use. That's weird to me. Once you're unlimited, you'll never play that same way--you'll just go on and on and on and on. It's like the ultimate jazz person's fantasy: "You to tell me I'm going to solo for the rest of my life, and you guys will think it's great?"

Having infinite options also means you don't have the pressure on you...

It's pressureless.

-which means that you won't necessarily work as hard as you would if you knew you had just two takes in 20 minutes to get it right.

You can't help it. You see, I grew up in the days of, time is money-as Madonna would say, "time is money, and the money is mine." And I like that, I love that.

You had a limitation of tracks, too. You were lucky if you had two tracks and you could do an alternative take.

You know what people do now when they want me to overdub on a record? They'll send an album with a mix, and I have like 22 open tracks of guitars I can put down. So now you are going to figure out what my part is.

And speaking of which, I have an article in the August issue of Nuts & Volts on Roland's GI-20 interface, titled "Shut Up And Play Your Computer!". The GI-20 allows any guitar with a Roland guitar synthesizer pickup to drive a myriad of software synthesizers via the PC's USB port, opening a realm that was heretofore almost entirely the exclusive province of keyboard players.

The article greatly expands on this Blogcritics piece from a few years ago. But I have no idea where they found the guy they photographed for the article...

In my review on Monday of Michael Mann's big screen version of his epochal 1980s TV series, I wrote:

I had a few big disapointments of my own with the film. First, its cinematography. Or, to be more prescise, videography. Whereas the original Vice set new standards for television cinematography, many of the scenes in this movie looked like television blown-up for the big screen. Indeed, when I got home, I searched around to find that Mann shot the film with a Thomson Viper FilmStream Camera--and it really shows. Despite all their shortcomings, George Lucas's digitally "filmed" Star Wars prequels all look like films. And when I go out to the movies, I want to see movies, or at least something that resembles the warmth and sheen of projected celluloid. Not digital, pixelated HD blown-up to the big screen.

But that's relatively minor. (My wife never noticed anything wrong with the film's cinematography; I'm not sure if the audience noticed anything unusual about it, either.) And when the film is released to DVD, it will look fantastic on the small screen.

Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail, notes some additional benefits when shooting digitally:

"I think shooting in digital changes acting as much as film changed stage acting, or as sound changed film," said [actor/director Tony Bill].

Why? Because film costs a lot and must be used sparingly, while digital tape is practically free. The difference between the scarcity economics of film and the abundance economics of digital is, as Bill put it, "the difference between pointing a loaded gun at someone and a toy gun. You point a loaded gun at them and they're going to act different. A film camera is a loaded gun. Digital is not."

He explained further what he learned shooting Flyboys with the Panavision Genesis. "The old model of acting is that the rehearsal is great and then things change when you say "rolling"--usually for the worse. Now there's no film in the camera. You can shoot everything. So there's no rehearsal. Or perhaps it's all rehearsal. Either way, it's far more natural."

Actors freeze up when they know that there's a cost to failure--a thousand-foot magazine of film costs $1,200 between film and developing. Said Bill: "That slight whirring noise of film running through the camera is the sound of money. And it gets in the way of being real."

I've had to unlearn saying "action" and "cut". I think shooting in digital makes every actor better. You're always in rehearsal and never in performance. There's no "start". It allows for serendipity. Rather than reach an emotional moment and then having to recreate it later with the film running, you capture everything.

Even better, the director doesn't have to make all the important decisions up front. They can apply "makeup" in post production. Rather than build the perfect period-piece set, they can shoot in the real world and age it afterward. For one movie set in the 1970s, one of the panelists said, "We shot on real streets and then spent a half-million dollars erasing Starbucks from every f***ing shot."

But there are some downsides to digital, too. For one thing, because it costs far less to do additional takes, directors are prone to making their actors do it again and again--asking for 40 takes rather than 20. Bill described Robert Downey Jr. leaving little jars of urine around his chair because the director wasn't letting him go to the bathroom. "I'm exhausted," Downey complained. Who can blame him?

OK, I will: geez, shades of how Howard Hughes was portrayed in The Avaitor--or maybe Sterling Hayden in Dr. Strangelove.

But precious bodily fluids aside, those are some great observations about shooting digitally. And, as Libertas frequently notes, digital filmmaking opens the door to everyone--even those Hollywood would generally like to keep out.

Attempting to distance himself from yesterday's Joe Lieberman in blackface image on The Huffington Post, Ned Lamont is now claiming:

"I don't know anything about the blogs. I'm not responsible for those. I have no comment on them."

