POSEUR ALERT: Ever since The Digital Bits DVD review site started linking to Matt Rowe's Music Tap Website, I've enjoyed its coverage of new CD, DVD-A and music-oriented DVD releases. But this review of a new version of John Lennon's Imagine album, released on CD by Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs, shows the typical, and very silly reaction that so many have towards its title song:

The tremor felt around the world on the eve of John Lennon's murder was that of John turning into the demigod that he has since become. That has accelerated throughout the decades since his death culminating in a reverence for his body of work that encompasses not only his Beatles production and everything that he brought to them but also, his solo work. None of those works shine more brilliantly than his Imagine.

Imagine is home to his most well known composition, the song that represents not only his entire output but also the cosmic sphere of that strange and elusive force known universally as peace. Peace was something that Lennon actually believed could be effected in his lifetime. Little would he know that the very anti-thesis of peace would be his demise.

First of all, there was no tremor "felt around the world on the eve of John Lennon's murder". There was a certain amount of disappointment towards John's 1980 comeback album, which combined mildly interesting songs like the vaguely Elvis-sounding "Starting Over" with a collection of typically horrid Yoko Ono tunes. But believe me, the Monday of his murder was a very typical day, capped by a very typical Monday Night Football game featuring the Dolphins and Patriots, where Howard Cosell broke the news to many viewers (including myself) that Lennon was shot.

Second, in 1980, with the Soviet Union trying to invade Afghanistan, and plotting to then introduce communism to Central America, while the Ayatollah Khomeini was holding Americans hostage in Iran, and an American economy in the midst of the worst economy in 50 years (to coin a phrase), peace was a long way away--and freedom for much of the world an even more difficult task. (Why is it that the left loves the idea of peace, but doesn't seem to understand that freedom is even more important?) It would take somebody who understood that peace through strength, not peace through surrender and passivity, was the only possible way to achieving those goals.

Meanwhile, Lennon's song "Imagine", while containing a nice melody and backing music, is grossly overrated by a left, which 30 years after its recording, no longer believes many of its key lines about a color-blind society. as Thomas Hibbs wrote, a few weeks after 9/11:

For all the calls to embrace difference, the song that has emerged as the post-Sept. 11 anthem of the rock community is John Lennon's "Imagine," a song that imagines all difference away. Thus does current rock oscillate between two extremes, neither of which is much help in thinking through our current crisis. Admittedly, Lennon's song is not so much about practical politics as it is about an inspiring and hopeful ideal of peace. But how, one cannot help but ask, are we to imagine the road toward this world beyond all national and religious differences, beyond possessions, with nothing "to kill or die for," where we all live in the moment? Clearly not by the old religious answer, which has to do with God's decisive and transforming intervention into history. Instead, "Imagine" is a sophisticated advertising jingle for Communism. In what it fails to say and especially in its hypnotic and placid melody, "Imagine" is a deeply dishonest song. Tracy Chapman's "Talkin' 'Bout a Revolution," with its warning that "poor people are going to rise up and take what's theirs" is more honest about the violence necessary for revolution. If we must have Lennon, let's at least have him as part of the Beatles, whose wry and ambivalent "Revolution" is superior to anything Lennon produced as a soloist.

I love many of Lennon's compositions with the Beatles, and even a few of his less political solo songs, but worshiping "Imagine" (the song, less so the album as a whole), is a sign of a skull full of mush of proportions that would make Professor Kingsfield want to hit the thinker on the hands--or maybe the head--with a ruler moving at warp speed.

But that shouldn't be taken as a slam against the rest of Rowe's site. He does a thorough job of reviewing new music releases. He just needs to be careful when it comes to thinking through his hero worship.

And to be fair, he might very well say the same about me, as well.

One more thing: it's curious to see that Lennon's widow Yoko, who watched her husband die a bloody and violent death, seems to have moved beyond the idea of non-violence and peace through submission.

At least as it applies to suicide bombing enemies of Israel, of course.

