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Saturday, July 17, 2004
Posted
7/17/2004 07:46:18 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Friday, July 16, 2004
Posted
7/16/2004 09:41:44 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/16/2004 01:00:49 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Extra! Extra! The big news of the past decade in America has been largely overlooked, and you'll find it shocking. Young people have become aggressively normal. Violence, drug use and teen sex have declined. Kids are becoming more conservative politically and socially. They want to get married and have large families. And, get this, they adore their parents. The Mood of American Youth Survey found that more than 80 percent of teenagers report no family problems -- up from about 40 percent a quarter-century ago. In another poll, two-thirds of daughters said they would "give Mom an 'A.' "In the history of polling, we've never seen tweens and teens get along with their parents this well," says William Strauss, referring to kids born since 1982. Strauss is author, with Neil Howe, of "Millenials Rising: The Next Great Generation." In an article in the latest issue of City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, Kay S. Hymowitz writes: "Wave away the smoke of the Jackson family circus, Paris Hilton and the antics of San Francisco, and you can see how Americans have been self-correcting from a decades-long experiment with 'alternative values.' Slowly, almost imperceptibly during the 1990s, the culture began a lumbering, Titanic turn away from the iceberg." Adults are changing, but kids seem to have changed most -- and they may comprise the new "greatest generation," as Tom Brokaw called the World War II cohort. "What is emerging," writes Hymowitz, "is a vital, optimistic, family-centered, entrepreneurial, and, yes, morally thoughtful, citizenry."Glassman goes on to write that the return to normalcy by America's youth is trouble for the Democratic party.
Posted
7/16/2004 12:38:27 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Those who want the enemy to win should indeed have their patriotism questioned. How can you love your country if you want its enemies to win? This is a question that should be put to all those "liberals" who want to be seen as patriotic but who have embraced America's enemies, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly by embracing anti-American supporters of the terrorists like Michael Moore, and through him the Zarqawi "resisters" in Iraq."Unfortunately we're not getting this message across as a nation", Horowitz writes--illustrating his case with painful results. Thursday, July 15, 2004
Posted
7/15/2004 11:50:58 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Computer-savvy and interested in presidential politics, 13-year-old Erin was upset to learn that America Online's Instant Message (AIM) robot, "Smarter Child," favored Democrat John Kerry in this year's election. Erin, whose last name is being omitted in this article, is a fan of President Bush. Internet instant messaging is one of the most popular methods for teens and even adults to stay in touch with friends and family. One of the better-known messenger programs, AIM, offers the feature called Smarter Child, a robot programmed to provide automated responses to those with whom it chats. Built and programmed by Conversagent, Inc., a privately held firm that develops technology for creating and operating interactive agents, Smarter Child is able to dispense facts and figures, movie times, or just plain conversation with AIM users. But when Erin told the robot that "George Bush is awesome," she was shocked by the response. "No way. George W. Bush is way uncool," the reply stated. She asked, "Do you like George W. Bush?" and the program replied, "I'm a Kerry supporter myself." Testing the waters, she typed in "John Kerry rocks." The robot's response: "Absolutely. John Kerry rocks."Nothing like getting them while they're young, huh AOL?
Posted
7/15/2004 10:07:11 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Bob Dole got the nomination because it was "his turn." Kerry got the nomination because at the last minute Howard Dean imploded, and Democrats settled on Kerry because they thought he was the most electable. Neither were smart ways to pick a candidate. The jubilation over Edwards is, I believe, a sign that the Democrats are in denial about how bad a candidate Kerry is. Time will tell if I'm right.RTWT.
Posted
7/15/2004 08:49:05 PM
by Edward Driscoll
1. It’s almost impossible to explain what a blog is to someone who’s never seen one. That's the mark of a true innovation.I don't think it's too difficult to explain what a blog is without seeing it. But, as I've written before, for me, it took seeing InstaPundit back when he was on Blogger, and had that Blogger logo on his site, to put the pieces together, and "get" that blogging could be something entirely unrelated to a personal "day in the life" diary. And I'm not entirely sure I agree with this one: 12. Art blogging will never be as popular as war blogging. More people care about politics than the arts.I think it depends on what your definition of the arts is. If it's expanded to include music and film, sites like Blogcritics get a ton of traffic for their reviews. Ultimately, blogging is really a content neutral-platform, especially when sites like InstaPundit has lots of posts of 50 words or less, and sites such as Steve Den Beste's and Blogcritics have posts of 500 words or more (sometimes a lot more in the case of Den Beste). Then there's this item: 8. For now, blogs presuppose the existence of the print media. That will probably always be the case—but over time, the print media will become increasingly less important to the blogosphere.A big part of Insta-style blogs (like this one) is that they link to, and analyze articles written by others. Often these articles are original pieces of reporting. The big advantage that AP, Reuters, UPI and others have over bloggers is that they've built up a huge amount of reporters and stringers to cover stories. Of course, they could very well lose their effective monopoly on reporting over time: I once did a piece where I spoke to the US rep of IFRA, a European news agency, and he had some very interesting ideas for organizing competitors to the old-line wire services. (While it's publication date is November of 2001, it was originally written a couple of years prior--before 9/11 and the blog explosion.) I've long thought that the real power in blogging is going to be in group blogs--and it's possible that they could make a real impact in the AP/Reuters/UPI style of reporting--but as Teachout implies, it's going to be a while before that starts to happen. But it probably will--because as Roger Ailes once said, "you don't need a license to report. You need a license to do hair". (Via Betsy Newmark.)
Posted
7/15/2004 08:10:17 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/15/2004 02:52:26 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/15/2004 02:33:15 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/15/2004 02:17:02 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/15/2004 12:55:10 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/15/2004 12:48:30 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/15/2004 12:40:31 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/15/2004 11:24:47 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/15/2004 11:19:00 AM
by Edward Driscoll
What's really surprising about this is that this suggests this wasn't part of an orchestrated effort to have Hillary make a "surprise" appearance, that it really was a glaring oversight by Kerry, his campaign, and convention organizers. How do you schedule a convention lineup and leave out the party's most popular woman?
Posted
7/15/2004 11:00:38 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/15/2004 01:42:34 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/15/2004 12:47:11 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Posted
7/14/2004 11:10:14 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/14/2004 08:53:27 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/14/2004 08:18:10 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/14/2004 08:02:31 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/14/2004 06:35:42 PM
by Edward Driscoll
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic candidate John Kerry, whose campaign demanded to know on Wednesday whether President Bush read a key Iraq intelligence assessment, did not read the document himself before voting to give Bush the authority to go to war, aides acknowledged.Nice to see just a smidgen of the bloom come off of the "collective glow" of the media's lovefest with Kerry.
Posted
7/14/2004 06:30:24 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/14/2004 05:04:52 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/14/2004 04:36:03 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/14/2004 03:51:55 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/14/2004 03:46:10 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/14/2004 03:04:34 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/14/2004 02:30:00 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/14/2004 01:11:24 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/14/2004 12:52:11 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/14/2004 12:02:33 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Posted
7/13/2004 11:02:48 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/13/2004 10:45:40 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/13/2004 10:43:03 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/13/2004 02:36:50 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Monday, July 12, 2004
Posted
7/12/2004 09:41:27 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/12/2004 09:40:47 PM
by Edward Driscoll
In an interview with The New York Times Magazine, William F. Buckley Jr., on the occasion of his taking leave from National Review, the magazine he founded 50 years ago, was asked a series of questions. Needless to say, given the politics of The New York Times and its interviewer, the questions were nearly all challenging. But nothing quite prepared a reader for this one: "You seem indifferent to suffering. Have you ever suffered yourself?" In one sentence, a New York Times interviewer summed up the liberal view of conservatives -- "indifferent to suffering." As I have long believed, in general, conservatives think liberals are fools and liberals think conservatives are evil.Ronald Reagan frequently called himself a National Review conservative. He ended the Cold War and freed hundreds of millions from the literal and figurative Gulag that was the Soviet Union. With National Review, Bill Buckley virtually created the modern conservative movement. If it were up to the Times, the Soviet Union, Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein would all still be in power. Tell me again who seems indifferent to suffering.
Posted
7/12/2004 12:54:37 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/12/2004 12:44:23 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/12/2004 12:38:18 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/12/2004 12:34:02 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/12/2004 12:15:20 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/12/2004 12:06:37 PM
by Edward Driscoll
The media “wants Kerry to win” and so “they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic” and “there’s going to be this glow about” them, Evan Thomas, the Assistant Managing Editor of Newsweek, admitted on Inside Washington over the weekend. He should know. His magazine this week sports a smiling Kerry and Edwards on its cover with the yearning headline, “The Sunshine Boys?” Inside, an article carrying Thomas’ byline contrasted how “Dick Cheney projects the bleakness of a Wyoming winter, while John Edwards always appears to be strolling in the Carolina sunshine.” The cover story touted how Kerry and Edwards “became a buddy-buddy act, hugging and whispering like Starsky and Hutch after consuming the evidence.” Newsweek’s competitor, Time, also gushed about the Democratic ticket, dubbing them, in the headline over their story, “The Gleam Team.” Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz also realized the media’s championing of the Democratic ticket and made it a focus of his Sunday Reliable Sources show on CNN. The on screen topic cues: “Edwards Lovefest?” and “Media’s Dream Team.” Kurtz’s Washington Post on Sunday well illustrated the media’s infatuation with Kerry and Edwards. “Kerry Vows to Restore 'Truth' to Presidency,” announced a July 11 front page headline. Inside, on page A-8, a headline declared: “Kerry, Edwards Revel in Brotherhood of Campaign.” The subhead: “Energy, Enthusiasm Infectious as Democrats Take Message to Battleground States.”Gee, no wonder polls keep producing results like this. UPDATE: And Kerry himself sites two New York Times reporters as being favorable to him. James Taranto writes: A few months back, when Kerry claimed to have been endorsed by various "foreign leaders," he insisted he was not at liberty to say who they were. But when he asserts he has the backing of New York Times reporters, not only does he name names, but the Times views the claim as neither newsworthy enough to report prominently nor embarrassing enough to rebut. It's as if Times reporters taking sides in a political race were the most ordinary thing in the world.
Posted
7/12/2004 12:00:18 PM
by Edward Driscoll
What makes the liberal bias in the mainstream media so pernicious is that they deny that they're biased and insist that their twisted version of events is "reality," and anyone who disagrees with them is either mentally or morally suspect. In other words, they're fanatics. And, like all good fanatics, they're utterly convinced that they're in sole possession of virtue and truth.RTWT. Sunday, July 11, 2004
Posted
7/11/2004 05:17:02 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/11/2004 04:28:15 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/11/2004 03:02:00 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/11/2004 02:24:52 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Saturday, July 10, 2004
Posted
7/10/2004 03:25:26 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/10/2004 03:09:51 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/10/2004 03:02:27 PM
by Edward Driscoll
LAST THURSDAY, CNN's Larry King asked John Kerry whether he would want former President Bill Clinton to campaign on his behalf. Kerry said yes. "What American would not trade the economy we had in the 1990s, the fact that we were not at war and young Americans were not deployed?" Kerry's answer is revealing. We were, in fact, at war. The Clinton administration, with the exception of a few cruise missiles, had simply chosen not to fight back. Osama bin Laden, a sworn enemy of the United States, had launched attacks on our embassies and on a warship of the U.S. Navy. Saddam Hussein had defied U.N. weapons inspections, repeatedly threatened America, and attempted to assassinate former President Bush. Furthermore, where does Kerry object to young Americans' being deployed? Afghanistan? But Kerry has criticized the Bush administration for an insufficient commitment of troops there. Iraq? But Kerry voted for the war and has said he would not cut and run.Further proof that it's 9/10 for Kerry: he skipped an intelligence briefing to watch Whoopi Goldberg berate his vice presidential candidate.
Posted
7/10/2004 01:32:23 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Friday, July 09, 2004
Posted
7/9/2004 07:55:05 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/9/2004 07:54:44 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/9/2004 07:53:12 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/9/2004 07:14:48 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/9/2004 05:14:02 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/9/2004 04:59:32 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/9/2004 03:51:19 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/9/2004 12:20:35 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/9/2004 01:52:29 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/9/2004 01:45:02 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/9/2004 01:40:01 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Today, on the floor of the United States Senate, Barbara Boxer referred to the Madrid bombings as a "rail accident." Honest. A rail accident. Boxer is a Senate accident. What an embarassment. I posed the question to my audience: How much money could Boxer lose in a Jeopardy game, assuming that, in her typical fashion, she obnoxiously buzzed in first every time and, also in typical fashion, she got everything wrong. The best calculation seems to be $58,000.A rail accident?? Thursday, July 08, 2004
Posted
7/8/2004 11:28:19 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/8/2004 10:48:47 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/8/2004 10:46:21 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/8/2004 10:39:34 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/8/2004 10:21:52 PM
by Edward Driscoll
I ask my Democrat friends what they’d rather see happen – Bush reelected and bin Laden caught, or Bush defeated and bin Laden still in the wind. They’re all honest: they’d rather see Bush defeated.But hey, don't question their patriotism!
Posted
7/8/2004 10:13:26 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/8/2004 09:54:47 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/8/2004 08:49:09 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/8/2004 07:18:15 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/8/2004 01:25:27 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/8/2004 01:24:57 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/8/2004 12:14:12 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/8/2004 11:47:36 AM
by Edward Driscoll
If the American news media are lucky, 2004 will be remembered as the year of living dangerously. If not, then this election cycle may be recalled as the point at which journalism's slide back into partisanship became a kind of free fall.I don't think the media has slid back into partisanship--they've just let the mask slip more often, and made their biases more obvious in straight reporting--as well as being forgetful when it suits their purposes. But that's been going on in increasing numbers for 15 to 20 years now. Personally, I don't think a partisan media is all that bad--the country did pretty well for its first 150 years or so with one, and all indications are that we're moving back to it. The key though, is explaining that it is biased, so that readers and viewers know what they're getting and providing them with choices. And since political correctness hasn't boosted readership, maybe it's time to go back to the future!
Posted
7/8/2004 11:35:10 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/8/2004 02:34:42 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/8/2004 02:30:18 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/8/2004 01:42:18 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Dupont University--the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition . . . Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a freshman from Sparta, North Carolina (pop. 900), who has come here on full scholarship in full flight from her tobacco-chewing, beer-swilling high school classmates. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that Dupont is closer in spirit to Sodom than to Athens, and that sex, crank, and kegs trump academic achievement every time. As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite--her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jayjay Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennium Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus--she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.Wolfe's been working on this book for years--it should be a knockout. Wednesday, July 07, 2004
Posted
7/7/2004 11:43:01 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/7/2004 11:21:30 PM
by Edward Driscoll
The two Johns believe that America's problems lie in the White House, not overseas. They believe that there's a rich supply of "allies" who would take bullets intended for Americans, if only George Bush had better manners. They believe, despite the fact that George Bush has increased spending on education by 60 percent, and despite the fact that the environment is cleaner now than any time in more than fifty years, that what America really needs more than anything is an education president, an environmental president. Meanwhile, as our enemies lop the heads off our citizens and plan more 9/11s, George Bush says we need a war president. Sounds like the makings of a great debate.Read the whole thing.
Posted
7/7/2004 10:53:28 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/7/2004 10:30:52 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/7/2004 10:02:09 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/7/2004 09:19:30 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/7/2004 07:20:28 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Now I know Kerry is a liberal, but does he really want to cite a man who wanted to abolish private property and loved Stalin? Again, the right-left double standard. If a fascist poet in 1938 had called to remake a pure racial America on the lines of Hitler's Germany, would he now be quoted by any leading politician? But the communists get a pass. Again. And again. And again.Of course, as the Professor writes, Kerry doesn't need to vet this sort of stuff, "if you're reasonably confident the press won't call you on 'em". Oh--and scroll up to Sullivan's next post, for some harsh words for Ted Rall's latest cartoon abortion. UPDATE: James Panero of The New Criterion also has some thoughts, on what he calls "That '30s Show".