Video proves otherwise.

Writing from Israel, Noah Pollak has an extremely astute take on the imbalance of Legacy Media coverage of the Middle East. He's writing specifically about Israel and Lebanon, after watching NBC's Ann Curry grill a young Israeli soldider, but his observations have far wider implications:

What I realized, from watching her and other journalists like her, was that contrary to popular belief, most of these journalists are neither “pro” nor “anti” Israel. In fact, they are not exactly journalists at all, at least not in the sense that we have been taught to believe. They do not seem interested in reporting what is traditionally understood as news — that is, information that attempts to convey as complete and realistic an accounting of events as possible.

They can be more accurately described as entertainers, who stimulate their audiences with that which is factual and passing. The most striking thing about the producers and on-air reporters who show up in Israel is how deeply ignorant they are of the conflict and its history. This is not exactly their fault: It is the product of their job, which is to entertain rather than inform. The skills required of them are technical and theatrical, not historic or intellectual, and thus they do not approach their task with much in the way of rigor; they are looking for interesting personal stories and manufactured mini-dramas, whose correlation to reality is only occasionally discernable. It is just more interesting to expose the tortured consciences of IDF artillerymen than to report on their achievements in battle.

There is another problem that makes serious journalism here unlikely. Because it is impossible for television reporters to obtain hard, reliable information from terrorist organizations, journalists are structurally forced to do almost all their interviewing on the Israeli side. But television news thrives on the contentious interview: The reporter barrages the interview subject with tough and impertinent questions, hoping to produce high-quality drama for the audience. Here, for example, are three questions Curry asked during one brief interview of the Israeli government spokeswoman, Miri Eisen, on July 30:

“Some people ask, while Israel is trying to root out Hezbollah, how it is justified in killing large numbers of civilians. Your answer?”

“But what is the—but it [Israel] doesn't target, but civilians were hit. What is to prevent this from happening again?”

“What—why won't Israel agree to an immediate cease-fire, as now is being called for by the pope today, as well as the European Union?”

Curry and her colleagues would probably ask similarly tough questions of Hezbollah officials, if they gave interviews. So the institutionalized result is that Israel must always operate with its feet held to the fire while Hezbollah enjoys a permanent holiday from media scrutiny. This massive imbalance is of course never remarked upon by American journalists — has Curry, in all of her inquisitions of Israelis, ever bothered to note that she never gets to give the other side an equal grilling?

Of course, give NBC some credit. To the best of my knowledge, they're not on the same kidding-around we're all friends here level with terrorists as Reuters.

...Or not. My wife and I spent most of last week without power to our Silicon Valley home--and its home offices. This post by Bill "No, I'm not the former Senator" Bradley over Pajamas' new Politics Central is a might too "green" for my tastes, but it makes a great point:

Weathering what may have been California’s worst ever heat wave, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger survived the very issue that began his recalled predecessor’s downward spiral. In doing so, the Governor grappled with issues that may afflict the rest of the nation. It was a perfect energy storm. And it may prove not to be uncommon.

Democratic Governor Gray Davis was flying high five years ago when rolling blackouts hit California, kicking him into a tailspin from which he never recovered. Those blackouts, later shown to have been partly manipulated by Enron and other power generators, occurred when electric power demand from the state’s regulated utilities was 41,000 megawatts. This week Schwarzenegger narrowly managed to avert blackouts with the peak power demand at 52,000 megawatts.

However, it fails to mention that for much of the 1980s and '90s, while California business boomed, environmentalism and NIMBY-ism kept electric utilities from keeping up with demand. It makes the Silicon Valley region feel a bit like Blade Runner or Max Headroom: an ultra high-tech computer industry running on an infrastructure that's been little updated in decades. Back in 2001, during the state's last power crisis, Michael W. Lynch of Reason wrote:

Times have been good in California over the past few years; industry has been working at capacity; more people have moved into the state; folks have been buying and air-conditioning larger homes; golf carts have been filling up the state’s fairways. Everything, in short, has been expanding in California since the "deregulation."

Except power plants. It’s extremely difficult to get a permit and a site for a power plant in California. Residents love electricity, but they also love such things as clean air, pristine beaches, unobstructed views, and critters such as the Kangaroo Rat. Since the early 1990s, not a single plant has been built in California. From 1996 to 1999, electricity demand grew by 12 percent while supply grew by less than 2 percent, according to the California Utilities Commission.