UPDATE (10/18/03): I was way too harsh on Rowe, who's actually a very reasonable fellow.

THE MOOCH WAS JUST THE BEGINNING: Having gotten Steve Mariucci removed as head coach for the '49ers, wide receiver Terrell Owens (he of the infamous Sharpie incident) now appears to be hunting for additional game: quarterback Chris Garcia, and Mariucci's replacement, Dennis Erickson.

The San Jose Mercury's Skip Bayless blasts Owens in his latest column.

This Sunday, Mariucci's Lions face his old team in San Francisco. If the Niners' losing streak continues, watch for this soap opera to get even uglier.

POT MEET KETTLE: USA Today reports, "Davis camp accuses Schwarzenegger campaign of 'dirty tricks'".

If you know anything about California politics, just roll that headline around in your head for a few times to get a sense of how unbelievably ironic it is--even without the delicious use of quotations around "dirty tricks" by USA Today's headline writer.

Which is making me start to believe that maybe the polls showing Schwarzenegger in the lead are right.

OP-ED SHOVING MATCH: Donald Luskin explains why having David Brooks at The Times is a very, very good thing.

Unless your name happens to be Paul Krugman, of course.

ELIA KAZAN DIED SATURDAY at age 94. As Orrin Judd writes, he brought the light of scrutiny to Hollywood in the 1950s.

DICHOTOMY: David Frum looks at Edward Said:

Said served for many years on the Palestinian National Council – the theoretical government of the Palestinian national movement. As such, he was at least formally implicated in Yasser Arafat’s three-decade-long terrorist crime spree. Nor did Said flinch from his responsibility: He may not have liked Arafat much as a man or leader, but he excused and condoned Arafat’s atrocities. Yet ironically, the same Islamic intolerance that has unsuccessfully sought since 1948 to drive the Jews out of Israel lay at the foundation of the larger campaign to drive Christians like the Said family out of the whole Middle East. The thugs and murderers to whom this embittered exile lent his strength were the same thugs and murderers who had exiled him in the first place. And the only people in the region who championed the humane, liberal, and democratic values that Said praised but did not practice were the very Israelis to whose extermination he sacrificed both his vocation and his integrity.

NOT SOFTENING: Despite Amina Lawal being acquitted of a death sentence last week, extreme Islamic-law (sharia) punishments live on in Africa, writes Paul Marshall.

EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED: Steve Spurrier goes conservative. Bill Parcells gets radical.

Both are big winners in the NFC North this week.

END RUN: John Leo writes about one-sided and flawed reporting by big media on Iraq, and the efforts of Bloggers and military personel to counteract things.

Leo has a quote from Senior Chief Petty Officer Art Messer of the Navy Seabees that puts everything in Iraq into a perspective not typically found in big media coverage:

"The countryside is getting more safe by the day despite all the attacks you are hearing about. Imagine if every shooting incident or robbery committed in Los Angeles was blown out of proportion."

CLARK: Day By Day has a new slogan for his campaign...

UPDATE: And Ronald Bailey has discovered an apt comparison for Clark, as well.

One gets the feeling that Ike isn't looking down and worrying about his place in history being usurped.

AN AUTHOR SO GOOD, I MARRIED HER! My wife has an essay in Tech Central Station on the joys of GPS.

LATTE TOWN REVISITED: Jonah Goldberg visits Burlington, Vermont, and unlike David Brooks, does not like what he sees.

"BETTER, FASTER, CHEAPER--pick any two": Stephen Den Beste has a long, detailed post on the end of NASA's Galileo probe.

EXPECT THE EXPECTED: Cris Carter writes that many desperate NFL teams will fall again tomorrow.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER WRITES that Ted Kennedy is losing it.

GEORGE PLIMPTON, the great Paper Lion author, passed away yesterday at age 76.

Plimpton has written lots of other great books of course. He also edited a superb collection of essays and reminisces on Truman Capote, which is also well worth seeking out, if only to see brilliant editing in action, forming and shaping what could otherwise be an amorphous collection of material.