Posted
7/7/2004 04:13:43 PM
by Edward Driscoll
No waiting around for the sour notes in De-Lovely: A no-fail idea begins to fail in the very first scene. An old man in a lonely penthouse plays a mournful "Night and Day" in a wheelchair. This is Kevin Kline as the dying Cole Porter—but with a bald head, liver spots and wrinkles for days, he doesn’t remotely resemble Kevin Kline, or Cole Porter. He looks like Carl Reiner. Suddenly he is visited by someone named Gabe (Jonathan Pryce) who is either an angel of death, a pallbearer or a Broadway producer hell-bent on staging a Cole Porter revival.Contrast this to Grant's Night And Day, as Reed does: There is one very funny scene in a Warner Brothers projection room where Linda and Cole watch the silly, overproduced 1946 biopic Night and Day, in which they were played by the luscious Alexis Smith and the elegant but riotously miscast Cary Grant. Even after the 1937 riding accident which left Cole drugged on scotch and morphine for the rest of his life, there was Cary, hale and hardy and strolling in the moonlight on two strong legs [actually, his Porter ends the film limping badly and relying on a cane--Ed] while the Warners symphony brought the film to a crashing finale. The lights come up in the screening room, and Kevin Kline says, "If I can survive this, I can survive anything." It’s the biggest laugh in the movie, but in reality Night and Day, which was directed by Michael Curtiz and has just been released on DVD, is a better-made movie than this current debacle, and a lot more fun. I mean, Mary Martin singing "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" majestically surpasses the droopy, who-gives-a-s*** Diana Krall, gloomily moping her way through a lifeless "Just One of Those Things." Night and Day was a mess, but it was an entertaining mess.Movies as entertainment? How quaint.
Posted
7/7/2004 12:17:17 PM
by Edward Driscoll
The hold JFK has over Democrats is extraordinary. Kerry would be the second consecutive Democratic president yearning to reprise the glories of Kennedy's 1,000 days. A star-struck Clinton idolized Kennedy before growing up to become himself a young, mediocre president with a weakness for the White House help. John Forbes Kerry shares JFK's initials, and has had a lifetime fascination with Kennedy. He fought on a Swift Boat in Vietnam, partly to repeat JFK's iconic PT-109 experience in World War II. Alas, despite Kerry's bravery, "Swift Boat No. 94" doesn't have quite the same resonance. What accounts for JFK's hold on the Dems? For one thing, he is all there is when it comes to Democratic presidential role models in the past 40 years. No one wants to be the next LBJ, JEC, or WJC. It's JFK or bust. What do liberals like about Kennedy's substance? The caution on civil rights? The tax cuts on the rich? The entry into Vietnam? It's the rhetoric and the image--those gorgeous pictures of Kennedy with Jackie--that make for much of the appeal. The JFK wannabes know the centrality of image to Kennedy's magic. Between Kerry's expensive haircuts and Edwards's hair-sprayed bangs, my guess is that no presidential ticket in the history of the planet has cared so much about personal grooming. When the ticketmates travel together, there will probably be stiff competition for the mirror and hair products. Teresa herself has gotten into the act, recently pronouncing herself "sexy"--an odd boast for someone auditioning for a job that usually involves reading to schoolchildren.Richard Nixon was well-known for his strategy campaigning as a conservative, but governing like a liberal. In many respects, JFK worship is the liberal equivalent.
Posted
7/7/2004 11:48:57 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/7/2004 11:39:03 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/7/2004 11:33:01 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
Posted
7/6/2004 05:20:02 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/6/2004 02:14:08 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/6/2004 01:55:45 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/6/2004 01:35:17 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/6/2004 01:22:59 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/6/2004 01:20:03 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/6/2004 01:00:38 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/6/2004 12:38:27 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, said Kerry's choice "really solidifies the fact that this is the most liberal ticket that the Democrats have put up for, basically, modern times. If you look at the voting records of those two guys, they are way out there in left field."And Bob Beckel, the campaign manager of the Mondale/Ferraro ticket in '84 confirms, "Yeah, it's a liberal ticket...." Nice to see some bipartisan unity in this rough-and-tumble campaign season.
Posted
7/6/2004 12:26:06 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Picking Edwards may also be an effort to keep would-be Ralph Nader voters in the Democratic fold. Edwards is a trial lawyer, Nader is the country's leading champion of trial lawyers, and, as the Village Voice points out, Nader actually urged Kerry to pick Edwards. Meanwhile, Alan Murray reports in today's Wall Street Journal that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce vowed to 'abandon its traditional stance of neutrality in the presidential race and work feverishly to defeat the Democratic ticket' if Edwards is on it.Taranto's got lots of other Edwards and Kerry links, incidentally.
Posted
7/6/2004 12:19:35 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/6/2004 12:13:11 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/6/2004 10:50:43 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/6/2004 10:38:11 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/6/2004 10:20:02 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/6/2004 12:04:22 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Monday, July 05, 2004
Posted
7/5/2004 11:53:49 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Did you ever notice that there are no Germans going around the world saying, or making movies about, how awful Germany is or has been? Given that Germany unleashed two world wars and invented industrialized genocide, why has there been no German Michael Moore? Are there any Japanese making films about the absence of Japanese soul-searching or expressions of sorrow over their country's enslavement, torture and murder of Asians in World War II? Has anyone ever encountered any Japanese self-hate? Any Belgians telling the world how bad their country is? Argentinians? French? France surely has reason to produce people ashamed of their country.Needless to say, RTWT.
Posted
7/5/2004 08:25:28 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/5/2004 08:10:02 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/5/2004 02:31:25 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Ever hear about the Battle of the Humvee? That's what I'm calling a May skirmish fought by soldiers of the 37th Armored Regiment's 2nd Battalion in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf. In what became a six-hour firefight, Americans battled followers of Moktada al-Sadir to secure the hulk of a burning Humvee. It's not that our soldiers fought because the flaming wreck amounted to a tin can's worth of military value. They fought, as Capt. Ty Wilson of Fairfax, Va., explained to The Washington Post, because "We weren't going to let them dance on it for the news. Even (with) all the guys they lost that day, that still would have given them victory." Chalk one up for our side, a small win on the way to an underreported triumph over the followers of Moktada al-Sadir in the spring. Iraq is sovereign, life goes on ... but I can't get over the chilling description of American soldiers risking their necks to keep the media from awarding a phony victory to the enemy. This puts the media -- in this case, anyone with a video camera and a satellite hook-up -- not in No Man's Land, but on the Other Side. The concept is horrifying in that the ramifications are so bleak. It shows our soldiers engaged in a war on two fronts -- a military front and a media front. And it shows our soldiers fighting two enemies: the adversary who fights fire with terror, and the adversary who also fights fire with perception.RTWT.
Posted
7/5/2004 11:15:45 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Savor, if you will, the image of France as the mighty defender of Europe.--Charles Johnson, Little Green Footballs.
Posted
7/5/2004 11:12:30 AM
by Edward Driscoll
This was not a "mishmashed oil change"... rather, it was an illustration of that part of our culture that does not fear solving problems and accomplishing great things.--J. Milt Heflin, chief, NASA's Flight Director Office, in a memo to the press. Sunday, July 04, 2004
Posted
7/4/2004 10:42:44 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/4/2004 01:14:18 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Saturday, July 03, 2004
Posted
7/3/2004 04:04:19 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/3/2004 03:41:31 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/3/2004 01:28:15 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/3/2004 11:19:36 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Friday, July 02, 2004
Posted
7/2/2004 02:37:08 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/2/2004 01:11:21 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/2/2004 01:04:54 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/2/2004 12:47:35 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/2/2004 11:47:27 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Not pretty, is it? UPDATE: Steve Den Beste analyzes bias, Saddam's trial and Bush Derangement Syndrome. Needless to say, RTWT. ONE MORE UPDATE: Oh and add to the list Tom Brokaw "correcting" then-incoming Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi when Allawi suggested Saddam was connected to al-Qaeda.
Posted
7/2/2004 11:30:42 AM
by Edward Driscoll
What newspaper was first to report the unexpected death of actor Marlon Brando? The winner, by a wide margin, appears to be the New York Post, if only in an unconfirmed manner. In its Friday morning edition, on page 11, the Post printed a small story, with a picture of Brando from "The Godfather," under the headline: "Brando is dead: TV report." It cited a bulletin on the Web site of Phoenix-based KPHO-TV, of all places. The paper said police had not confirmed the death but claimed that relatives were gathering at the actor's Los Angeles home.Given the Internet, the blogosphere and wall-to-wall cable TV, why the condescending tone that it wasn't AP/Reuters/UPI/NYT but a Phoenix-based TV station "of all places" that broke the story? Thursday, July 01, 2004
Posted
7/1/2004 07:37:21 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/1/2004 07:21:05 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/1/2004 06:58:30 PM
by Edward Driscoll
One day a pair of security guards from the Iranian mission will be heading for the Lincoln Tunnel, and they won’t be carrying just their Kodak Instamatics. The war on terror’s a bit of a joke on the Left these days. In Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore says Bush is deliberately keeping the population in a state of fear, and he gets some of his biggest laughs with clips of solemn announcers announcing upgraded terrorism alerts. I suppose it is pretty funny. Until it happens. And then Moore and the Democrats will switch to arguing that Bush knew it was going to happen all along and didn’t do anything about it. In the autumn of 2001, Jacob Weisberg, now editor of Slate, wrote a column bemoaning what he regarded as a silly post-9/11 trend. The Weekly Standard, the New Republic and other publications had begun giving ‘Susan Sontag Awards’ and similarly facetious honours for notably stupid anti-war commentary. Early winners included Oliver Stone, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Michael Moore, etc. Weisberg thought this unworthy of serious news magazines: ‘Stone and Moore are well-known cranks, regarded with considerable distaste even on the Left,’ he wrote. The idea that ‘these comments represent a significant body of anti-war opinion’ was preposterous.... Put bluntly, there is no anti-war movement, intellectual or popular, in the United States. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying no one opposes the war. According to polls, 5 per cent of the country is against it. There are pacifists and Buddhists ...Those policing the debate are dropping the rhetorical equivalent of daisy cutters on a few malnourished left-wing stragglers.’ Well, something’s changed in the last couple of years, and those left-wing stragglers are a lot less malnourished. Last weekend Michael Moore, the ‘well-known crank’ regarded with ‘considerable distaste’, had the Number One movie in North America. Okay, its weekend gross was $21 million, which sounds big, until you realise that the week before a dumb comedy called Dodgeball took $30 million without anybody even noticing. On the other hand, the business of Congress wasn’t put on hold because so many Democratic bigshots were attending the premiere of Dodgeball. That did happen with the premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11, and when the movie was over it was all five-star raves. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa urged all Americans to see the film. Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, praised the film for raising ‘a lot of issues that Americans are talking about’ - i.e., is Bush in league with the bin Laden family? As those Iranian photographers remind us, this war can only be won abroad. And, as the rise of Michael Moore emphasises, it can only be lost at home.Brent Bozell writes: For the Left, this film is a test to separate the wheat from the chaff, the honorable from the dishonorable, the serious from the unserious. In the Clinton years, conservatives needed to step away from the unsubstantiated videos that talked in conspiratorial tones about all of Clinton’s heinous secret crimes. To be taken seriously, every liberal today should criticize “Fahrenheit 9-11" as an affront to journalism and civil discourse.Bozell adds that "To their credit, a number of liberal pundits and journalists have been passing this test", but sadly, few critics on the left and even fewer leftwing politicians have been. And the film places John Kerry in a vice grip: he risks alienating his base if he condemns it. And he risks alienating moderates if he doesn't. Not surprisingly in this type of situation, he's said (to the best of my knowledge) nothing about the film. And as a result, he's allowed it to define him. UPDATE: John Hawkins also has some thoughts.
Posted
7/1/2004 03:51:25 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/1/2004 03:42:40 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/1/2004 02:43:56 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/1/2004 01:36:49 PM
by Edward Driscoll
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution leads its homepage today with: "Saddam: The Real Criminal Is Bush." Yeah. That's the most important thing that happened in the courtroom. Mmm hmm.Nope, no media bias there. Nothing to see, move along! SILLY UPDATE: I'm confused: when did Saddam start looking like Victor French? SERIOUS UPDATE: James Lileks writes that "What matters most now is adopting the correct cynical pose" about Saddam's trial. Because clearly, the fact that Saddam Hussein is being tried by the very people he mercilessly ruled over for a generation can't be a clear and obvious positive event. If it were, George W. Bush would get the credit for it, and we can't have that, of course. Based on the Lileks Template, it appears that the Journal-Constitution is using the Template Code labeled D-with a little of Template Code F thrown in as well. FLASHBACK: To see how blase the world viewed the capture of Saddam (alive, needless to say, unlike the vast majority of previous despots when their regimes came to an end) click here, keep scrolling down. ANOTHER UPDATE: Via Instapundit, Arthur Chrenkoff looks at the media's pro-Saddam spin machine.
Posted
7/1/2004 11:17:24 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/1/2004 01:50:44 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/1/2004 01:40:18 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
7/1/2004 01:10:03 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Posted
6/30/2004 11:36:59 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Out of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, 23 had rail transit in 2000. This study reviews those 23 regions and finds: • Half of all rail regions lost transit commuters during the 1990s; • Taken together, rail regions lost 14,000 transit commuters in the 1990s; • Meanwhile, bus-only regions gained nearly 53,000 transit commuters in the 1990s; • Transit lost market share of commuters in two-thirds of all rail regions in the 1990s; • Per capita transit rides declined in half the rail regions; • Transit’s share of total travel declined in a majority of rail regions; • Sixteen of the 20 urban areas with the fastest growing congestion are rail regions – and one of the other four is building rail transit; and • By comparison, only three of the 20 urban areas with the slowest growing congestion are rail regions – and only because all three have nearly zero population growth. Based on these and other criteria, including cost effectiveness, safety, energy, and land use, this paper constructs a Rail Livability Index that assesses the effects of rail transit on urban areas. Every rail region earned a negative score, suggesting rail reduces urban livability. Rail transit is not only expensive, it usually costs more to build and often costs more to operate than originally projected. To pay for cost overruns, transit agencies often must boost transit fares or cut transit service outside of rail corridors. Thus, rail transit tends to harm most transit users. Rail transit also harms most auto drivers. Most regions building rail transit expect to spend half to four-fifths of their transportation capital budgets on transit systems that carry 0.5 to 4 percent of passenger travel. This imbalanced funding makes it impossible to remove highway bottlenecks and leads to growing congestion. Rail’s high cost makes it ineffective at reducing congestion. On average, $13 spent on rail transit is less effective at reducing congestion than $1 spent on freeway improvements. Investments in rail transit are only about half as effective as investments in bus transit. Rail transit also tends to be more dangerous than other forms of travel. Interstate freeways cause 3.9 deaths per billion passenger miles. Accidents on urban roads and streets in general lead to about 6.8 deaths per billion passenger miles. Among the various forms of urban transit, buses, at 4.3 deaths per billion passenger miles, are the safest; heavy rail averages 5.0, commuter rail 11.3, and light rail 14.8.I understand that cities need public transportation to function, but why not purchase additional buses and build additional roads or widen existing ones, which would benefit not only the buses but also individual motorists. Unlike fixed rail lines, if a route doesn't provide enough passengers for a bus to make sense, it's easy to reassign them elsewhere. The Texas Policy report is an 84 page Adobe Acrobat file, so I'm not going to say "read the whole thing". But just skimming it is pretty frightening in and of itself.
Posted
6/30/2004 09:51:21 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/30/2004 09:41:33 PM
by Edward Driscoll
From where we sit, it appears that Democrats in 2004 are repeating the mistake Republicans made in 1996: assuming that the intensity of their own loathing for the incumbent means that loathing is widespread beyond the partisan base. We could be wrong, of course--our own political preferences no doubt color our views--but a party that consorts with the likes of anti-American filmmaker Michael Moore strikes us as more desperate than confident.I guess we view things through a similar shade of Wayfarers. As I wrote last week: They're overplaying their hand, just like the over the top Wellstone funeral-cum-political orgy of 2002. They've hitched themselves to something which is likely to rebound very badly in their faces; but in the meantime, I hope a rope-a-dope strategy is in place by the White House, because without signs of the president fighting back, all of this can be brutal to watch. On the other hand, the staggering amount of overheated rhetoric doesn't sound at all like the FDR-style jaunty "happy days are here again" feeling of a party confident of victory in the fall.Incidentally, the rope-a-dope began the next day.