In the latest City Journal, Nicole Gelinas writes that a similar situation exists in the other big blue "parenthesis state", as Tom Wolfe once dubbed New York and California:

Over the past 10 years, Con Ed says, electricity demand in Gotham has risen 20 percent. It’s no mystery why: over that time period, New York developers have built 160,000 new homes—equivalent to a Boston-sized city.

While most media attention centers on the need to build new power plants to meet this demand, independent power producers do a reasonable job on this task themselves. During the Bloomberg years, competing power generation companies have quietly built, or begun work on, five new plants to serve New York City, enough to meet about two-thirds of projected demand through the end of the decade.

Why? Because competition works: despite permitting and environmental obstacles that politicians and community activists have thrown up, power generators want to build in New York, since they know they can make money here.

But competition doesn’t work at Con Ed. Since 1990s-era deregulation, Con Ed produces little power itself. Instead, it buys the power from the independent generators and distributes it to New Yorkers. Con Ed, as a monopoly, faces none of the competitive pressures that the independent generators face. So it must operate under close supervision by New York City and State to ensure that it’s doing a good job.

Con Ed, for example, isn’t free to set its own power rates—New York State sets them. And it isn’t free to earn unlimited profits, as most companies can: over a certain threshold, New York demands that some extra profits be returned to ratepayers.

Most important, Con Ed must depend on state officials to allow it to “pass through” to its customers the cost of investments that it makes in its underground transmission network. The company said earlier this year that it would spend $1.2 billion this year, and $5.3 billion over three years, to improve its transmission and distribution networks (some of that money goes to counties outside New York City). But clearly, it wasn’t enough, or fast enough.

Because Con Ed doesn’t face competitive pressures to do what’s best for New York City, it’s the mayor who must ensure that the company does so, or New York’s growth suffers. Due to the Queens blackout, one of the borough’s largest employers, Citigroup, lacked a reliable supply of electricity. Next time, it might be Midtown Manhattan without power for a week. Faced with such a crisis, what would a responsible CEO conclude about his company’s future in Gotham?

He'd probably reach much the same conclusion as Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn did late last year about his company's future in Los Angeles:

Nissan Motor Co. announced Thursday it is moving its North American headquarters and nearly 1,300 jobs from California to the Nashville area to take advantage of the lower cost of doing business in the Southeast.

"The board of Nissan decided to relocate our North American headquarters, and we're coming to Tennessee," Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn said at a news conference at the state Capitol attended by Gov. Phil Bredesen and other top state officials.

The headquarters, which has been based in Gardena, Calif., will relocate to Williamson County, a suburban area south of Nashville. . . .

Ghosn cited lower real estate and business taxes as major reasons for the move.

"The costs of doing business in Southern California are much higher than the costs of doing business in Tennessee," he said.

Faced with headlines such as this in today's New York papers, what business owner wouldn't want to decamp towards a more business-friendly environment--which, not coincidentally, is bound to have more reliable utilities?

Today is the anniversary of the death murder of journalist/author/blogger Steven Vincent in Basra, Iraq. I had the privilege of meeting Lisa, his widow, last November during the Pajamas launch in New York, along with Judith Weiss of Kesher Talk, who's posting a memoriam to Vincent today.

Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, two of the most anti-Semitic figures on the American left (and along with Pat Buchanan, certainly amongst recent former presidential candidates) are campaigning against Joe Lieberman in Connecticut. Meanwhile, Lieberman is being portrayed on the Huffington Post (and it's astonishing I'm even typing this word in the 21st century) in blackface.

As I wrote last week:

And remember, the midterms--and their aftermath--are still well over three months away. Meaning that it's only going to get worse, when the rest of the country begins to start paying attention.

Incidentally, Mitt Romney was attacked last week for calling Boston's "Big Dig" project a "tar baby", despite the phrase's recent use by (scroll to bottom) The Boston Globe and Herald, Molly Ivins, and John Kerry. Will a similiar firestorm breakout over Lieberman in blackface?

Nahh, I'm not holding my breath, either.

Update: The Anchoress has some thoughts that are well worth reading:

Hillary loves to talk about - he’s being treated abominably…by people who will proclaim (with straight faces) that they are “tolerant” and “open-minded” and that they believe “people are entitled to their opinions.”

Well…that’s what liberalism was when I was being raised as a liberal, by liberals. Liberalism these days seems to be about doing what you’re told to do, saying what you’re told to say and falling in line.