UPDATE (9/29/03): In a nice (if obviously unintended) capstone to a wonderful career, Plimpton joined a reunion of the team he commemorated--and played for--in Paper Lion less than a week before he died.

"GODS THAT FAIL": "Dr. Manhattan" writes about Edward Said, who died this week at age 67.

See also this essay from February 2002 by Jonah Goldberg on the book that put Said on the academic map, Orientalism.

DOES THE LEFT HAVE A PATRIOTISM PERSECUTION COMPLEX? John Hawkins has some thoughts on the subject.

HAS CRUZ CRASHED? Is Bustamante a bust? There's no end to the silly headlines, but the Brothers Judd have some serious thoughts (and links) on the state of his campaign.

IS THERE A NEW ALBUM IN THE WORKS BY THE WHO (or at least by Pete Townshend and Roger Daltry, their two surviving members)? Blogcritics has the details on what's new with the Who.

NO SEX PLEASE MORE PENICILLIN PLEASE, WE'RE BRITISH: This is London reports, "Huge rise in sex diseases".

BLOWOUT: Did anybody see the Raiders get their black and silver butts handed to them last night? Shanahan seemed to have his Broncos totally prepared, both in terms of "strategery" and in terms of having them completely geeked up to play the hated Raiders.

The Raiders' win last year against the Broncos on Monday Night Football set them on a run towards the Super Bowl. It will be interesting to see if they can rebound from yesterday.

UPDATE: Skip Bayless writes, "It's way too early to write off the Raiders. But it isn't too soon to wonder in print if Rich Gannon has gone Kurt Warner."

"BLEAK" RAISES: Virginia Postrel notes that economic writers reporting "bleak" pay raises seem to have forgotten how inflation works--and how it influences pay raises.

GORDON JUMP DIED: A terrific actor who's best known for being Arthur "Big Guy" Carlson on WKRP In Cincinnati and for being the lonely Maytag repairman in their long-running series of commercials passed away at age 71. Orrin Judd has some thoughts and memories, including what may be one of the great lines ever on a TV sitcom, delivered by Jump.

LOST BIRTHRIGHT: Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal explains why angry Democrats "hate Bush as much as Republicans once hated FDR".

ON AGAIN, FOR NOW: AP reports that the 11-member panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the California recall for October 7th.

But will the ACLU appeal to the Supremes?

UPDATE: Lawrence Solum writes, "For all intents and purposes, it seems highly likely that the legal challenge to the recall election is over". Hope he's right.

ANOTHER UPDATE: "the American Civil Liberties Union said it would not appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, removing the final legal roadblock to the election just two weeks away".

Showtime, folks!

YET ANOTHER (and possibly final) UPDATE: Heh.

CLARK NEVER CALLED KARL: Matthew Continetti writes, "Wesley Clark says he would have been a Republican if Karl Rove had returned his phone calls. White House phone logs suggest otherwise".

THE CYNICISM OF HOWARD DEAN: Writing in National Review Online, John J. Pitney Jr. has some thoughts.

THE CYNICISM BEHIND CLARK: Andrew Sullivan has some thoughts. He also links to Clark's "Issues" page.

(Note: I hate to spoil the punchline, but as of the time of this post, the issues page currently says, "Coming Soon". Watch for it to be updated or deleted as a result of the heavy traffic from Sullivan's site.)

UPDATE (5:53 PM 9/23/03): Drudge has linked to Dean's empty issues page as well, thus ensuring it will be updated and deleted very quickly.

AMERICA'S MUSLIM BACKLASH: This incident, combined with this one, are very, very worrisome events. How does the Army screen its recruits for militant islamofascists, without upsetting the PC crowd, who (to coin a phrase) already loathe the military?

UPDATE (9/23/03): More Muslim problems for the military at Gitmo.

BRITAIN'S MUSLIM BACKLASH: Virginia Postrel has some thoughts.