Posted
6/30/2004 09:25:32 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/30/2004 08:47:50 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/30/2004 05:43:54 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/30/2004 05:33:19 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/30/2004 11:37:54 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/30/2004 12:52:49 AM
by Edward Driscoll
From your latest column: "One needs to point out that the pan-Arab media said nothing when the Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad destroyed Hama and killed more than 10,000 of his own innocent people, or when Saddam Hussein used poison gas on Iraqis and created 300,000 anonymous graves." Guess which liberal ****sucker gave Saddam the gas along with anthrax, smallpox, and other bacterial cultures in '83-'84? (I can talk like this 'cause Cheney proved it in the Senate last week.) Donald Rumsfeld gave him the gas and germ cultures for the Reagan administration and admitted it before Congress in testimony last March. Look it up. The whole country is getting hip to neocon ***holes like you, Rummy, and Bush. Crowds are flocking to Fahrenheit 9/11 and recognizing the truth when visual evidence is shown to them. AND YOU CAN'T DO A THING ABOUT IT. The days of hysterical demagogue liars like you, Coulter, "Savage", the Limbaughs, Hannity, and the rest are coming to an end. These little piggies are going home. Bye-bye.I'm not printing the name of the person who sent this to me (or the foul language, which I replaced with asterisks) because deep down inside, I'm a nice guy. And I don't want to embarrass somebody who has confused me with Newt Gingrich. (Does Newt receive nastygrams about his latest posts in Blogcritics?) Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Posted
6/29/2004 11:59:47 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Saturday, June 26, 2004
Posted
6/26/2004 06:27:30 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Friday, June 25, 2004
Posted
6/25/2004 10:53:47 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/25/2004 09:27:38 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/25/2004 08:15:19 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/25/2004 04:49:16 PM
by Edward Driscoll
What I'd like to know is how does Moore get permission to use all those news clips and outtakes? Does he actually pay for the rights? If I tried to use that material for profit, I'd be inundated with lawyers waving "cease and desist" orders for my copyright violations long before I got to the screening stage. And are those new organizations really that willing to license their material, especially the stuff (like the makeup outtakes) that was never meant to be shown publicly?Right--we won't help the US military if it's under attack. But we will help someone attack the US. Sounds about right.
Posted
6/25/2004 03:56:03 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/25/2004 02:59:45 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/25/2004 02:20:37 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/25/2004 01:52:38 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Right after 9/11, some of us thought it was impossible for leftist critics to undermine a war against fascists who were sexist, fundamentalist, homophobic, racist, ethnocentric, intolerant of diversity, mass murderers of Kurds and Arabs, and who had the blood of 3,000 Americans on their hands. We were dead wrong. In fact, they did just that. Abu Ghraib is on the front pages daily. Stories of thousands of American soldiers in combat against terrorist killers from the Hindu Kush to Fallujah do not merit the D section. Senator Kennedy's two years of insane outbursts should have earned him formal censure rather than a commemoration from the Democratic establishment. What a litany of distractions! Words — preemption," "unilateralism," "hegemony," — whiz by and lose all meaning. Names — "Halliburton," "Chalabi," "INC" — become little more than red meat. Vocabulary is turned upside down: "Contractors," who at great risk restore power and water to the poor, are now little more than "profiteers" and "opportunists"; killers are not even "terrorists" but mere "militants." "Neo-cons" are wild-eyed extremists; "realists" are no longer cynics — inclined to let thousands die abroad unless the chaos interrupts transit of oil or food — but rather "sober" and "circumspect," and more likely Kerry supporters. A depressing array of transitory personalities parades before our screen, entering stage left to grab 15 minutes of notoriety for their scripted invective, only to exit on the right into oblivion. Who can remember all these one-tell-all-book, one-weekend-on-the-Sunday-news-programs personalities — a Hans Blix, Scott Ritter, Howard Dean, Paul O'Neil, Joe Wilson, Richard Clark, or Richard ben Veniste? In between their appearances on Sunday morning television or 60 Minutes, a few D.C. functionaries are carted out for periodic shouting — an unhinged Al Gore, a puffed-up Ted Kennedy, a faux-serious Bob Kerry, and occasionally a Senator Byrd or Hollings. And since the very day after 9/11 we've gotten the Vietnam-era retreads — a Peter Arnett, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Robert Scheer, John Dean, or Seymour Hersh — tottering out with the latest conspiracies about the old bogeymen and "higher-ups." We are winning the military war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The terrorists are on the run. And slowly, even ineptly, we are achieving our political goals of democratic reform in once-awful places. Thirty years of genocide, vast forced transfers of whole peoples, the desecration of entire landscapes, a ruined infrastructure, and a brutalized and demoralized civilian psyche are being remedied, often under fire. All this and more has been achieved at the price of political turmoil, deep divisions in the West — here and abroad — and the emergence of a strong minority, led by mostly elites, who simply wish it all to fail.Read the whole thing.
Posted
6/25/2004 12:52:05 PM
by Edward Driscoll
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Posted
6/25/2004 12:39:43 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/25/2004 12:33:07 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/25/2004 01:16:47 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/25/2004 12:22:42 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/25/2004 12:09:30 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Thursday, June 24, 2004
Posted
6/24/2004 10:58:55 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/24/2004 10:31:41 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/24/2004 06:42:55 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/24/2004 03:46:22 PM
by Edward Driscoll
At what point do we start coming up for names for what the left is doing now? To paraphrase President Clinton, it's not a conspiracy; it's right out in the open: the constant hammering of President Bush by the press (who ignore their own reporting on Iraq during the Clinton years), the outbursts in the Senate by disgruntled leftwingers like Ted Kennedy, Tom Harkin, and Frank Lautenberg; Michael Moore's film and now this...[This being the backing of Fahrenheit 911 by the chairman of the DNC and other high ranking Democrats.]Today, this was a headline on Reuters.com: Read the rest of the Reuters piece. Finally, Bush is getting the mainstream media to report on the Democrats' shenanigans, by highlighting them in his ads and press releases. As Hugh Hewitt writes, "It stings because it is so true". Hopefully more will follow.
Posted
6/24/2004 03:38:55 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/24/2004 01:57:51 PM
by Edward Driscoll
KEEPING THE BACK BENCH WARM: Back in the 1970s, "me too Republicans" in Congress ensured that their party would stay on the back bench for many years, by offering little in the way of new ideas. Rather, they'd look at the welfare and social spending by the Democrats and talk about how expensive it was, and that the fat should be cut out of it...[Nancy] Pelosi is the House Minority Leader--and looks to continue to keep her party in the minority.She must be thinking they'll be there for a while--because she's just introduced a House minority "Bill of Rights"! Via Hugh Hewitt, who writes, "That's pretty revealing, isn't it? She's ready for a long stay on the loser's side of the aisle. I was in Washington for a long stretch of the Democrat's majority in the lower body. I think they should get every courtesy they extended to the GOP." Oh--and this does help to explain the Pelosi-Beaker connection that Chris Muir noticed today. UPDATE: Speaking of keeping the backbench warm, this doesn't sound like the actions of a party that's trying to recapture America's goodwill, does it? GOOORRRREEEE UPDATE: Neither does this. Power Line also has some thoughts, and notes that just as the press has forgotten their own words in the 1990s, so has Al Gore.
Posted
6/24/2004 01:00:38 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/24/2004 12:19:48 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/24/2004 12:07:43 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/24/2004 11:05:49 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/24/2004 10:51:54 AM
by Edward Driscoll
a source deep within the Pentagon has sent me the previously classified transcript of a secret video tape of an actual interrogation session involving both men and women. The partial transcript is unclear as to time, date and full identies of all those involved.(Via Steve Green.)
Posted
6/24/2004 10:39:25 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/24/2004 01:31:55 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Let me be blunt. Newspapers bite. The work isn't much fun anymore, thanks to the soul-snatching corporate culture that has euthanized newsroom personalities. Most papers reflect that numbers-crunching, cubicle-hunkering mentality. We're boring, predictable, staid and out of touch with the folks with quarters. Nobody rushes to the rack anymore to see what the paper's great voices have to say because there aren't many great voices left. Meanwhile, half the nation's editorial cartoonists - Doug Marlette's "designated feelers" - have disappeared from editorial pages, leaving holes where hearts used to beat. With television offering headlines - and Internet blogs offering inspired commentary - why do people want to get their hands dirty reading stale stories that fail to ring the chime of truth? Declining reader confidence isn't just about high-profile scandals such as the Jayson Blair/New York Times and Jack Kelley/USA Today debacles. Distrust is also tied to the reality "disconnect" between those who produce newspapers and those who read them. Yes, the media tilt left and the Earth is round. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center that has journalists debating themselves reports that the elite media are far more liberal than the public ("Ordinary Americans," as the elites like to call you). While 34 percent of journalists self-identify as liberal, only 20 percent of Ordinary Americans do. Only 7 percent of journalists consider themselves conservative, compared with 33 percent of the public. Even those figures may be misleading, as a large majority of journalists consider themselves moderate. You be the judge.RTWT.
Posted
6/24/2004 01:27:17 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/24/2004 01:21:55 AM
by Edward Driscoll
"We got along fine for years with the 18-year-old drinking age," the former CEO of the Coors Brewing Co. told an audience of about 200 people at a candidates' debate here. "We're criminalizing our young people."Wow--the Instapundit conspiracy moves in mysterious ways... Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Posted
6/23/2004 11:10:00 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/23/2004 10:19:33 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/23/2004 09:38:34 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Peter Beinart, the editor of The New Republic (and a friend of mine), has been complaining for a very long time that conservatives haven't shown the sort of introspection liberals have in the wake of the White House's missteps. After all, conservatives historically have looked skeptically on pie-in-the-sky Wilsonian adventures abroad -- and especially on the notion that the Pentagon has some sort of Easy Bake Oven nation-building set that can whip up democratic societies overnight. Now it is the liberals and leftists who sound like Kissingerian foreign policy realists, making allowances for barbaric regimes and ridiculing conservatives who needlessly demonized Saddam. But Saddam was a demon. Since we've been in Iraq, we've confirmed that he killed more than 300,000 Shiites after 1991 alone. We've found up to 30,000 in a single grave. Forty thousand "marsh Arabs" were murdered and their lands drained. We didn't need to confirm what happened to the Kurds. It's also worth recalling the reason we were in a de facto state of war with Saddam long before the actual war: It was to keep Saddam from doing these sorts of things to Kurds and Shiites again (never mind the Kuwaitis). The no-fly zones, the laughably and tragically inept sanctions regime -- which was making Saddam stronger and French and UN bureaucrats richer -- the various cruise missile attacks: These were all acts of war necessary to "keep Saddam in his box." And that whole system was falling apart. Bush faced a choice: Let Saddam out of his box or get rid of him. The former would make Saddam a hero, lower the price for defying America and further solidify the law of the jackboot in the Arab world. After 9/11 Bush felt he had no choice at all. We had to force changes in the Arab world before the Arab world forced worse things on us. Removing Saddam has had unforeseeable bad consequences, as well as some foreseeable ones. But it seems to me that liberals who now think we shouldn't have done it, solely because we didn't do it "just right," are falling prey to their own historic pie-in-the-skyism. There is no "just right" way to do things like this. If there were, we would have toppled Saddam with nerf bats.
Posted
6/23/2004 06:31:39 PM
by Edward Driscoll
WASHINGTON (AP) - Cheered by supporters, Michael Moore previewed his Bush-bashing documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11," before a mostly Democratic audience in the nation's capital Wednesday night. Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe said he thought the film would play an important role in this election year. "This movie raises a lot of the issues that Americans are talking about, that George Bush has been asleep at the switch since he's been president," McAuliffe said as he walked the red carpet into the premiere. Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa implored all Americans to see the film: "It's important for the American people to understand what has gone on before, what led us to this point, and to see it sort of in this unvarnished presentation by Michael Moore."Add to it Mario Cuomo's efforts to get its rating lowered from R to PG-13 so that more kids could attend. Here you have three very prominent members of the Democratic party praising a piece of agitprop designed to trash a sitting president. Hillary could go on The Today Show in 1998 and claim a vast right wing conspiracy with a straight face, and nobody in the press questioned her. Does Bush get to make a similar claim about the left? If so, how can he frame it, considering how much he's loathed by the press? I do think that ultimately, this stuff isn't helping the left's cause, and they're overplaying their hand, just like the over the top Wellstone funeral-cum-political orgy of 2002. They've hitched themselves to something which is likely to rebound very badly in their faces; but in the meantime, I hope a rope-a-dope strategy is in place by the White House, because without signs of the president fighting back, all of this can be brutal to watch. On the other hand, the staggering amount of overheated rhetoric doesn't sound at all like the FDR-style jaunty "happy days are here again" feeling of a party confident of victory in the fall. It's not 1968--yet. But it can certainly feel like it, at times. UPDATE: John H. Hinderaker of The Power Line Blog writes, "With all of this publicity, Fahrenheit 9/11 can only be a mega-hit. I mean, the last cultural phenomenon to receive this kind of hype was Air America". Heh. More from Power Line on the left's crack-up here. ANOTHER UPDATE: John Hawkins has some questions for the Democratic politicians who consider Moore to be part of the mainstream.
Posted
6/23/2004 02:20:46 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/23/2004 01:52:56 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/23/2004 12:37:03 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/23/2004 11:32:47 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/23/2004 01:10:29 AM
by Edward Driscoll
These are all some of the more memorable sound bites from the past two decades of presidential politics. Of course, when you've given your opponent a sound bite he can use against you, you've clearly fumbled the ball. And by the way, did Jay Nordlinger call this, or what?
Posted
6/23/2004 12:19:46 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Posted
6/22/2004 10:32:57 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/22/2004 08:58:44 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/22/2004 08:27:24 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/22/2004 04:53:35 PM
by Edward Driscoll
More than any other leading Democrat, Bill Clinton understands the role religion actually plays in modern politics. He knows Americans want to be able to see their leaders' faith. A recent Pew survey showed that for every American who thinks politicians should talk less about religion, there are two Americans who believe politicians should talk more. And Clinton seems to understand, as many Democrats do not, that a politician's faith isn't just about litmus test issues like abortion or gay marriage. Many people just want to know that their leader, like them, is in the fellowship of believers. Their president doesn't have to be a saint, but he does have to be a pilgrim. He does have to be engaged, as they are, in a personal voyage toward God. Clinton made this sort of faith-based connection, at least until he sullied himself with the Lewinsky affair. He won the evangelical vote in 1992, and won it again in 1996. He understood that if Democrats are not seen as religious, they will be seen as secular Ivy League liberals, and they will lose. John Kerry doesn't seem to get this. Many of the people running the Democratic Party don't get it either.This isn't news; the fact that it's being discussed in the Times, is. As Dreher wrote: True story: I once proposed a column on some now-forgotten religious theme to the man who was at the time the city editor of the New York Post. He looked at me like I'd lost my mind. "This is not a religious city," he said, with a straight face. As it happened, the man lived in my neighborhood. To walk to the subway every morning, he had to pass in front of or close to two Catholic churches, an Episcopal church, a synagogue, a mosque, an Assemblies of God Hispanic parish, and an Iglesia Bautista Hispana. Yet this man did not see those places because he does not know anyone who attends them. It's not that this editor despises religion; it's that he's too parochial (pardon the pun) to see what's right in front of him. There's a lot of truth in that old line attributed to the New Yorker's Pauline Kael, who supposedly remarked, in all sincerity, "I don't understand how Nixon won; I don't know a soul who voted for him."And unlike Dreher and Brooks, I doubt many of the reporters on The Times understand how the Democrats became the Godless Party. (Via Betsy Newmark.)
Posted
6/22/2004 04:40:17 PM
by Edward Driscoll
"Mass transit" is purely an academic term. With half the world's populations living in cities by 2050, owning a private automobile becomes a default response to the imperfect and often inconvenient availability of so-called "mass transit" mobility.Sadly though, "the desire named streetcar" continues to percolate in most city planners' brains.