I’m just astonished. And sickened.

She's not the only one.

Update: Betsy Newmark and The New Republic untangle a Mobius loop of Al Sharpton's creation. Meanwhile, Lieberman responds:

"It's extremely offensive," Lieberman said. "I have been the target of the 'blogs' on a lot of really offensive stuff, stuff I consider lies and smears, but this picture of me with Bill Clinton and me having my face blackened is offensive to people of all races and colors and just doesn't belong."

Well yeah. But sadly, the left has decided that Lieberman himself just doesn't belong. And to paraphrase a quote from Andrew Sullivan back in 2003, they don't know when to stop. There's no controlling mechanism when they go on the attack.

In 2004 article in The Weekly Standard, James Piereson wrote a perfect description of the rather toxic direction that liberalism took, beginning in the 1960s:

From the time of John Kennedy's assassination in 1963 to Jimmy Carter's election in 1976, the Democratic party was gradually taken over by a bizarre doctrine that might be called Punitive Liberalism. According to this doctrine, America had been responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds through its history for which it deserved punishment and chastisement. White Americans had enslaved blacks and committed genocide against Native Americans. They had oppressed women and tyrannized minority groups, such as the Japanese who had been interned in camps during World War II. They had been harsh and unfeeling toward the poor. By our greed, we had despoiled the environment and were consuming a disproportionate share of the world's wealth and resources. We had coddled dictators abroad and violated human rights out of our irrational fear of communism.

Given this bill of indictment, the Punitive Liberals held that Americans had no right at all to feel pride in their country's history or optimism about its future. Those who expressed such pride were written off as ignorant patriots who could not face up to the sins of the past; and those who looked ahead to a brighter future were dismissed as naive "Pollyannas" who did not understand that the brief American century was now over. The Punitive Liberals felt that the purpose of national policy was to punish the nation for its crimes rather than to build a stronger America and a brighter future for all.

Here the Punitive Liberals parted company from earlier liberal reformers such as FDR, Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, who viewed reform as a means of bringing the promise of American life within reach of more of our people. The earlier reformers believed deeply that the American experiment in self-government was inherently good, and that the task of policy was to improve it. But in the troubled years following Kennedy's death, the reform tradition took on a furrowed brow and a punitive visage.

I don't mean to imply by the title that ol' Frank fit that description--he was as comfortable with President Reagan as he was with JFK (something millions and millions of Americans would agree with, including my parents). But get a load of this passage in a profile of Tony Bennett by The New York Times' Stephen Holden that Power Line discovered:

Careers that last as long and have been as distinguished as Mr. Bennett’s have something to tell us about collective cultural experience over decades. It has been said that Sinatra’s journey from skinny, starry-eyed “Frankie,” strewing hearts and flowers, to the imperious, volatile Chairman of the Board roughly parallels an American loss of innocence. As Sinatra entered his noir period in the mid-1950’s, his romantic faith gave way to a soul-searching existentialism that yielded the most psychologically complex popular music ever recorded. Following a similar arc, the country grew from a nation of hungry dreamers fleeing the Depression and fighting “the good war” into an arrogant empire drunk on power and angry at the failure of the American dream to bring utopia.

In 2004, when the Times' then-ombudsman Daniel Okrent wrote...

Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?

Of course it is.

...Okrent didn't describe what flavor of liberalism he was referring to. Passages such as Holden's along with the Times' post-9/11 actions put it squarely in the punitive camp.

Update: Michael Barone also has some thoughts on the late '60s rise of Punitive Liberalism, and its impact on journalism:

The second period is the second half of the 1960s and on through the 1970s and 1980s, when the dominant print media (the NYT, Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek) and the three broadcast news networks, as yet unchallenged by cable news, took an increasingly adversarial stance toward American government and institutions and an increasingly partisan stand against Republicans and conservatives. Lemann, who was on the Harvard Crimson in the 1970s, in his writings has seemed reluctant to admit that what I call Old Media have taken such an adversarial and partisan stand; he seems wedded to the idea that Old Media are simply being "objective" and that reasonable people could not be expected to operate differently.

Which brings to mind a conversation with a broadcast network news executive I remember from many years ago.

Q. Don't you think it affects your work product that 90 percent of your people are Democrats?

A. No, no, our people are objective, they have professional standards, they report fairly.

Q. Then doesn't that mean that your work product would be the same if 90 percent of your people were Republicans?

(Quickly) A. No, then it would be biased.

Only liberals, in this view, can see the world accurately.