SAY HELLLLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND! Roger Ebert looks at Scarface, 20 years after its initial release.

IS SUPERMAN PRO-SADDAM? Brent Bozell on the left's infiltration of the comic book world.

(Here's a thought--somebody should update Bill Buckley's first book, and write about "God and Superman at DC". On second thought, maybe not.)

PAUL KRUGMAN IS AN ANGRY MAN, according to Bruce Bartlett, who writes that Krugman is unhappy with supply side economics, largely because it was built on necessity, not ivory tower theories.

How? Read the whole thing.

There was a classic "Derek and Clive" sketch by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, that went something like this:

Cook: I was against it, you know.
Moore: Against what?
Cook: The Second World War.
Moore: Well, I think everyone was against the Second World War!
Cook: Yes, but I wrote a Letter!

CALLING OCCUPANTS OF INTERPLANETARY CRAFT: Federation High Commissioner Gray Davis is proud of the "people from every planet" that make up the great state of California.

Hey, didn't Davis make sport of someone else's verbal skills just a week or so ago...?

Contrary to popular opinion, I don't completely wallow in nostalgia--there's a lot about today's society that I like. But it's tough not to feel that we've lost a fair amount of civility, when comparing this essay on Manhattan in 1939 (linked to by James Lileks) with this recent article in the Wall Street Journal on today's fashions--or lack thereof.

The 1980s rediscovered fashion to a certain extent. As Lileks once described it people temporarily threw off their beat 1970s Army surplus olive drab Vietnam-protesting jackets and decided to look sharp.

Will it happen again? Hope springs eternal, but its arteries (at least around here) are definitely feeling sclerosed these days.

Ironically, America has lost its sense of fashion, just as it's become obsessed with design aesthetic. But how do you abandon personal aesthetics, and insist on good design in inanimate objects?

READ THE WHOLE THING: Lileks is spot-on. As usual.

(Hopefully I'll have posts with more than ten words in them on Thursday. But in the meantime, do click on over and read James Lileks.)

BACK FROM ROOT CANAL: Hopefully more posts later, as my mouth and brain become less numb.

POLITICAL VIRILITY: Jay Nordlinger on "the Daddy Party".

CRUISING PAST CRUZ'S RACIAL CONTROVERSIES: Tim Graham has more on MEChA, Bustamante, and the scandal that the "vast right wing" media (just ask the two Als, Gore and Franken!) refuses to investigate.

"THE WHITE ZONE IS FOR LOADING": Man oh Manischewitz--all of a sudden, San Jose Airport looks pretty darn good!

THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE PAGE: John Hawkins asked 125 right-of-center bloggers who their favorite editorial columnists are. 37 responded.

Here's the list.

KISS OF DEATH: Retired General Wesley Clark has entered the presidential race.

He's already gotten his first endorsement.

He's toast.

UPDATE: Here's David Frum's take on Clark.

FREE TO CHOOSE: John Hawkins has an exclusive interview with the great Milton Friedman.

"POLITICAL FEVERS ARE A DANGEROUS THING": Charles Krauthammer has some thoughts on what makes the Bush haters so mad.

MEDIA ROUNDUP: Charles Johnson has another example of anti-Israeli bias at AP. And, Glenn Reynolds has a photograph which is the virtual definition of "manufacturing dissent".

Meanwhile, CNN's Christiane Amanpour claims that in the run-up to the war in Iraq, "the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled," she said. "I'm sorry to say that, but certainly television and, perhaps, to a certain extent, my station, was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News."

Of course, what Amanpour doesn't say (and apparently was never asked), is that Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news executive admitted that he was willing to be literally intimated by Saddam Hussein and his foot soldiers, and presented radically slanted, pro-Baathist coverage, in order to say to put those magic words, "live from Baghdad" on the screen.

A spokeswoman from Fox News puts has the last word: "It's better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than spokeswoman for al-Qaeda."

Or Saddam Hussein.