Posted
6/22/2004 02:58:27 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/22/2004 02:28:53 PM
by Edward Driscoll
A hippie at heart, Carlos Santana has long championed music as a potent force for creating positive vibrations that – as this veteran of the 1969 Woodstock festival puts it – "can change your molecular structure." But the legendary rocker sounded uncharacteristically angry during a discussion about the recent death of one of his musical heroes, jazz drum icon Elvin Jones, who died May 18 of heart failure. Santana, who will be honored in Los Angeles as the 2004 Latin Recording Academy Person of the Year on Aug. 30, is incensed that Jones' death elicited scant media coverage. He expressed his frustration during a recent interview from his San Rafael office. "I'm really embarrassed for this nation, and for MTV and VH1 and Rolling Stone, because it was a very racist thing not to acknowledge this most important musician when he passed," said Santana, whose 1999 album, "Supernatural," won nine Grammys and has sold more than 25 million copies. "For them to (play up) Ozzy Osbourne and other corny-ass white people, but not Elvin, is demeaning and I'm really embarrassed to live in this country."There's a very simple answer to this: put your money where your mouth is, Carlos--create a jazz TV channel for cable. If Al Gore can convince a group of investors to buy a Canadian TV channel to create Al-TV, there's no reason why Santana can't try to do something similar. But will there be enough of an audience for advertising revenues? Because as Air America on the radio is showing, if nobody tunes in, it won't stay on for too long. VH-1 showed jazz every Sunday night in the mid to late 1980s. Jazz musician Ben Sidran was the host, and I used to watch it each week. But apparently, nobody else did, because it was eventually cancelled. There's a great book from the late 1990s called If It Ain't Got That Swing: The Rebirth of Grown-Up Culture by Mark Gauvreau Judge. Judge argues that rock and roll took off in the mid-1950s largely because jazz musicians and their critics abandoned the popular swing bands for the much more insular bebop and cool jazz, which made the musicians and critics happy, but alienated mass audiences, who wanted simple music they can dance to. When Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Elvis came along offering them just that, guess where the audiences went? And Santana knows this--there's a reason why his latest record sold 50 bazillion copies: because it had simple songs with popular young singers on them, rather than Coltrane-style modal jams. So Carlos is filling sports arenas playing rock, but surprised that nobody's buying jazz records. Go figure. Incidentally, has anybody asked Santana what he thinks of the outpouring of emotion that Ray Charles received when he died? Or does that not count because Ray sold out and played popular music to the masses, rather than jazz. ...You know, like Santana.
Posted
6/22/2004 01:13:22 PM
by Edward Driscoll
In many ways, the moment is more Wild West than Wilbur Wright, opening a new frontier for the geniuses and thrill seekers, businessmen and hucksters who have long followed pioneers to new lands and new markets. "It's like the opening of the West," says Howard McCurdy, a spaceflight historian at American University in Washington. "Entrepreneurs followed in the wake of the oft government-funded explorers. There were a lot of characters and a lot of innovation."I wasn't around when Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth for the first time, and when Alan Sheppard and Gus Grissom followed with their first suborbital flights, but yesterday's flight is equally important: the first time a man who wasn't on a government payroll went into space. (Unfortunately, pilot Mchael Melvill isn't on Henry Luce's payroll, so he won't get the endless and positive PR that the Mercury Seven astronauts received.) Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey will eventually arrive, but like most Kubrick productions, it's going to take much longer than first anticipated.
Posted
6/22/2004 01:06:25 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/22/2004 12:54:28 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/22/2004 11:37:33 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Now I know I will be criticized for making this statement without seeing the film (perhaps fairly). But I did see the trailer the other night and what is being emphasized in the advertisement is that the documentary reveals the shocking news that Bush helped the Bin Laden family leave America immediately after 9/11. Now Hitchens, of course, shows how this is a bald-faced lie. Bush critic Richard Clarke has acknowledged his sole responsibility for that. (I blogged about this a few weeks ago.) It seems to invalidate the entire film without having to go further. It will be interesting to see how the critics respond. Don't look for the Cannes Film Festival to rescind the Palme d'Or. After all, Quentin Tarantino informed us that his jury had awarded the film the prize "for aesthetic reasons."Of course they did.
Posted
6/22/2004 12:39:39 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Monday, June 21, 2004
Posted
6/21/2004 10:02:35 PM
by Edward Driscoll
A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history. If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.James Lileks writes, "Ever wondered if there’s a literary equivalent of someone attacking a hanging side of beef with a chain saw? Wonder no more."
Posted
6/21/2004 04:33:55 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Only John Kerry would declare the country to be in scientific decline on a day when the country’s first privately funded space trip is successfully completed. America is the world leader in patents, research and development and Nobel prizes, and the President's budget raises federal research and development funding to $132 billion for 2005, a 44 percent increase since taking office.More on Spaceship One, later.
Posted
6/21/2004 02:32:16 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/21/2004 02:27:02 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/21/2004 02:19:17 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/21/2004 02:15:50 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/21/2004 12:14:33 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Sunday, June 20, 2004
Posted
6/20/2004 06:36:54 PM
by Edward Driscoll
The connection between the words "punctilious,'' which means "attentive to formality or etiquette,'' and "punctuation'' is instructive. Careful punctuation expresses a writer's solicitude for the reader. Of course punctuation, like most other forms of good manners, may yet entirely disappear, another victim of progress, this time in the form of e-mail, cell-phone text messages and the like. Neither the elegant semicolon nor the dashing dash is of use to people whose preferred literary style is "CU B4 8?'' and whose idea of Edwardian prolixity is: "Saw Jim -- he looks gr8 -- have you seen him -- what time is the thing 2morrow.'' Oh, for the era when a journalist telephoned from Moscow to London to add a semicolon to his story!I wouldn't go that far--I'm quite happy to live in an era of demassified media (to borrow one of Alvin Toffler's favorite phrases). But I'd happily take the language skills that flourished in the past.
Posted
6/20/2004 04:21:45 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Saturday, June 19, 2004
Posted
6/19/2004 06:24:43 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/19/2004 04:14:33 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Earlier this month, Andres Oppenheimer of The Miami Herald asked John Kerry what he thought of something called the Varela Project. Kerry said it was "counterproductive." It's necessary to try other approaches, he added. The Varela Project happens to be one of the most inspiring democracy movements in the world today. It is being led by a Cuban dissident named Oswaldo Payá, who has spent his life trying to topple Castro's regime. Payá realized early on that the dictatorship would never be overthrown by a direct Bay of Pigs-style military assault, but it could be undermined by a peaceful grass-roots movement of Christian democrats, modeling themselves on Martin Luther King Jr. As a young man, Payá founded a magazine called People of God, but it was shut down. He criticized the Soviet Union and was thrown into a work camp. He was given a chance to escape Cuba, but refused. Then in the mid-1990's, he and other dissidents exploited a loophole in the Cuban Constitution that allows ordinary citizens to propose legislation if they can gather 10,000 signatures on a petition. They began a petition drive to call for a national plebiscite on five basic human rights: free speech, free elections, freedom to worship, freedom to start businesses, and the freeing of political prisoners. This drive, the Varela Project, quickly amassed the 10,000 signatures, and more. Jimmy Carter lauded the project on Cuban television. The European Union gave Payá its Sakharov Prize for human rights. Then came Castro's crackdown. Though it didn't dare touch Payá, the regime arrested 75 other dissidents and sentenced each of them to up to 28 years in jail. This week Payá issued a desperate call for international attention and solidarity because the hunt for dissidents continues. John Kerry's view? As he told Oppenheimer, the Varela Project "has gotten a lot of people in trouble . . . and it brought down the hammer in a way that I think wound up being counterproductive." Imagine if you are a Cuban political prisoner rotting in a jail, and you learn that the leader of the oldest democratic party in the world thinks you're being counterproductive. Kerry's comment is a harpoon directed at the morale of Cuba's dissidents. Imagine sitting in Castro's secret police headquarters and reading that statement. The lesson you draw is that crackdowns work. Throw some dissidents in jail, and the man who might be president of the United States will blame the democrats for being provocative. Imagine if in the 1980's Ronald Reagan had called Andrei Sakharov or Natan Sharansky or Lech Walesa or Vaclav Havel "counterproductive" because, after all, what they did spawned crackdowns, too. If there's anything we've learned over the past 20 years it is the power of moral suasion to buck up dissidents and undermine tyrannical regimes. And yet Kerry seems to have decided that other priorities come first.Based on his record in the Senate, I'm not at all surprised that Kerry is an anti-anti-Castro. And while Brooks is an awfully squishy conservative, his column continues to pay big dividends with its location. UPDATE: More here.
Posted
6/19/2004 03:13:32 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/19/2004 01:33:26 PM
by Edward Driscoll
One of the artworks destroyed in the Saatchi fire turned out to have been Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary. That was the elephant dung-splattered, female-buttocks-and-genitalia-surrounded painting of the Madonna that was part of the "Sensations" show of Saatchi-owned art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. As might be expected, New York City’s substantial Catholic population was incensed that a tax-supported museum was using their money to pay for what they considered to be a three-way combination of blasphemy, scatology, and pornography. Then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani threatened to pull the museum’s $7 million grant from the city. A lawsuit followed, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the rest of the usual suspects--but it would seem that the final justice rendered might have been divine, for most of the "Sensations" show perished in the recent fire. What I loved about the Holy Virgin Mary flap was the tidal wave of pretentious blather it induced from the intelligentsia, who cast themselves as usual, as defenders of free speech and great art from the mindless, puritanical mob.Read on, to observe Salon’s Daniel Kunitz waxing philosphic--about a painting covered in elephant dung. Friday, June 18, 2004
Posted
6/18/2004 03:53:39 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/18/2004 02:36:28 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/18/2004 02:08:45 PM
by Edward Driscoll
As a famous Soviet dissident joke put it: "In the Soviet Union, the future is known; it's the past which is always changing."In the 1990s, President Clinton and his administration released numerous bits of intel and information on Bin Ladin and Saddam Hussein to the press. As a result, The New York Times, as well as Newsweek, and NPR each ran stories documenting his ties to Bin Ladin. Yesterday, the 9/11 commission confirmed those ties, and admonished the press for ignoring them. Was Saddam directly tied to 9/11? President Bush never said he was. But clearly, Iraq and Al Qaeda were quite cozy with each other. Something the press spent the past decade documenting when it benefited one administration, and the past three years chucking down the memory hole when it hindered another. UPDATE: Steve Den Beste has a new post which shows how Prager's line applies to academia: In the "new" "enlightened" approach to history, you don't study historical events in order to learn the consequences and results of certain kinds of decisions and policies. History is a source of lessons, but you don't study history and derive lessons from past events. The lesson comes first. The conclusion is already known. You study history to find justifications for that lesson, but you already know the lesson is right before you begin that study. If history doesn't actually give you the justification you require, then you modify it as needed so that it does. That may mean you ignore some of it and emphasize other parts, or it may require you to rewrite it so that it happens the way it should have happened. This is a fundamentally teleological approach to history, in which the esthetic beauty of a conclusion, and the fact that we strongly want it to be true, are more important than whether it is empirically correct. If not, then the universe must change, because the mind and the concept are the most fundamental realities of all.Needless to say, RTWT. UPDATE: The Gipper's farewell from the White House warned of such revisionism. Speaking of President Reagan, here are some thoughts on how his legacy should be tought in school, by Robert Mandel, that rarest of breeds these days: a conservative teacher.
Posted
6/18/2004 02:04:13 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/18/2004 12:44:06 PM
by Edward Driscoll
ASTANA, Kazakhstan - Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday his government warned Washington that Saddam Hussein's regime was preparing attacks in the United States and its interests abroad — an assertion that appears to bolster President Bush's contention that Iraq was a threat.I guess "Putin Confirms Saddam Was Threat" would be too gauche, huh? Or as Jim Geraghty wrote: The Left: The war on Iraq is a disaster! The world hates us! You did it unilaterally! You should have gotten Russia on board. You should have gotten Putin to support a U.N. resolution. The support of Russia would show this isn't just America being imperialist, but the whole unified world coming together to face Saddam. The Right: Well, Putin says Saddam was going to attack us with terrorists. The Left: Well, who the hell trusts Putin and the Russians?If the facts don't fit...
Posted
6/18/2004 12:16:43 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Hollywood turned its back on his bloody Bible flick, a cross that Mel was only too happy to carry himself. With The Passion of the Christ bringing in more than $600 million at the box office, he is likely to make at least $150 million more in the next year. Mel made the top 10 in every category we measured this year: money, magazine covers, press clippings, Web presence, TV/radio hits.Who says the auteur theory is dead?
Posted
6/18/2004 11:54:04 AM
by Edward Driscoll
The real Viktor Navorski [Tom Hanks' character], a displaced Iranian named Merhan Karimi Nasseri, was stuck in Charles De Gaulle airport for over seven years before the two European governments made any attempt to resolve his situation. Now, sadly, it seems Nasseri has gone a bit mad, and refuses to leave the airport for any country save England, which is not an option for him. With Spielberg and Hanks at the helm, The Terminal is, for the most part, everything one would expect — charming, funny, and possessing its own singular character and visual beauty in much the same way as their last collaboration, Catch Me If You Can. But what it is not is intellectually honest. True, Spielberg most likely could not have set this film in France with as much success. But if he had, it is unlikely he would have made a French immigration authority the villain he makes out of Dixon. Truth, as always, remains stranger than fiction, and Hollywood's fiction, as always, does what it can to undermine the reputation of certain American institutions. The Terminal manages to amuse, entertain, and inspire. But as with almost all things connected to Tinsel Town, just don't expect it to educate — at least, not fairly.The same is true of Saved which, as Jonathan Last notes, does something [satire] no other Hollywood film has ever done before [/satire]: make fun of Christians! Don R. Lewis, of Film Threat, wrote that "Saved!" is "a sweet and funny movie that starts off with bite but settles into an honest feeling of happiness and acceptance for all types of people and their choices." Of course, he doesn't really mean all types of people. He went on to note that the movie is "a gentle exploration of why the judgments of the Catholic church are so screwed up." ("Saved!" is about evangelical Christians--not Catholics--but you know how it is. They all look alike.) John Leonard of CBS thought the movie "good-hearted," while Manohla Dargis, in the Los Angeles Times, labeled it "a soft-bellied, sweet-tempered satire." Both Newsweek and the New York Times judged as merely "gentle" the ribbing that "Saved!" gives to Christians. Too gentle, for some. The Chicago Tribune lamented that "after bravely lampooning an institution so many consider beyond reproach, Saved! chickens out." Michael Atkinson, from the Village Voice, wrote that American evangelicals--whom he called "warmongers praying for corpse-heaped victory"--need "a good, steel-tipped satiric whipping," and that the movie didn't deliver it. For good measure, he added: "the born-again, one-hand-in-the-air prayer stance. . .resembles a Nazi salute." Ms. Dargis faulted "Saved!" for not having the courage to "admit that some of [God's] most ardent believers will always be invested in hate." Other reviewers were not so dismissive of Mr. Dannelly's grit. "Teasing Christians," said Newsweek, "is risky business." David Denby, in The New Yorker, solemnly nodded, adding that although "Saved!" was not an attack on Christianity, "to make it at all took courage." Actually, it took no courage, since the movie plays straight into Hollywood's smug stereotypes about religion, especially the non-Buddhist variety.For all its flaws, audiences instinctively knew that The Passion took its Christianity seriously, propelling a low budget vanity film by Mel Gibson into the box office stratosphere. Will anybody else in Hollywood get the message?
Posted
6/18/2004 01:42:09 AM
by Edward Driscoll
For Israel, the victory is bitter. The past four years of terrorism have killed almost 1,000 Israelis and maimed thousands of others. But Israel has won strategically. The intent of the intifada was to demoralize Israel, destroy its economy, bring it to its knees, and thus force it to withdraw and surrender to Palestinian demands, just as Israel withdrew in defeat from southern Lebanon in May 2000. That did not happen. Israel's economy was certainly wounded, but it is growing again. Tourism had dwindled to almost nothing at the height of the intifada, but tourists are returning. And the Israelis were never demoralized. They kept living their lives, the young people in particular returning to cafes and discos and buses just hours after a horrific bombing. Israelis turned out to be a lot tougher and braver than the Palestinians had imagined. The end of the intifada does not mean the end of terrorism. There was terrorism before the intifada and there will be terrorism to come. What has happened, however, is an end to systematic, regular, debilitating, unstoppable terror -- terror as a reliable weapon. At the height of the intifada, there were nine suicide attacks in Israel killing 85 Israelis in just one month (March 2002). In the past three months there have been none. The overall level of violence has been reduced by more than 70 percent. How did Israel do it? By ignoring its critics and launching a two-pronged campaign of self-defense.RTWT. (Via Steve Green, who's going through the same
Posted
6/18/2004 01:22:45 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/18/2004 01:14:40 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/18/2004 12:48:16 AM
by Edward Driscoll
The opening night of next month's Democratic convention in Boston is set to feature an emotional party tribute to hometown hero Ted Kennedy, who has served in office longer than every other senator but one. Guess no one at the Democratic National Committee took a close look at the calendar: That July 26 salute to Teddy just happens to coincide with . . . the 35th anniversary of Chappaquiddick.Wonder if this writer from the Boston Globewill be covering the event. UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein has a copy of the invitation. Thursday, June 17, 2004
Posted
6/17/2004 10:00:42 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/17/2004 08:27:27 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/17/2004 08:15:26 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/17/2004 08:07:36 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/17/2004 08:05:32 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Ambitious to succeed, the young Reagan went off to college, then made a career in radio, then passed a screen test and became a movie star. The 1920s and 1930s radio and 1930s and 1940s movies were universal media, aimed at all Americans, presenting a vision of a friendly and open nation. Those movies were the strongest popular culture since Charles Dickens and, for many, still define the American character. Ronald Reagan was suffused with their spirit and brought it or, rather, brought it back to American politics. Brought it back, because it was the same spirit brought to politics by Franklin Roosevelt, for whom Reagan voted four times. Roosevelt and Reagan both came to office when people had given up on the American economy, and both brought it back toward prosperity and abundance — Roosevelt by expanding government, Reagan by cutting taxes and curbing inflation, freeing the American economy to produce the largely unpredicted surge of prosperity of the past 20 years. Roosevelt and Reagan as presidents both faced a world where totalitarian regimes were on the march and where the United States seemed helpless to stop them. Roosevelt led the American people to victory and the destruction of Nazism and took steps to keep the peace in the postwar world he did not live to see. Reagan pushed the Soviet Union to the brink of collapse and had the satisfaction, before his mind dimmed, of watching the Berlin Wall fall and Moscow's empire crumble. He is buried now near a slab from that wall, overlooking the mountains and the Pacific to the west. Reagan always admired Roosevelt, even as he came to oppose many of his policies, and there were similarities in their characters. Both were optimistic and friendly and seemed open, yet both had hard cores inaccessible even to their closest aides: cold steel beneath the smiles. Both had courage, "grace under pressure," as Thatcher said. Roosevelt, at his speeches, stood in steel braces and with great effort, in enormous pain, walked forward to the microphone and addressed the nation. Reagan, after he was shot, stood and walked from the ambulance into the hospital, taking care to button his jacket. The two men stand now, in history, the two most consequential presidents of the 20th century.That grace under pressure may best be summed up by a quote that Reagan himself made: "Uncle Sam is a friendly old man, but he has a spine of steel".