It's curious to see old media figures hanging on--at least publicly--to the idea that Big Media is objective. The rise of the Long Tail has allowed a few of their more honest representatives ample opportunity to discuss its biases--including, in 2004, the Times' then-ombudsman, himself.

Jason Apuzzo of Libertas writes that while their best-known product has served as rallying points for very divergent ideologies, Mel Gibson and Michael Moore are actually buddies on some level, linking to this 2005 quote from The New York Times:

Mr. Moore and Mel Gibson … are fans of each other’s work. Asked if he had seen Mr. Gibson’s film, Mr. Moore lighted up.

“I saw it twice,” Mr. Moore said. “It’s a very powerful film. I’m a practicing Catholic. My film might have been called ‘The Compassion of the Christ,’ though. The great thing about this country is the diversity of voices. When we limit the voices, we cease being a free society.”

When Mr. Gibson walked to the press room lectern, he and Mr. Moore seemed delighted to meet each other.

“I feel a strange kinship with Michael,” Mr. Gibson said. “They’re trying to pit us against each other in the press, but it’s a hologram. They really have got nothing to do with one another. It’s just some kind of device, some left-right. He makes some salient points. There was some very expert, elliptical editing going on. However, what the hell are we doing in Iraq? No one can explain to me in a reasonable manner that I can accept why we’re there, why we went there, and why we’re still there.”

Meanwhile, there's another kinship the two Hollywood elites share. Clive Davis highlights this passage from Jesse Larner, the leftwing author of Forgive Us Our Spins, who knew Michael Moore way back when Moore was editing Mother Jones:

He also showed signs of what people who observed him in later years would call manic depression. A senior staffer who worked closely with Moore told me:

"We had a staff picnic in August. Now, if you're the editor of a magazine that has a staff picnic, you go to the picnic and you lead; you have fun. Moore went to this picnic and he found a table in the picnic area off to the side and sat there by himself, staring into space for five hours with this really morose look on his face. He wouldn't talk to anybody. It was the weirdest thing, really bizarre. People were wondering, 'What the hell? This is our editor? Our leader?' It was at that point that most people realized, 'This guy can't run this magazine; he can't lead us.' Some of this stuff would even be excusable if he was coming in on Monday with thirty great ideas, twenty great writers, but that wasn't happening at all. As a matter of fact, he was blowing us away with how stupid he was at running the magazine."

And as Mickey Kaus noted a few days ago, Gibson suffers from the same affliction, pointing out this sentence in a 2004 piece in Daily Catholic:

He has made it known that from an early age he suffered from being manic depressive, but through his strong faith and appropriate medicines he has been able to overcome these shortcomings to attain the heights of stardom.

Jason adds:

These quotes, along with Gibson’s remarks about Bush’s ‘fearmongering’ have been out there for a while, but conservatives haven’t wanted to talk about it because they’re apparently in thrall to the cult of celebrity around Gibson. And this, perhaps is the most vital point I have to make to fellow conservatives: get over this guy.

Fair enough.

Editor & Publisher writes that Cynthia McKinney is suing the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for libel.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey notes that McKinney might want to pay more attention to her campaign than her lawsuit: Hank Johnson is blowing her out by 15 to 25 percent in the current polls:

This is not to say that Johnson is a conservative's dream. People should check out Johnson's website to see hi s positions on the issues, which correspond very closely to the Democratic Party platform, such as it is these days. His voice will lend itself to increased spending and increased taxes. However, one can expect no less from this particular district, as those policies find great favor among McKinney's constituents. This district will not turn Republican in the next few weeks.

What Johnson will bring to Congress is a responsible voice for that constituency, a voice that will garner attention for the right reasons. I will likely oppose most of what Johnson supports, and vice versa, but Johnson will at least have my respect and that of the rest of Congress. Johnson will not use his office to turn himself into some kind of pop-culture martyr. The voters of his district deserve to have a responsible Representative, and it appears that enough of them agree.

That's good to see.

Update: OK, don't pass the popcorn:

A Democratic congresswoman from Georgia is not suing The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for libel, contrary to a report in [Editor & Publisher] yesterday.

U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney has not in fact filed suit against the Journal-Constitution, according to attorney Tom Clyde, who is representing the paper.

Yesterday, it was incorrectly reported that McKinney filed charges against AJC Editorial Page Editor Cynthia Tucker and Publisher John Mellott for an editorial column that ran in its July 30 edition about the congresswoman's alleged altercation with police.