UPDATE: To coin a phrase--heh.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Upon returning from a visit to Iraq, Federal Judge Don Walter writes:

We must have the moral courage to see this through, to do whatever it takes to secure responsible government for the Iraqi people. Having decided to topple Saddam, we cannot abandon those who trust us. I fear we will quit as the horrors of war come into our living rooms. Look at the stories you are getting from the media today. The steady drip, drip, drip of bad news may destroy our will to fulfill the obligations we have assumed. WE ARE NOT GETTING THE WHOLE TRUTH FROM THE NEWS MEDIA. The news you watch, listen to and read is highly selective. Good news doesn't sell.

ONE MORE MEDIA UPDATE: Brent Bozell wants to know why the media aren't asking Bill and Hillary about why they didn't do more to prevent 9/11.

QUICK QUESTION: How does anyone with a conscious say that she's been "muzzled" by a rival TV network, when the network she works for admitted that they aided a despot who thought nothing of literally cutting the tongues off of those who opposed his regime?

POSTREL ON TELLER: Last week we had a brief post on the death of Edward Teller. Virginia Postrel has a detailed memoriam, with several links.

THE DOWD AWARD: Andrew Sullivan has a new award category, and a very appropriate first nominee to break it in.

UPDATE (9/16/03): Sullivan writes that "The Post comes through" with a correction to his Dowd Award nominee. "Good for the Post. The New York Times is, apparently, too wedded to Maureen Dowd's ego to do the same thing".

THE IRAQI/AL QAIDA WTC BOMBING CONNECTION: John Hawkins (and Dick Cheney) have details.

WOODWARD & BERNSTEIN, THE NEXT GENERATION: Jacob Sullum has a brief post on Reason's "Hit & Run" Blog about "the aptly named Michael Puffer, an intrepid investigative reporter for the Danvers, Massachusetts, Herald".

Puffer practices hard-hitting investigative journalism at its very, very finest. As Sullum writes, "It makes you proud to be a journalist".

Indeed.

CALIFORNIA RECALL RECALLED: InstaPundit and National Review Online's "The Corner" has links and opinion. For the Corner, start here and read up.

UPDATE: Glenn predicts, "Unless there's some awfully compelling legal principle that's not making it into the press accounts, I predict a reversal on this one. It's just too explosive."

If the US Supreme Court overturns the 9th Circuit, and if Arnold or McClintock wins, it's an extremely safe bet that we'll have the tinfoil hat wearing folks on the left making the same arguments they made after the US Supreme Court overturned the rogue Florida Supremes, something along the lines of, "Bush (or "The Republicans" or "the conservative Supreme Court", or whatever their epithet for the right is) rigged the recall! It's a conspiracy!"

And I'll bet the judges on the 9th Circuit know full that's what will happen. For them, it's win-win: If Davis stays in power a few more months, or the election is held in October and Bustamante wins, great. Election held in October and Schwarzenegger wins? It's the eeeeeeevil Republican Supreme Court's fault!

UPDATE: Here's a solution that's so obvious, and so simple, it doesn't have a prayer of being implemented.

ANYONE...ANYWHERE: Mark Steyn has some thoughts on the death of Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh:

"It's terrible wherever it happens," said Fredrik Sanabria. "But you think you would be safe from this kind of violence in a country like Sweden."

Really? Why would you think that? Sweden's violent crime and murder rates have been going up, up, up over the last quarter-century. But just about every Swede quoted in every news story seems mired in what National Review's Dave Kopel described, after September 11, 2001, as "the culture of passivity." The lone exception was Lanja Rashid, a Kurdish immigrant. "If I had been there at the stabbing, I would have ripped his face off," she said. "We Swedes have to think again. How could he have got away? How could people just stand back and watch?"

You can blame it on a lack of police, as everyone's doing. But Mrs. Lindh's killer didn't get away with it because of the people who weren't there but because of the people who were: The bystanders. When I bought my home in New Hampshire, I heard a strange rustling one night and, being new to rural life, asked my police chief the following morning whether, if it had turned out to be an intruder, I should have called him at home. "Well, you could," said Al. "But it would be better if you dealt with him. You're there and I'm not." That's the best advice I've ever been given.