Posted
6/17/2004 05:09:54 PM
by Edward Driscoll
P.J. O'Rourke once wrote a book called Holidays in Hell. If you're up for a virtual one, how about a motorcycle ride past the abandoned hulk of Chernobyl and its nearby deserted ghost towns, with Elena, a beautiful Russian brunette as your guide?Steven Den Beste links to Elena's site as the launching pad for an essay on the archeological implications of Chernobyl. Den Beste describes what it tells us about the state of the Soviet Union at the time of the Chernobyl meltdown, only four years after Arthur Schlesinger, just back from a trip to Moscow in 1982, said that President Reagan was delusional about the crumbling state of the Evil Empire: "I found more goods in the shops, more food in the markets, more cars on the street -- more of almost everything," he said, adding his contempt for "those in the U.S. who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink."
Posted
6/17/2004 03:22:28 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/17/2004 03:17:38 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/17/2004 01:46:27 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Talking about education yesterday, Mr. Kerry also told the largely black crowd at the day care center that there are more blacks in prison than in college. "That's unacceptable," he said. "But it's not their fault." Rather than the inmates, the former Boston prosecutor blamed poverty, poor schools, a dearth of after-school programs and "all of us as adults not doing what we need to do."James Taranto writes: What do adults "need to do" to prevent youngsters from turning to crime? Surely, above all, instill in them a sense of personal responsibility. Kerry sends precisely the opposite message when he says of criminals--and, it would seem, only of those criminals who happen to be black--that "it's not their fault." There's a tinge of racism, what President Bush aptly terms "the soft bigotry of low expectations," in Kerry's assumption that young blacks can't be expected to do any better than end up in prison.Another staggering Kerry gaffe that old media won't comment on, for several reasons. (Via Joanne Jacobs.)
Posted
6/17/2004 01:17:55 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/17/2004 12:28:14 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/17/2004 11:37:06 AM
by Edward Driscoll
There was a time not long ago when the conventional wisdom skewed heavily toward a Saddam-al Qaeda links. In 1998 and early 1999, the Iraq-al Qaeda connection was widely reported in the American and international media. Former intelligence officers and government officials speculated about the relationship and its dangerous implications for the world. The information in the news reports came from foreign and domestic intelligence services. It was featured in mainstream media outlets including international wire services, prominent newsweeklies, and network radio and television broadcasts. Newsweek magazine ran an article in its January 11, 1999, issue headed "Saddam + Bin Laden?" "Here's what is known so far," it read: “Saddam Hussein, who has a long record of supporting terrorism, is trying to rebuild his intelligence network overseas -- assets that would allow him to establish a terrorism network. U.S. sources say he is reaching out to Islamic terrorists, including some who may be linked to Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi exile accused of masterminding the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa last summer.” ....NPR reporter Mike Shuster interviewed Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA's counterterrorism center, and offered this report: “Iraq's contacts with bin Laden go back some years, to at least 1994, when, according to one U.S. government source, Hijazi met him when bin Laden lived in Sudan. According to Cannistraro, Iraq invited bin Laden to live in Baghdad to be nearer to potential targets of terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait....Some experts believe bin Laden might be tempted to live in Iraq because of his reported desire to obtain chemical or biological weapons. CIA Director George Tenet referred to that in recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee when he said bin Laden was planning additional attacks on American targets.” By mid-February 1999, journalists did not even feel the need to qualify these claims of an Iraq-al Qaeda relationship. An Associated Press dispatch that ran in the Washington Post ended this way: "The Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden, who openly supports Iraq against Western powers." Where did journalists get the idea that Saddam and bin Laden might be coordinating efforts? Among other places, from high-ranking Clinton administration officials. In the spring of 1998 -- well before the U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa -- the Clinton administration indicted Osama bin Laden. The indictment, unsealed a few months later, prominently cited al Qaeda's agreement to collaborate with Iraq on weapons of mass destruction. The Clinton Justice Department had been concerned about negative public reaction to its potentially capturing bin Laden without "a vehicle for extradition," official paperwork charging him with a crime. It was "not an afterthought" to include the al Qaeda-Iraq connection in the indictment, says an official familiar with the deliberations. "It couldn't have gotten into the indictment unless someone was willing to testify to it under oath." The Clinton administration's indictment read unequivocally: “Al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.”I wonder if the 9/11 Commission knows about this. UPDATE: More here. ANOTHER UPDATE: This issue's controversy in an election year is somewhat muted by the fact that John Kerry agrees with the president' position... Wednesday, June 16, 2004
Posted
6/16/2004 09:39:11 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/16/2004 07:36:48 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/16/2004 05:30:41 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/16/2004 04:16:06 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/16/2004 03:38:26 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/16/2004 02:22:01 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/16/2004 01:47:03 PM
by Edward Driscoll
A blog which soared with high-minded rhetoric about how the war on terror is the test for this generation and that Bush was the right man to lead that struggle, now day-after-day tries to whittle away at reasons to support Bush in the fall as if the war on terror were merely another issue which can be trumped by any other issue you happen to feel more passionate about."Some days", Jonah adds, "it really sounds like Sullivan wants to jump into the anti-Bush pool but he just can't muster the gumption if others won't join him." UPDATE: Jonah notes that Sullivan has pulled a fast one: I must say I was surprised to discover this link from the gay magazine The Advocate. It seems that Andrew had been unequivocal about his opinions on Bush in that publication but not in his blog. In his Advocate essay he writes:Well, at least now we know. (Via InstaPundit.) UPDATE: Ace of Spades has some thoughts on Sullivan, in a long, detailed post. ONE MORE UPDATE: This sounds like some furious tap dancing to me. A THOUGHT: When Andrew finally does line up for Kerry, watch The New York Times eventually start running him on the Op-Ed page again. OK, ANOTHER UPDATE OR TWO: More from Ace of Spades, here. Meanwhile, Sullivan takes a real cheap shot at Jonah, quoting anti-gay posters from Jonah's mom's site, Lucianne.com. One would assume that when Sullivan endorses Kerry, it will be in spite of some of the more extreme comments written by the folks who post at say, Democratic Underground or IndyMedia.But it’s time to say something very clearly: Bush’s endorsement of antigay discrimination in the U.S. Constitution itself is a deal-breaker. I can’t endorse him this fall. Like many other gay men and women who have supported him, despite serious disagreements, I feel betrayed, abused, attacked.And...I will be excoriated by the same people who always denounce anyone who doesn’t toe the Democratic Party line. “What took you so long?” they sneer. Hope, engagement, principle are my answers. I do not regret trying to make conservatism safe for gays. It’s still possible to be in favor of small government, low taxes, a tough foreign policy, and to be a proud gay man. My principles haven’t changed. Nor will they anytime soon. But when a president allies himself with forces that really do want to keep gay people in jail, therapy, or the closet, it’s time to break off. The deal is broken. And no amount of rationalization can make it whole again.Now I disagree with much (but not all) of what Andrew says in his essay. But it's an honest and decent position. Still what baffles me is why, to my knowledge, he's made no reference to this essay or his absolutist position on his site. Maybe, I missed it and he has. But I don't think so. Obviously, there's no binding code of ethics governing the blogosphere and even if there were I doubt it would have anything to say about not linking to articles you've written elsewhere or being obligated to express every significant opinion you have. But still, reading Andrew over the last year, you would have gotten the impression that at least theoretically his mind was open on who to support. According to this piece, it isn't. And that strikes me as an extremely significant silence.
Posted
6/16/2004 11:35:05 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Posted
6/15/2004 10:38:29 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/15/2004 09:56:59 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/15/2004 09:16:36 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/15/2004 09:11:10 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/15/2004 09:08:49 PM
by Edward Driscoll
The Germans now face what is to them an unthinkable possibility. Their eastern neighbors are dramatically more successful than they are and may soon enough be richer. The costs of their lazy socialism are apparent even to their children, and the country is in a panic. "We all recognize," one participant told me, "that Germany needs its own Reagan."That's true of several countries in Europe.
Posted
6/15/2004 09:00:16 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Vermont is a paradox. It's a relatively poor state filled with low-income families who can use the price breaks brought by discount retailers. But it's also a playground for wealthy progressives and elitists who tend to be concentrated in the Burlington area. They began flocking to state three decades ago because they saw an opportunity to take control of Vermont's policy-making process and force through a progressive agenda. Though their wealth is a product of our capitalist, free-market system, these left-leaning relative newcomers see development and economic advancement as threats to Vermont's rural and quaint small-town flavor. That puts them at odds with much of the more deeply rooted populace that shares neither the elitists' wealth nor their values. As such it becomes clear why the state is the perfect location for the escalating culture clash over Wal-Mart.Kraemer concludes, "Most Vermonters could use more Wal-Marts and the low prices and job opportunities the retailer brings. Yet an elite few are willing to make sure they get neither. The world's largest retailer is unwelcome in Vermont and in other self-characterized progressive states and communities across the country. That might be OK for the cocktail party crowd, but it is a disservice to those who rely on Wal-Mart to make their incomes go further".
Posted
6/15/2004 06:02:56 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Sophisticates unwittingly paid Reagan a compliment by calling him a cowboy, by which they meant gunslinger, instead of in the more accurate sense of a man able to see nature without blinders; to know things for what they were. Although Ronald Reagan has left the nation a huge legacy of achievement still it would be incomplete and his bequest to posterity less final if we forget that his greatest strength was to think for himself and dare to do the same.And now: These days, [leftwing radio personality Phil Hendrie] is more likely to appear on Dennis Miller’s new MSNBC comedy news show, or even to be booed at the recent Aspen Comedy Festival, at a Saturday-morning panel on “Who’s Funnier — the Left or Right?” “I’m delighted to be counted among Phil’s admirers,” says Harry Shearer, “although he’s hopelessly wrong about the war . . . Long and short of it — he’s way too good for KFI.” “Ever since 9/11,” says Hendrie, “as the days tick by, I wonder if I’m insane. I wonder if I’ve overreacted, because I’ve seen the country drift back to this blasé attitude: Maybe 9/11 was this isolated thing, and maybe we should just cool out. And sometimes I doubt myself — should I be as shocked as I was? But I remember those days. Everybody felt it. And it’s changed me a lot. I feel like I need to say this. I’m not going to change anyone’s mind, but I’ve got to get it off my chest. And I’m not a Republican; I am a Democrat. I know I’m a Democrat, and I know what the Democratic Party stands for. I think the president is wrong-minded on certain domestic issues such as gay marriage. I think he’s being badly influenced by, once again, the thing that’s going to tear the Republican Party apart, the religious right. But that said, I don’t think I need to turn my card in just because I don’t hate George Bush. I know war is bad, but this is not the generation that’s going to end it.”
Posted
6/15/2004 04:51:32 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/15/2004 02:53:59 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/15/2004 02:43:44 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/15/2004 02:18:22 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Thompson has less hope than the Islamists; at least they have an afterlife to look forward to. All we have is a country so rotten and exhausted it’s not worth defending. It never was, of course, but it’s even less defensible now than before. He can say what he wants. Drink what he wants. Drive where he wants. Do what he wants. He’s done okay in America. And he hates this country. Hates it. This appeals to high school kids and collegiate-aged students getting that first hot eye-crossing hit from the Screw Dad pipe, but it’s rather pathetic in aged moneyed authors. And it would be irrelevant if this same spirit didn't infect on whom Hunter S. had an immense influence. He's the guy who made nihilism hip. He's the guy who taught a generation that the only thing you should believe is this: don't trust anyone who believes anything. He's the patron saint of journalism, whether journalists know it or not.Of course, that doesn't mean the public--you know, the folks who actually buy newspapers and log-on to news Websites--think the same way. Which helps to explain this, doesn't it?
Posted
6/15/2004 01:58:06 PM
by Edward Driscoll
In a sworn statement to be made public Tuesday, University of Colorado President Elizabeth Hoffman said a four-letter word used toward women can sometimes be used as a "term of endearment." The comment comes from Hoffman's latest sworn testimony in connection with a federal lawsuit against the university. 9NEWS received a copy of the passage in question from the university after sources both outside and inside CU told us about it.Decorum prevents me from mentioning the school's initials are the same two... ...Well--moving right along now! Monday, June 14, 2004
Posted
6/14/2004 10:16:03 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/14/2004 07:06:39 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/14/2004 06:55:59 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/14/2004 03:09:50 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/14/2004 02:53:17 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/14/2004 02:35:24 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/14/2004 02:03:30 PM
by Edward Driscoll
I find Meet the Press a prime example of the decline of the mainstream media during my lifetime. A show which began years ago with several voices has devolved into the fiefdom of Tim Russert--and the medieval analogy is not accidental. Still, I watch it, even if his questions are not designed to reveal the truth, but rather for dramatic-gotcha effect.Simon says that Iraq's incoming president, Ghazi Al-Yawar, did a masterful job of defending himself from Russert's gotcha-games--and the quotes of Al-Yawar confirm it.
Posted
6/14/2004 01:26:11 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/14/2004 12:39:15 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/14/2004 12:18:46 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/14/2004 11:37:49 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/14/2004 01:51:19 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Sunday, June 13, 2004
Posted
6/13/2004 06:42:25 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/13/2004 04:35:44 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/13/2004 03:49:56 PM
by Edward Driscoll
He made a tandem jump - harnessed to a member of an Army's Golden Knights parachute team - after officials decided the wind conditions and low clouds made it too dangerous for the 41st president to jump alone, which he did when he turned 75. "This was a real thrill for me," said Bush, wearing a black-and-gold jumpsuit. "I felt no fear ... for me to get a chance to jump with the Golden Knights is a dream." With Staff Sgt. Bryan Schnell on his back and a black-and-gold parachute ballooning above them, the former president waved his arms to some 4,000 spectators as he neared the drop zone - a painted logo of "41 at 80" in the center of a football-field-sized area on the grounds of his presidential library at Texas A&M University. "It's been a great day," Bush said after sailing to the ground, landing and scooting a ways on his backside. "This was a day of joy and a day of wonder for the Bush family, certainly for the old guy." The crowd included his wife, Barbara, his son Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev - whom the former president had invited to jump with him. "Afraid," Gorbachev said through an interpreter, explaining why he didn't accept the offer. "Maybe on his 90th birthday. ... For me, it would be a first. At my age, that may kill me." Gorbachev gave Bush flowers and a bottle of vodka.This wasn't the first time Gorbachev felt afraid when confronted by a request from an American president... UPDATE: For some reason, this article omits the fact that Chuck Norris and Brit Hume also jumped with President Bush. I had to learn about the latter via "Day By Day" (!) and then Google for another news story!