Rather, McKinney's lawyer, J.M. Raffauf, sent a letter to the newspaper on July 31 saying that the July 30 column by AJC Editorial Page Editor Cynthia Tucker contained material that Raffauf says was "untrue, defamatory and libelous." Raffauf and McKinney have also demanded a retraction, as well as an editorial in which the attorney says the paper should "repudiate its libelous statements."

The letter, obtained by E&P today, details the segments of the AJC column with which McKinney takes issue. In one part, Raffauf says Tucker's suggestion that "When he stopped [McKinney], the officer said, she slugged him with her cellphone" is "a false allegation not supported by any witness or any other evidence," and that Tucker is "maliciously attempting to spin this into a felony by falsely alleging that she assaulted the officer with a deadly weapon."

The letter also refutes the part of Tucker's column that said the congresswoman "suggested that President Bush had known in advance about the Sept. 11 attacks but did nothing to stop them so his friends could profit from the ensuing war." Raffauf states that "The award-winning documentary film 'American Blackout' definitively exposed this statement by Tucker as false, as the Congresswoman never made this statement even though Tucker continues to assert that she did."

Thanks for clearing that up, E&P.

In May of 2004, I wrote a piece for TCS Daily titled, "Welcome To The Post-Bias Media" (the italics in the title referred to Bernard Goldberg's seminal look at the subject):

Another strange thing has started happening as well -- in the past, media elites denounced any claims of a liberal bias in the news with a shrug and a "who, us? We're not liberals. We're not leftwing. We're objective and neutral. No biases here!" More and more, as we'll shortly see, the media are going on the record (Brock, Gore and Franken, notwithstanding) that it leans pretty heavily towards the left.

In September of 2004, a week after Ra^therGate broke, Stanley Kurtz theorized:

we may well be seeing the initial signs of a profound realignment of the media along more strictly and openly partisan lines. The mainstream media as a whole may be larger than the alternative outlets, but the mainstream audience itself is segmented. Looking at the CBS News audience alone, we are probably talking about the most self-consciously liberal part of the network audience pie. True, nowadays all the network newscasts are liberal. But CBS has had that reputation longer than the rest. Gradually, with the exit of moderates and conservatives to other networks and the alternative media, CBS's audience is probably now composed largely of liberal Democrats. In the middle of the most divisive presidential election in years, we have to assume that the CBS audience itself is far more interested in helping John Kerry than in getting to the bottom of the forgery issue. So as the country increasingly divides into two media camps, the "mainstream media" is becoming more openly partisan. And it's the audience that's driving this — not only, or even primarily, the journalists, liberal though journalists may be.

Just this past April, Peggy Noonan looked at Katie Couric's arrival at CBS and speculated:

Is the appointment of Katie an acknowledgement by CBS that it doesn't feel it has to care anymore about political preferences, that the existence of Fox News Channel has in effect freed up the network broadcasts to be what you and I might call more politically tendentious and they might call edgy? In a fractured media environment where everyone can have a voice, why wouldn't the broadcast networks take the new freedom as new license? After all, if America is one big niche market, liberals make up a big niche.

I'm wondering how the network news divisions are viewing the lay of the land. The answer will tell us something about the future American media environment.

According to a recent Pew report, it sounds like we have an answer:

Liberal media critics dismiss FNC as biased to the right, pointing to how Republicans prefer to watch it, but a new poll completed by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that by the same margin that Republicans choose to get their news from FNC, Democrats prefer to learn their news from the broadcast networks and, to a somewhat lesser extent, CNN and NPR. In the survey released Sunday, 34 percent of Republicans reported they watch FNC regularly, compared to 20 percent of Democrats -- a 14 point spread. As for the broadcast networks, Pew reported: "The gap between Republicans and Democrats in regular viewership of the nightly network news on ABC, CBS, or NBC is now 14 points, nearly three times as large as it was in 2004; currently, 38 percent of Democrats regularly watch compared with 24 percent of Republicans. There is a slightly smaller gap in the regular audience for NPR -- 22 percent of Democrats listen regularly, compared with 13 percent of Republicans." A higher percentage of Democrats than Republicans watch CNN, MSNBC, network morning shows, Sunday morning interview programs and TV news magazine shows.

Can't say I'm too surprised by the results of this poll, of course. And it certainly makes sense for networks, like Hollywood, to aim material that appeals to their core audience. Fortunately, there's a Long Tail of options for the rest of us to choose from.