Posted
6/13/2004 12:58:53 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Saturday, June 12, 2004
Posted
6/12/2004 01:45:22 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/12/2004 12:43:27 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/12/2004 12:40:55 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/12/2004 12:34:32 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/12/2004 12:31:45 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/12/2004 12:07:45 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Friday, June 11, 2004
Posted
6/11/2004 11:51:31 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/11/2004 11:44:37 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/11/2004 11:34:14 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/11/2004 11:32:09 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/11/2004 10:52:22 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/11/2004 10:35:25 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/11/2004 10:31:14 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/11/2004 10:26:51 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/11/2004 10:21:45 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/11/2004 01:37:10 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/11/2004 01:06:20 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Thursday, June 10, 2004
Posted
6/10/2004 11:24:09 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/10/2004 05:36:50 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/10/2004 01:00:52 PM
by Edward Driscoll
In 1982 the Dow Jones industrial average hit a low of 800. After the final pieces of the Reagan tax cuts were installed, the market rocketed upward for 18 consecutive years. From 800, the Dow rose to 10,000 — creating between $15 trillion and $20 trillion in new wealth and industries. The Dow would have to climb to 100,000 by 2020 to match this Herculean performance. By clearing away the wealth destroyers of high tax rates and high inflation, U.S. companies became far more productive, profitable, and valuable. The economy also created 15 million new jobs under Reagan and grew in real terms by 40 percent. Some have likened this to adding a new California to the U.S. economy. By the end of the 1980s, in what was a fitting tribute to the Reagan program, almost all industrialized nations had sharply lowered tax rates to regain a competitive position lost to the U.S. in the decade. Reagan would note that "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." In this way, Reaganomics saved not just the U.S. economy from worldwide depression, but the entire global economy as well. The Reagan way was spurned throughout the 1980s as "voodoo economics" (one of George Bush Sr.'s few memorable comments.) Many college textbooks to this day even argue that Reagan's economic policies were flawed because they created record budget deficits. But the textbooks don't mention that as the national debt rose by $2 trillion, national wealth rose by $8 trillion. They also don't mention that the Laffer curve worked: Lower tax rates did generate more tax revenues at the federal, state, and local levels. Federal tax collections rose from $500 billion in 1980 to $1 trillion in 1990.Moore quotes Arthur Laffer, who says that at Reagan's first cabinet meeting as president, "Reagan, the seasoned actor, waited for silence in the Cabinet Room. He then stood and said, 'Gentlemen and ladies, I hate inflation, I hate taxes, and I hate Communism. Do something about it.'" They did. UPDATE: Get a load of this quote by Tom Brokaw, from a 1983 interview with far-left magazine Mother Jones: “I thought from the outset that his ‘supply side’ [theory] was just a disaster. I knew of no one who felt that it was going to work, outside of a small collection of zealots in Washington and at USC – Arthur Laffer, Jack Kemp. What I thought quite outrageous was the business community, which for years carped and complained that it could never get a President sympathetic to its needs, finally got its champion, Ronald Reagan. Then, to its horror, it discovered that he was actually going to press ahead with supply side – a theory whose disastrous consequences businesspeople began desperately to prepare for, but did not publicly warn the rest of the country about. They knew it simply could not work. But what they did was look to their own little life raft and not to anyone else’s.”Lots more quotes in a similar vein via that same link.
Posted
6/10/2004 11:46:01 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/10/2004 10:44:42 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/10/2004 09:32:41 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/10/2004 09:23:40 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/10/2004 12:38:48 AM
by Edward Driscoll
![]() Think of everything Reagan did, and then add: He did it all before Fox News. He did it all before the Rush Limbaugh phenomenon. He did it all before the instant battle cry of his defenders could hit the Internet. He did it all before C-SPAN caught on and people could enjoy the game of watching entire speeches and debates and then observing how the network tricksters discombobulated them into liberal hatchet jobs. He did it all when (well, eventually) the only conservative regular on the big networks was ABC's George Will, and at that time Will was still fashionably fussing about Americans being "taxophobic" and spurning Reagan's "Morning in America goo." In the prologue to his book on Reagan Dinesh D'Souza captured the flavor of how Reagan was greeted by the Washington establishment. Everything Reagan sought to accomplish seemed ludicrous and uneducated to the long-standing liberal consensus. Tax cuts would be wildly inflationary. A foreign policy based on the radical notion that Communism should be put on the ash heap of history was dismissed as a bellicose fantasy too dangerous for the nuclear age. At the end of it all, Reagan was the wise man, and all his detractors — Democrats and ersatz Republicans, political scientists and economists, "Sovietologists" and journalists — were the dummies.Graham adds, "We should welcome any reevaluation by the reigning pundits of the Reagan era as the truth winning out. We should welcome the warm glow of nostalgia from all Americans who share it. Reagan won over many adversaries by his magnanimity under rhetorical assault. Bitterness at this time wouldn't be Reaganesque." ONE MORE UPDATE: "Were we fools then, or are we dishonest now?" And here's one more for the road. OK, ONE MORE, ONE MORE UPDATE: Virginia Postrel notes the slanted polling questions in this week's MediaBistro poll. "The survey is unscientific, but the dominance of answer five certainly doesn't exactly make the participating journalists look, uh, fair and balanced." Answer five reads, "He was a vacuous ideologue and his death was not unexpected. Enough already". THE RETURN OF THE SON OF ONE MORE UPDATE: "Rest in peace, Mr President. And know that after all these years, you were right - and all these people were clearly, emphatically, embarrassingly, wrong".
Posted
6/10/2004 12:34:40 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Posted
6/9/2004 04:35:16 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/9/2004 04:22:29 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/9/2004 04:11:13 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/9/2004 03:07:43 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/9/2004 01:04:28 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/9/2004 11:17:48 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Expect to see a lot of chatter today and tomorrow over the just-released Pew study of news audience attitudes. Howie Kurtz has a rundown in today's Washington Post, including some crowing from various network/newspaper PR flacks about the results. One of those, from CNN's Matthew Furman, struck me in particular:Daaaaamn right, as Isaac Hayes would say. While part of the reason for this lack of trust is that viewers and readers now have more options available to them, there's another reason why. While Bernard Goldberg did yeoman work in Bias and Arrogance to expose many of the medias' follies, William McGowan's Coloring The News is in some ways more impressive. Goldberg showed the rest of the world that bias in journalism exists, something that conservatives have been railing about since the days of the "nattering nabobs of negativism" speech by Spiro Agnew (and written by Bill Safire). And for that, he should be commended. What McGowan (a self-professed liberal like Goldberg, incidentally) did is a bit more subtle, which is why his book has gotten less attention that Goldberg's two titles. The title of his book is somewhat of a misnomer. While it does talk extensively of how the press covers (and in many cases avoids) racial issues, what it's really about is how, by drinking the politically correct Kool-Aide (and gallons of it) in the late '80s, the press took a hard left turn, and went from doing straight reporting to frequently turning routine stories into activist journalism. And this was after the majority of the country elected a conservative president, and the man who campaigned as his successor, in three blow-out victories. (And don't forget, Bill Clinton ran as a "New Democrat", and frequently governed as such--voting for such conservative issues as NAFTA and welfare reform, and was far more fiscally restrained--after the Hillarycare debacle of course--than most previous Democratic presidents had been.) What the press didn't count on was that by the late '90s, there'd be so many choices available via the Internet and cable TV. And as the late Robert Bartley said only a couple of years ago:"We're obviously pleased -- once again we've been voted the most trusted news organization in America."Man, you talk about burying the lede. That's like being ranked "the most successful professional football team in Atlanta." According to the Pew survey, less than one-third of those "able to rate" CNN said that they believe "all or most of what they see" on the network. Memo to Matthew Furman: When 68% of your potential audience doesn't trust you, you don't have any reason to brag. "If it finds the mainstream press lacking, the public will simply find its own sources of information--as declining readership and network news ratings suggest is already happening."So I'm not surprised to see, as Will Collier wrote: For all intents and purposes, more than half of the populace (everybody except partisan Democrats, and even their numbers for credibility are nothing for most of the press to brag about) has written off the vast majority of the national press. And they're doing so because they believe that the press has written them off. Things have gotten to the point where the President of the United States sees no reason not to ignore the networks and the New York Times. If the coin of your realm is trust, and influence is what you buy with that coin, what do today's viewership realities say about the state of the realm?That a lot of people have their head in sand. And it's going to years for them to come up for air (and that doesn't even take into consideration CNN's own enormous credibility problem with Iraq). In the meantime, as Bernard Goldberg told me: I'll give you a quote from paragraph one of Arrogance:It has.If the media elites don't start to listen to reasonable criticism about them, they're going to become the journalistic equivalent of the leisure suit: harmless enough, but hopelessly out of date.The reason why I called that book Arrogance is that these people don't listen to anybody. They don't listen to any criticism! If you point something out to them, they say, "this proves that you're the one with the bias problem". If they continue that, they will be less relevant next year then they are this year, and less relevant two years from now than they will be next year. They're becoming less and less relevant. And proof of this is that once upon a time, not ten thousand years ago, but just in the recent past, the most trusted man in America was Walter Cronkite. Does anybody, no matter what his or her politics are, does anybody think that Americans would pick one of the three network anchors as one of the most trusted men in America today? I don't think so. I don't think so. So they're losing their clout, they're losing their influence, they're losing their relevance, and they continue to fiddle while Rome is burning. They are so arrogant that they can't see straight, and I think it's going to cost them.
Posted
6/9/2004 10:55:42 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
Posted
6/8/2004 10:38:48 PM
by Edward Driscoll
What matters is not what Bill Clinton wants, but what the Reagan family wants. And somehow, here we are again, discussing Bill Clinton when he has absolutely nothing to do with this event. And once again, we witness the spectacle of Bill Clinton's lack of class and graciousness.And as P.J. O'Rourke wrote...
Posted
6/8/2004 05:44:21 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/8/2004 04:36:12 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/8/2004 02:27:01 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/8/2004 01:16:19 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/8/2004 12:42:40 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Reagan invented the Internet. Well, OK, that's not exactly right, but his administration made the key decision that opened the Internet up to commercial utilization. But wait just a doggone nano-second, you might be saying, didn't Al Gore invent the Net? Or didn't he at least try to take credit for it in 1999, when he told CNN, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet"? Of course, what started out as Arpanet reaches back to the late 60s, when Gore was still in school. But as for "creating the Internet" as THE Internet, one might turn to a 2000 book written by Reed Hundt, who declares himself to be one of Gore's biggest fans. Hundt's memoir of his tenure as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 1993-1997, You Say You Want a Revolution: A Story of Information Age Politics, was written, in part, to help Gore's presidential prospects; in a talk four years ago to the New America Foundation, he described himself as "Al's lieutenant," sent to the FCC to "implement his agenda." Yet even so, the author's basic honesty got in the way of his political advocacy. On page 133 of his book, Hundt noted that a "far-sighted, or accidentally smart" ruling by the Reagan-era FCC prohibited phone companies from levying "access charges" on data, as distinct from voice transmissions. "In the absence of the FCC's decision," Hundt writes, "the Internet would have been so expensive that [founder Marc] Andreesen's Netscape would not have been a hiccup, much less one of the first bubble stocks of the Internet." Let's pause over this for a moment. Even a pro-Gore Democrat concedes that the biggest pro-Internet inflection point dates back to the early 80s. In fact, if one looks up the case -- MTS and WATS Market Structure Order, 97 FCC 2d 682 (1983) -- one sees that the FCC was then chaired by Mark Fowler, a Reagan appointee. And so Gore looks less like a prime mover, and more like a free rider. And Reagan, meanwhile, gets credit -- or should get credit -- for picking free-market heroes such as Fowler. Did the Gipper ever know about the Net? Maybe not, but it hardly matters; even through lean times, such as the 70s, he never lost his faith in the genius of the American people and in the almost-magical powers of the free market. So if someone had told him that American enterprise had created a Next Big Thing that was adding trillions of economic output, he would probably have said, "Well, of course."Pinkerton adds, "A quarter-century after my first contact with Ronald Reagan, I now see that he was right: our best days as Americans are still ahead of us, as they are always ahead of us -- because there are no natural limits on the capacity of free minds. Reagan knew it then; I finally know it now."
Posted
6/8/2004 12:37:30 PM
by Edward Driscoll
The County Board of Supervisors plans to reconsider the deal it reached last week to remove a cross from the county seal. The supervisors voted 3-2 to remove the symbol from the seal after the American Civil Liberties Union threatened a lawsuit, saying it was an improper endorsement of Christianity. Supervisors Michael Antonovich and Don Knabe said their offices have been bombarded with phone calls and e-mails since the decision was made, including from a conservative legal group offering to represent the county for free in a legal battle against the ACLU. The county would probably win such a lawsuit, those groups said, because there have been similar instances were crosses were permitted because they were historical rather than religious symbols. Antonovich estimated it could cost millions of dollars for the county to remove the tiny cross from all its letterhead, officials vehicles, uniforms and buildings.OK, so it could cost millions to update the seal, and the County would probably win a suit against the ACLU. But that didn't prevent the supervisors for being so quick to roll over. UPDATE: Oh, That Liberal Media looks at how the L.A. Times has been covering the story, siding with the ACLU "while pretending not to side with the ACLU". Monday, June 07, 2004
Posted
6/7/2004 06:01:16 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/7/2004 05:45:49 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/7/2004 12:43:43 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/7/2004 11:33:00 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/7/2004 02:26:38 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/7/2004 12:01:14 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Sunday, June 06, 2004
Posted
6/6/2004 08:00:47 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/6/2004 11:32:55 AM
by Edward Driscoll
if Germany wants to rewrite history to show that Hitler and the Nazis were some sort of occupying power in Germany, then they risk forgetting the lesson taught to them at the cost of millions of Allied lives. "Never again" becomes "Never what again?" becomes "It's happening again." We can't afford to let Germany forget what happened, and who was to blame.Ironically, Germany's efforts at revisionism come at a time when historians are finally starting to recognize just how welcome and accepted the Nazis were in Germany. And this is in marked contrast to the themes of previous tomes, such as William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. As Orrin Judd noted: A perfectly acceptable relic of its time, [Shirer's] book treats Hitler and the Nazi Party as complete aberrations, imposed on a slumbering Germany by a freakish set of circumstances. This view, understandable in a liberal West which finds it necessary to aver "it couldn't happen here" and which found it necessary to rehabilitate Germany into a worthy Cold War ally, has prevailed for the better part of sixty years now. In recent years however at least one book has come along to directly challenge this view, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's excellent Hitler's Willing Executioners. But to my knowledge, British historian Michael Burleigh's Third Reich is the first major one volume history to rival Shirer's work and it is an invaluable corrective, precisely the kind of big idea contrarian history that we could use more of and which, even if the author's claims are ultimately rejected, can serve to clarify the thinking of us all on the issues he broaches. Burleigh apparently draws on some academic work (for instance that by Saul Freidlander) with which I'm unfamiliar, but his central argument will ring a bell with anyone who's ever read Eric Hoffer's great book The True Believer. Burleigh considers the Third Reich to have been the product of a political religion, replete with symbols, hymns, liturgy, martyrs and a Messiah. From this perspective, the German people, defeated in WWI and impoverished by reparations and Depression, emerge, not as unwitting dupes, but as desperate believers in a new state religion propounded by Hitler, a true totalitarianism, suffused with racially motivated criminality, which sought to infiltrate every aspect of their lives.As Orrin said, we needed to maintain the fiction that the Nazis were a strange alien virus imposed on innocent Germans, to resuscitate them into a worthy Cold War ally. But as Steve notes, the Germans themselves are returning to that fiction, just as she and France are returning to their shared anti-Semitic roots. Saturday, June 05, 2004
Posted
6/5/2004 11:10:43 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/5/2004 10:57:45 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/5/2004 10:51:49 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/5/2004 09:38:10 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/5/2004 09:32:08 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/5/2004 09:26:16 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/5/2004 09:18:56 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/5/2004 05:40:45 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/5/2004 02:05:44 PM
by Edward Driscoll
As I understand it, Reagan will lie in state in Sacramento, then at the Capitol. Then there will be a memorial service at the National Cathedral, after which RR will be flown back to California for a sunset interment at the RR Library.UPDATE: Paul Kengor, author of God And Ronald Reagan has a moving tribute, here. UPDATE: Terry Teachout has this prophetic quote from Reagan In His Own Hand: "Communism is neither an ec[onomic] or a pol[itical] system--it is a form of insanity--a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature. I wonder how much more misery it will cause before it disappears." Ronald Reagan, Reagan, In His Own Hand (written 1975, collected 2001)Teachout looks at another collection of President Reagan's writings, here. UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg compares the coverage at CNN and Fox News (I'm watching Fox as I type this, incidentally). UPDATE: John Kerry's statement--complete with a nasty dig at the 40th President--here. UPDATE: Nice tribute to the Gipper from Gabriel Syme of Samizdata. UPDATE: Speaking of nasty digs, check out Slate's coverage of a former president's death: "The Man Who Ruined Republicans". UPDATE: Alphecca, a self-proclaimed "gay gun nut in Vermont" has collected some quotes from a few left-leaning blogs on the Gipper's death. And like Slate, they're not pretty. LAST UPDATE (for now): Many more links here.
Posted
6/5/2004 01:57:24 PM
by Edward Driscoll
My political credo is simple and many people share it: I am against phonies. A cultural establishment that (on the whole) doesn't give a damn about World War II or its veterans thinks it can undo a half-century of indifference verging on contempt by repeating a silly phrase ("the greatest generation") like a magic spell while deploying fulsome praise like carpet bombing. The campaign is especially intense among members of the 1960s generation who once chose to treat all present and former soldiers like dirt and are willing at long last to risk some friendly words about World War II veterans, now that most are safely underground and guaranteed not to talk back, enjoy their celebrity or start acting like they own the joint. A quick glance at the famous Hemingway B.S. detector shows the needle pegged at Maximum, where it's been all week, from Memorial Day through the D-Day anniversary run-up.RTWT.
Posted
6/5/2004 01:47:51 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/5/2004 12:36:57 PM
by Edward Driscoll
There's a bad craziness loose among the media elites. That a reputable journalist would write such a thing is bad enough--but for any paper, even the Village Voice, to publish it without a qualm is infinitely worse.I thought the whole beef that elites have Weblogs is that there's no editor to fact check and to prevent over the top remarks from being published. With the Village Voice, you have to wonder what's in the water, that would allow an editor to let a quote like that to fly under radar. Of course, as James Lileks presciently wrote this past week: To paraphrase an influential thinker of the previous century: The death of millions is a statistic. The reelection of one is a tragedy.That's certainly true as far as 36 Cooper Square is concerned. Never mind the fact that a real extermination occurred only a few blocks away from there.
Posted
6/5/2004 12:25:36 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Friday, June 04, 2004
Posted
6/4/2004 06:32:57 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/4/2004 06:06:30 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/4/2004 05:31:41 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/4/2004 04:48:10 PM
by Edward Driscoll
...journalists have allowed themselves to be cowed by "organized right-wing groups." "I think they are afraid," Brock said. "For a long time, the mainstream media has not stood up. They've essentially allowed Fox to happen. They do not cover Limbaugh -- he is a serious political figure in this country -- they don't write about what he says."OK--so the news media is right wing--but they don't cover its most prominent radio talk show host. ....Right. (Oh and by the way, Rush is featured in Time magazine this week. He felt so comfortable talking to the house organ of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy that he also tape recorded the interview himself, in case Time butchered one of his quotes.) UPDATE: Tim Graham of the Media Research Center notes: CNN did a whole story promoting their campaign to censor Rush Limbaugh off the Armed Forces Radio Network. Can you imagine how they would have reacted if an MRC had demanded the removal of NPR from Armed Forces Radio because it was too demoralizing to troops? PS: Their Web site is hot and heavy defending George Soros from conservative attack this week. They know who butters their panini.
Posted
6/4/2004 09:43:45 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/4/2004 01:21:37 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Thursday, June 03, 2004
Posted
6/3/2004 03:13:34 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/3/2004 03:09:51 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/3/2004 02:59:32 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/3/2004 01:26:46 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Dick Meyer of CBSNews.com gets it right: "Plenty of white writers or editors simply avoid wading into this altogether because it is perceived as too risky, too easy to be accused of prejudice, or meddling." And that avoidance, as Meyer notes, "ensures the issues become even more buried. Pimp rap goes uncriticized. Schools stay bad." The slow but now-steady spread of the Cosby story illustrates one more way bloggers serve an invaluable function: not just by rebutting or correcting the news; but by watering and "sunshining" stories that are dying on the vine because they disrupt the pre-conceived liberal agendas of media elites. Many bloggers who depend on the news hold in low regard the person whose job title is "Page One Editor," "National Editor," or "Foreign Editor." And rightly so, all too often. These folks play up what they like according to their politics, and downplay what they don't like. What gets two inches on page A12 might really deserve 25 inches, starting on Page One. Enter the humble blogger. True, the percentage of Internet users who report they view blogs regularly is still low. But even then, we're talking some 31 million regular blog viewers. Admittedly, some blogs are about knitting, snow-boarding, or origami. Others are authored by navel-gazing college students, polyamorists, vegan anarchists, or self-declared alcoholics detailing each wretched night's debauch. But watch out for many of the rest. Their reach grows. The Cosby story — like others before it — has shown that a news story can grow "legs" thanks more to repackagers in the blogosphere than to "legitimate" print and broadcast outlets.Read the whole thing.
Posted
6/3/2004 01:44:08 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
Posted
6/2/2004 02:38:35 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/2/2004 02:09:01 PM
by Edward Driscoll
In that Raines article in the Guardian you linked, he writes "As America's FIRST WAR-HERO candidate since John F Kennedy, he ought to be leading the national discussion on what went wrong in Iraq." You would think Howell Raines would have heard of George McGovern or at least George H.W. Bush, right?Hey, it's not like an editor checks facts or anything.
Posted
6/2/2004 12:58:12 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/2/2004 01:30:35 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Tuesday, June 01, 2004
Posted
6/1/2004 04:40:33 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/1/2004 04:00:14 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/1/2004 02:24:01 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/1/2004 01:47:34 PM
by Edward Driscoll
I've been getting great e-mails all day from around the country over my DMN column whacking the media for ignoring the good news out of Iraq. One of my correspondents was Mark Tapscott at the Heritage Foundation, who sends along results of a Gallup poll released today. The poll surveyed the confidence Americans had in their institutions. The military got the highest rating, with 75 percent of those polled expressing a "great deal" of confidence, while only five percent saying they had "very little or none" in the military. Compare that with TV news, in which 30 percent of respondents report a "great deal" of confidence, and a nearly equal number reporting "very little or none." It's not much better for newspapers: 30 percent have a "great deal" of confidence, while 25 percent have "very little or none." The U.S. military, then, is the most popular institution in America. The news media are among the least popular."And of course", Dreher notes, "this will be ignored in newsrooms, which have an uncanny ability to ignore handwriting on the wall when it tells them things they don't want to hear". UPDATE: John Hawkins also has some thoughts on the topic.
Posted
6/1/2004 11:28:03 AM
by Edward Driscoll
And the best thing about Americans recusing ourselves from global entanglements is that we will be loved again. Imagine a world where American manners and mores set the standard almost everywhere, where American fashions, American ideas and American lifestyles are universally sought out and copied. A world where people avidly listen to American music, eagerly watch American TV and movies, and try to imitate Americans in every way. Imagine a world where the U.S.A. is so admired that people by the millions want nothing more than to come to America and recuse themselves from global entanglements.Hey--it could happen!
Posted
6/1/2004 10:59:53 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/1/2004 10:43:06 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
6/1/2004 01:04:17 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Monday, May 31, 2004
Posted
5/31/2004 07:12:56 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Sunday, May 30, 2004
Posted
5/30/2004 01:01:13 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Over the past year, following enactment of the president's tax-cut plan, real economic growth has increased 5 percent with only 1.6 percent inflation. After-tax profits have increased 37 percent (fully adjusted for depreciation and capital consumption). Business spending on equipment and software has grown 12.5 percent. Since last August, 1.1 million jobs have been created. Spendable income has increased 4.9 percent in real terms. Consumer spending is up 4.3 percent. The economy is roaring at its fastest in 20 years, and there's no clear reason the prosperity trends won't continue.Kudlow asks, "Why can't the naysayers see it?" Saturday, May 29, 2004
Posted
5/29/2004 10:49:09 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Friday, May 28, 2004
Posted
5/28/2004 03:55:25 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Thursday, May 27, 2004
Posted
5/27/2004 10:57:55 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/27/2004 03:27:39 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/27/2004 03:17:21 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/27/2004 12:46:03 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/27/2004 12:20:21 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/27/2004 12:14:51 PM
by Edward Driscoll
"It is now clear that Al Gore is insane," writes the New York Post's John Podhoretz. "I don't mean that his policy ideas are insane, though many of them are. I mean that based on his behavior, conduct, mien and tone over the past two days, there is every reason to believe that Albert Gore Jr., desperately needs help. I think he needs medication, and I think that if he is already on medication, his doctors need to adjust it or change it entirely." Maureen Dowd of the New York Times agrees. When he delivered a speech to the far-left outfit MoveOn.org yesterday, she writes, "Mr. Gore hollered so much, he made Howard Dean look like George Pataki." She says the erstwhile veep represents "the wackadoo wing of the Democratic Party."And while in the past, we've been no great fan of the former Vice President, we certainly agreed with his comments about Iraq--or at least those he made in 1998.
Posted
5/27/2004 11:58:39 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Roadside Attractions and Samuel Goldwyn films have accused MTV of refusing to air commercials for Super Size Me, the award-winning documentary which landed in the top-ten box-office attractions last weekend, something rare for a documentary. The two companies said in a statement that they were told that the ads were "disparaging to fast-food restaurants," which are big advertisers on the youth-oriented cable outlet. MTV disputed the charge, saying that the distributors balked at a deal. (More here, for when the IMDB link scrolls off.)Wait a second--Spurlock told Bartiromo, "we live in a country where people should have the right to say what they want". So why are his backers upset that MTV doesn't want to run their ads? SUPER-SIZE THIS UPDATE: Somebody could make a whole documentary about this.
Posted
5/27/2004 10:37:08 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/27/2004 09:44:06 AM
by Edward Driscoll
The number of bloggers has grown quickly, thanks to sites like blogger.com, which makes it easy to set up a blog. Technorati, a blog-tracking service, has counted some 2.5 million blogs. Of course, most of those millions are abandoned or, at best, maintained infrequently. For many bloggers, the novelty soon wears off and their persistence fades. Sometimes, too, the realization that no one is reading sets in. A few blogs have thousands of readers, but never have so many people written so much to be read by so few. By Jupiter Research's estimate, only 4 percent of online users read blogs.And how many people is four percent of online users? As I wrote in my March Tech Central Station article about a similar piece that appeared on CNN's Website, according to one study, there are 146 million adult Internet users in the US alone. If we assume that only four percent of online users are reading them, that's 5,840,000 readers: Scott Ott, the humorist whose Scrappleface Website is a Blogosphere favorite (in January of 2003, Ott coined the brilliant "Axis of Weasels" meme that later graced the cover of The New York Post), puts things into sharp perspective. In one of his typically satiric news articles, he wrote that if only about two percent of Internet users actually write Weblogs, it means that there are more bloggers writing, than people reading USA Today (whose circulation is 2.6 million), The New York Times (1.6 million) or The New York Daily News (805,000). Ott doesn't mention CNN, but since the article most prominently appeared on CNN's Website, it's probably worth noting that in the US, CNN's typically daily viewership is only about 450,000 viewers. (The Fox News Channel, the cable news ratings leader, gets an average of 799,000 viewers during their broadcasting day.) Of course, if I were CNN, I'd be worried about having, in a manner of speaking, all of my viewers, and then some, owning Weblogs.That goes double for the Times, where Bloggers had a field day with Howell Raines, Jayson Blair and Maureen Dowd. (And naturally, there's no mention of Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds or Mickey Kaus, who used their Blogs to pummel The Times last year at the height of the Blair scandal). ...and stories like this one, which find the one blogger on the planet who doesn't know what his stats package says: Mr. Wiggins, 48, a senior information technologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, does not know how many readers he has; he suspects it's not many. But that does not seem to bother him. "I'm just getting something off my chest," he said.It then concludes, "Indeed, if a blog is likened to a conversation between a writer and readers, bloggers like Mr. Wiggins are having conversations largely with themselves." Oh sure, that never happens at The Times. UPDATE: What did others in the Blogosphere think of the story? Ask Memeorandum! LAST UPDATE: Instalanche! Welcome readers of The Professor.
Posted
5/27/2004 09:27:21 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/27/2004 09:24:55 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Posted
5/26/2004 02:26:05 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/26/2004 02:10:50 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/26/2004 02:06:42 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/26/2004 12:53:31 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/26/2004 12:15:48 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Comparing the plane to aircraft that brought U.S. troops to and ferried them home from Vietnam, Kerry called the plane his ``freedom bird.''But after Vietnam, Kerry said: I did take part in free-fire zones, I did take part in harassment and interdiction fire, I did take part in search-and-destroy missions in which the houses of noncombatants were burned to the ground. And all of these acts, I find out later on, are contrary to the Hague and Geneva conventions and to the laws of warfare. So in that sense, anybody who took part in those, if you carry out the application of the Nuremberg Principles, is in fact guilty.If that's how Kerry feels, why is he naming his plane after those that transported armies of fellow war criminals to and from their destructive tasks? You'd think somebody that ashamed of his actions in Vietnam would want to play them down. UPDATE: Rich Lowry notes that AP didn't pick up on the missing "for" in the "John Kerry President" emblazoned on Kerry's campaign aircraft.
Posted
5/26/2004 12:09:16 PM
by Edward Driscoll
''We need national resolve and unity, not weakness and division when we are engaged in an action against someone like Saddam Hussein,'' the vice president said on CNN's Larry King Live. Wired for a round-robin of live interviews with five network TV anchors, Gore blanketed the airwaves with a prediction that critics of the president's decision to strike Iraq would change their opinion as they learned more about the situation and received more information from military leaders. ''This action is the correct action,'' he said.Whoops--that was in 1998. Nevermind. The press certainly doesn't.
Posted
5/26/2004 10:47:52 AM
by Edward Driscoll
When he was 17, Ike's screenwriter and co-executive producer Lionel Chetwynd joined the 3rd Battalion Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment), spending two years in the Canadian peacetime military. During that time he met some veterans of Dieppe, a bloody but necessary dress rehearsal to D-Day that established the futility of invading a fortified European port. Now in his early 60s, Chetwynd is a longtime naturalized American citizen who was born in England and raised in Montreal. He'd remembered from Canadian regimental history that of the 4,400-odd Canadians sent to Dieppe, about 3,600 were killed. Although they knew it was basically a suicide mission, not one man failed to report for duty. Chetwynd asked one of the old soldiers in his regiment, Sgt. Gordon Betts, why. "My generation had to figure out what we were ready to die for," Chetwynd recalled Betts telling him. "You kids don't even know what to live for." Many years later, when Chetwynd was a successful Hollywood writer specializing in historical dramas, he told the Dieppe story during a Malibu dinner party — as a sort of tribute to the men who died there so people could sit around debating politics at Malibu dinner parties. One of the guests was a network head who asked Chetwynd to come in and pitch the story. "So I went in," Chetwynd told me, "and someone there said, 'So these bloodthirsty generals sent these men to a certain death?' "And I said, 'Well, they weren't bloodthirsty; they wept. But how else were we to know how Hitler could be toppled from Europe?' And she said, 'Well, who's the enemy?' I said, 'Hitler. The Nazis.' And she said, 'Oh, no, no, no. I mean, who's the real enemy?'" "It was the first time I realized," Chetwynd continued, "that for many people evil such as Nazism can only be understood as a cipher for evil within ourselves. They've become so persuaded of the essential ugliness of our society and its military, that to tell a war story is to tell the story of evil people."Kind of puts it all into perspective when someone living in Hollywood is complaining about "the essential ugliness of our society" and thinks that during WWII the real enemy wasn't the Nazis, but the men who fought them, doesn't it?
Posted
5/26/2004 10:39:07 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Posted
5/25/2004 11:12:20 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/25/2004 07:09:44 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/25/2004 03:25:03 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/25/2004 02:01:59 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/25/2004 01:56:20 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Monday, May 24, 2004
Posted
5/24/2004 08:06:40 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/24/2004 04:49:45 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/24/2004 04:39:40 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/24/2004 03:55:34 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/24/2004 03:38:52 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/24/2004 02:08:50 PM
by Edward Driscoll
The long-dreaded 2004 Olympics in Greece will be the ultimate crossroads for sports and politics in this new and vicious century. The recent photos of cruelty at the Abu Grahaib all-american prison in Baghdad have taken care of that. Yes, sir. We have taken the bull by the horns on this one, sports fans. These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected. I have been in this business a long time and I have seen many staggering things, but this one is over the line. Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport. Not even the foulest atrocities of Adolf Hitler ever shocked me so badly as these photographs did.As I said last Sunday, Thompson and the late William S. Burroughs are the prime examples that sooner or later, decades of pharmaceutical excess catch up with a writer--and the results are not pretty. As James Lileks wrote that same day: Thompson has less hope than the Islamists; at least they have an afterlife to look forward to. All we have is a country so rotten and exhausted it’s not worth defending. It never was, of course, but it’s even less defensible now than before. He can say what he wants. Drink what he wants. Drive where he wants. Do what he wants. He’s done okay in America. And he hates this country. Hates it. This appeals to high school kids and collegiate-aged students getting that first hot eye-crossing hit from the Screw Dad pipe, but it’s rather pathetic in aged moneyed authors. And it would be irrelevant if this same spirit didn't infect on whom Hunter S. had an immense influence. He's the guy who made nihilism hip. He's the guy who taught a generation that the only thing you should believe is this: don't trust anyone who believes anything. He's the patron saint of journalism, whether journalists know it or not.Does anybody at ESPN proof Thompson? Is there an editor who receives his copy and says, "Abu Grahaib is worse than the Holocaust. Yeah, sports fans will love this!" Rush Limbaugh and Gregg Easterbrook were fired from ESPN last fall because of their excesses. It should be interesting to see if anything happens to Uncle Duke. UPDATE: And the Airbrush Award of the month goes to...ESPN. After the Drudge Report had a link to the article which contained the above quote, ESPN doctored it to now read: The long-dreaded 2004 Olympics in Greece will be the ultimate crossroads for sports and politics in this new and vicious century. The recent photos of cruelty at the Abu Grahaib all-american prison in Baghdad have taken care of that. Yes, sir. We have taken the bull by the horns on this one, sports fans. These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected. I have been in this business a long time and I have seen many staggering things, but this one is over the line. Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport.Gee, and I thought only the BBC airbrushed their stuff. ANOTHER UPDATE: Drudge is mentioning the airbrush, here. Drudge writes: But after being linked to the DRUDGE REPORT, a top editor demanded the sentence be immediately edited --without Thompson's okay, according to an ESPN.com staffer. "Hunter can go too far sometimes," the Bristol-based ESPN employee told the DRUDGE REPORT.Yes he can. So why aren't Thompson's excesses noticed before ESPN is deluged with email? Of course, as Drudge notes: As with the original, Thompson still concludes with the thought: "Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport."Why not move to France?
Posted
5/24/2004 01:21:14 PM
by Edward Driscoll
If you can't get upset with a film that crazily attacks the president and slanders the war effort, and makes wild accusations about the Bushes being tight with the bin Ladens, then you should take some outrage pills. Then there's all the liberal film critics. The same people who earlier this year sounded like a pack of anthropologists who miraculously all attended the crucifixion of Christ and became fiercely convinced that Mel Gibson is mangling history will now all treat Michael Moore like his documentaries aren't the slightest bit factually mangled.Well, this was the year that Hollywood honored Leni Riefenstahl at the Academy Awards. Sunday, May 23, 2004
Posted
5/23/2004 07:51:11 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/23/2004 05:35:36 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Saturday, May 22, 2004
Posted
5/22/2004 06:11:59 PM
by Edward Driscoll
if the thought of Pamela Anderson standing in for Ingrid Bergman turns your stomach, well, don't be too alarmed--her character is not the Ilsa Lund equivalent.As James Panero wrote, it's always worse than you think. Especially when it comes to Hollywood.
Posted
5/22/2004 05:29:20 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/22/2004 05:11:35 PM
by Edward Driscoll
On the radio, hyperbole and invective usually succeed only if they're funny - as they sometimes are on Franken and Limbaugh. With Rhodes, however, all you get is the same kind of flat pronouncements you could hear from a seventh-grader in Boulder: George Bush is "deaf, dumb and blind" and "stupid" and "an idiot" and people who vote for Bush are "morons" and "pathological." For someone with such a smug sense of intellectual superiority, Rhodes is remarkably ignorant. Monday, for example, brought the bizarre claim that United States bombed Dresden after the Germans had surrendered in World War II. Actually, the bombing was three months before the Germans surrendered.This sounds like it should be the subject of the next Michael Moore "documentary".
Posted
5/22/2004 03:30:06 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/22/2004 03:16:52 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/22/2004 02:20:11 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/22/2004 12:50:22 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Vann Nath reflects on the Party’s favoring the word "destruction" for its enemies, rather than "killing." He says: "If you think about the word ‘destruction’ it’s more than cruel. In the word ‘kill’ there still seems to be a moral aspect, but in ‘destruction’ there’s nothing human left. We become dust, just particles blowing in the wind." From the now-empty site of a mass grave where one of the guards explains how he killed the prisoners — by striking them from behind with an iron bar then cutting their throats and pushing them into the already-prepared grave where they died — to the final scene of the empty prison with the wind sweeping through it and blowing the dust about, the film dramatizes this observation. It never does answer the question, "Why?" No one ever really can. But it is hypnotically watchable.I wonder if John Kerry will be in the audience. Friday, May 21, 2004
Posted
5/21/2004 07:23:55 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/21/2004 07:11:52 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/21/2004 03:07:25 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/21/2004 02:38:11 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/21/2004 02:02:09 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/21/2004 01:55:17 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/21/2004 01:43:51 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/21/2004 12:47:13 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Posted
5/20/2004 05:03:39 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/20/2004 04:16:56 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/20/2004 03:23:03 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/20/2004 01:30:23 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/20/2004 01:31:17 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/20/2004 12:00:16 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
Posted
5/19/2004 11:52:00 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/19/2004 02:55:13 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/19/2004 02:26:47 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Couric contended that “most people, I think, on the street would say the media it tends, tend to be more liberal than conservative" and she proposed: “Aren't most people in journalism, primarily, except for say on Fox, and in certain conservative publications, aren't they for the most part, and of course the media is, are not monolithic, but pro-choice, you know, against prayer in school, probably favor affirmative action? I mean don't you think that's, that's fairly typical? And if so is it, why isn't it fair to say that liberals, sort of, are controlling the mainstream media?"Brent Baker writes, "A lot of journalists, who see no bias in any mainstream media outlet, are magically able to see bias on the Fox News Channel. Couric may be the first to recognize bias beyond FNC." Actually, there have been several other journalists who have gone on the record about media bias recently; something we discussed originally here, and then fleshed out in our interview with Bernard Goldberg, the man who helped to break the logjam.
Posted
5/19/2004 01:43:54 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/19/2004 01:41:13 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/19/2004 01:24:37 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/19/2004 12:50:27 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Posted
5/18/2004 10:24:12 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/18/2004 07:29:24 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/18/2004 06:51:09 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/18/2004 03:50:49 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/18/2004 02:55:02 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/18/2004 02:49:28 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/18/2004 02:38:25 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/18/2004 01:55:50 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/18/2004 10:44:16 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/18/2004 02:32:51 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Monday, May 17, 2004
Posted
5/17/2004 06:56:38 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/17/2004 03:50:02 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/17/2004 01:38:25 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Jude Law will play Sebastian. Notice how this report claims that Castle Howard, the setting of the 1981 series, "was considered too small by Hollywood standards." Nice.Castle Howard was also used as Castle Hackton in Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. I actually visited there in 2000--and it's enormous--both the castle and the estate that it's on. James Panero writes: I asked James Bowman if it is a Hollywood imperative that all great films be remade as bad films. Even 'Psycho,' he pointed out, was redone--but not yet "Casablanca." Which leads me to wonder, is it only a matter of time before we get "Casablanca, The Reckoning... because, this time, it's personal"?Does the TV series that starred David Soul as Rick, and Hector Elizondo as Louis Renault count? It had a mercifully brief run in 1983, but still, it demonstrated the sheer hubris of trying to remake one of the great films of all time. On the other hand: Citizen Kane II: The Wrath of Susan Alexander has yet to be made. But give 'em time...
Posted
5/17/2004 11:38:07 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/17/2004 11:36:48 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/17/2004 12:53:11 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Sunday, May 16, 2004
Posted
5/16/2004 05:50:35 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Saturday, May 15, 2004
Posted
5/15/2004 02:49:38 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Friday, May 14, 2004
Posted
5/14/2004 11:09:42 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/14/2004 09:12:30 PM
by Edward Driscoll
I would like to know if any of these torturers is actually in Abu Ghraib right now. Let's hope they were not among those let out. I also would like to know what Senator Kennedy has to say about the moral equivalence of our actions after watching these tapes. And finally, I would like to know why it took so long for these to come out.All good questions. But don't look for the press to question Ted anytime soon about his recent statements anytime soon.
Posted
5/14/2004 08:55:08 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/14/2004 04:44:15 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/14/2004 04:05:01 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Take a look at Time magazine's cover this week. It features an artist's rendering of one of the photographs from Abu Ghraib with the line: "Iraq: How Did It Come to This?" "It" didn't come to "this." "It" is a war to liberate 25 million people and rout Islamic extremists, terrorists and those who thirst for the mass murder of Americans. "This" was an aberrancy that was stopped almost five months ago, when the revelations at Abu Ghraib led to investigations, arrests and the wholesale reinvention of the Iraq prison system. Time's cover line is a vile and grotesque slander against every American in uniform in Iraq. It remains the case, more than two weeks after the public exposure of the Abu Ghraib photographs, that not a single digital photo showing mistreatment has emerged from another cellblock at that self-same prison, or from any of the other 24 prisons in Iraq. Indeed, every photograph shown to U.S. senators yesterday is part of the same set of pictures featuring the same eight dirtbags. The scandal isn't widening. If anything, it's contracting. The focus continues to zoom in on the actual people in the pictures and their disgusting conduct in them. And yet Teddy Kennedy, a man who once let a woman die, feels free to speak the following unspeakable words: "We now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management." The United States is, according to the man in whose car Mary Jo Kopechne drowned, no better than the regime of Saddam Hussein. Teddy Kennedy isn't just some outlier. Teddy Kennedy is the chief surrogate of the Democratic candidate for president of the United States and a lionized figure - so lionized that a worshipful profile of him published in Boston magazine won a major journalism award last year. So let's be clear what's going on here. As we speak, 138,000 Americans are serving under dangerous conditions in Iraq. And our forces in Karbala are fighting against the goons and thugs of Muqtada al-Sadr with some success. They're risking their lives for freedom and honor and duty and love of country. And conventional liberal opinion wants them to lose.Back in December, Charles Johnson wrote: Am I the only one who thinks it's more than a little weird that TIME Magazine names "The American Soldier" as their "Person of the Year," only days after publishing a story by a TIME reporter who's hangin' out with the mujahideen trying to kill that same "Person of the Year?"Linking to Johnson's post, I wrote, "Pick a side boys, so the readers know where you stand". Looks like they have.
Posted
5/14/2004 11:04:17 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Drudge (linking Media Life Magazine) is telling us the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times are locked in mortal combat to see who will own the suddenly important Graydon Carter Story. Vanity Fair editor Carter, whose magazine features movieland coverage, has evidently been profiteering off his cozy Hollywood ties, even to the tune of an alleged hundred grand 'consulting fee' from Universal. Creepy, I guess, and unethical... but these same papers don't seem too concerned that the Wall Street Journal and the 'lowly' tabloid New York Post own the UN Oil-for-Food Scandal. Why is that, one wonders, when surely the latter story is vastly more important to the current world situation and to how the international community could conceivably go forward? Yet they seem content to be Missing-in-Action on that. It would be interesting to know how many reporters the two papers have assigned to both stories and hear an explanation of why.I suspect that Simon knows exactly why the Graydon Carter story is getting more ink: it's got more sex appeal. And it involves "killing their own". As Woody Allen once said, "intellectuals are just like the Mafia--they only kill their own". The media works much the same way: they love to see one of their peers take a fall. Most importantly, Hollywood and journalistic corruption is nothing new. But if you're a liberal journalist, to believe that the UN is corrupt is to change a worldview you may have held since childhood that the UN is a benign organization full of wonderful humanitarians that helps keep the peace and keeps the "evil" United States in check. And if that's no longer true, then all of those bad things that conservatives have been saying about the UN...may be true! And that can't be possible. Maybe Stefan Sharkansky is right--this is the week the media jumped the shark. UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds reminds us that UNSCAM isn't the only scandal in town among global elites.
Posted
5/14/2004 10:13:55 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Thursday, May 13, 2004
Posted
5/13/2004 08:52:53 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/13/2004 02:11:50 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/13/2004 12:38:12 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/13/2004 11:13:06 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/13/2004 11:10:14 AM
by Edward Driscoll
It doesn't matter what the killers knew. They could put in the story, "Berg was Jewish, and it is uncertain whether his killers knew that." Simple as that. No bias one way or the other. To excuse the *media* for not knowing he was Jewish is ridiculous though. They're reporters. It's their job to find things out. How hard is it to find out someone's religion? Obituary writers do it all the time. The media's theme for this story has been "revenge for Abu Graihb". If they report that he was Jewish, then the theme might become "racists terrorists brutally murder Jewish American". Is that the media's motivation for not reporting something as important as someone's religious identity? I don't know. And I'll say that.Questioning the media's motivation is always a good thing. In a link-filled post titled, "Why The Big Media Continue To Lose Their Audience", Glenn Reynolds writes, "big media leaders seem almost desperate to keep the story on Abu Ghraib" But on the Internet, "where users set the agenda, not Big Media editors and producers, it's different". And Nick Berg is the story, as well it should be. Wednesday, May 12, 2004
Posted
5/12/2004 08:51:53 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/12/2004 06:24:38 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
5/12/2004 06:13:08 PM
by Edward Driscoll
In 1969, Buzz Aldrin took a portable tape player up there with him, and “Fly Me To The Moon” became the first moon song to get to the moon itself. “The first music played on the moon,” said Quincy Jones [who arranged Sinatra's definitive version]. “I freaked.”Steyn adds: Had any other nation beaten NASA to it, they’d have marked the occasion with the “Ode To Joy” or Also Sprach Zarathustra, something grand and formal. But there’s something very American about Buzz Aldrin standing on the surface of the moon with his cassette machine.Exactly.
Posted
5/12/2004 12:15:44 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Does America have the "right to know," to see every image of smiling American morons at Abu Ghraib? To see every image of the horrors of the war? Contrary to what they might say on the chat-show circuit, the media themselves do not have an absolute position on that. Look no further than March 31, when a vicious mob shot four American contractors, mutilated them, burned their corpses, dragged them through the streets, and hung body parts from bridges. Like the prisoner-abuse story, this was the ugliness, the horror of war. But in this case, most in the media determined the public did not have a right to see the pictures. Notice the great irony behind the Abu Ghraib pictures. Because they are less graphic and disturbing, since the prisoners are being humiliated, and not killed, they are more acceptable for airing, and then more acceptable for complete over-airing. The end result is that Americans are inundated with visuals of injustices committed by Americans, and lost is the reality of far graver and more frequent atrocities committed against Americans. Reality gives way to the perception of reality, all in the name of "news." [Emphasis mine--Ed] Now, the media elite are showing us the most remembered gloomy images of Vietnam, the war America lost when Americans lost heart. By putting those Iraq pictures next to these, the media are vying for similar results. If not, why make all the comparisons? Why are our media taking sexual humiliation and comparing it to the Kent State shootings, or more outrageously, the mass murder at My Lai? Do they have no ability to distinguish between these, or do the ends justify the means, with one image just as good as the next one?It certainly fits the profile of why they justified running footage of Fallujah in March, but not of the 9/11 attacks by Al Qaida on our own soil. Or as Glenn Reynolds writes, the media's viewpoint is that "Publishing images that might inflame Arabs against Americans is responsible journalism. So is not publishing images that might inflame Americans against Arabs." Nicholas Berg's killers directly cited the images from Abu Ghraib as their justification for beheading them. I wonder if the media feels complicit. Well, actually, I don't. UPDATE: Speaking of damage overdrive, one of Steve Green's readers emailed to tell him: The Berg family was sandbagged in their grief by an AP reporter who told them for the first time that their family member had been decapitated and the video of the murder was online. An AP photographer was on hand to record the family's response. The father collapsed on the sidewalk in tears.Green has contact info for AP, for those who like to discuss this example of fine quality journalism with them.
Posted
5/12/2004 10:34:39 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
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