This isn't an argument for guns, though inevitably Sweden has gun control, knife control and everything else. It's more basic than that: It's about the will to be a citizen, not just a suckling of the nanny-state narcotic.

Roger Ebert has a perceptive retrospective of Leni Riefenstahl, drawing upon his 1994 review of the documentary, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.

Ebert appropriately excoriates Riefenstahl for being a Nazi sympathizer. But how many Soviet filmmakers are still praised to this day by film scholars, even though their works, while fictional, were propaganda to the Soviet Union? Is it simply because Sergei Eisenstein (to name one example) created fiction, whereas Riefenstahl was a documentarian?

It's been frequently noted that a huge mistake on our part was not holding Nuremberg-like trials for the apparatchiks and party members of the Soviet Union after the Cold War ended. This is yet another example of how a lack of recorded judgment continues to create an unnecessary double standard when it comes to two equally evil empires of the 20th century.

Update: Ebert's piece on Riefenstahl has since scrolled off the Sun-Times' site, but is currently available here.

$430,000: That's how much George Harrison's rosewood Telecaster, custom made by Fender as a gift for using Fender equipment (and boosting Fender's sales in the process of course), fetched in auction on Saturday.

This was the guitar that Harrison played in the Beatles' last concert, on the rooftop of Apple's offices on Savile Row in London, in what would be the climax of their last movie, Let It Be, so it's no surprise it fetched a considerable chunk of change.

UPDATE: In other Beatles-related news, Yoko Ono has gone on record for being a fan of Rachel Corrie, the American flag burning, Palestinian sympathizer killed by an Israeli bulldozer. Charles Johnson writes:

I don't think the man who wrote "if you go carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow" would have approved of his wife slobbering over the hate-filled terrorist supporter who did this:

[Johnson follows with the infamous photo of Corrie feverishly burning an American flag.]

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: This quote by Yoko in Johnson's post speaks volumes of her priorities:

The events that have occured since 9-11 have made me terribly vulnerable, as if the slightest breeze could make me cry. (Emphasis mine.)

IRONY CAN BE PRETTY IRONIC SOMETIMES DEPARTMENT: KTVU, channel 2 in the Bay Area, just advertised their California gubernatorial recall coverage during the 49ers/Rams game. They're calling it "Race to the Recall".

No word yet on what Cruz Bustamante thinks of that name.

SUE ME, SUE YOU BLUES: The Beatles' Apple label is suing Apple Computer's iTunes in a trademark suit.

Reuters reports that The Beatles' Apple "did not elaborate on the penalties it is seeking, but said the computer maker violated a 1991 agreement specifying that it could use the Apple trademark for computer products only."

INDIANA'S GOVERNOR DEAD: Democrat Frank O'Bannon was 73.

THE ACCIDENTAL RADICAL: Just added Jonathan Rauch's "Accidental Radical" essay to the "Internet's Greatest Hits" section of our links page, which is basically a collection of essays, both humorous and serious, that I've referred back to on numerous occasions.

Rauch's essay does a brilliant job of explaining the "strategery" and the seemingly contradictory strains of the Bush administration, and placing them in perspective. Needless to say, it's well worth reading.

LOOK HOW FAR WE HAVEN'T COME: Pejman Yousefzadeh has a photograph taken ten years ago today that, as he writes, "used to symbolize hope. Now, it just looks ridiculous".

UPDATE: David Frum writes, "Here’s a question: Why is there still a Palestinian Authority?"

SUSPECTED ECO-TERRORIST ARRESTED, according to AP, which reports:

A 25-year-old man was arrested Friday by FBI agents for investigation of arson and vandalism that caused $1 million in damages last month at a Hummer dealership, police said.

Joshua Thomas Connole, of Pomona, was arrested at home about 12:30 a.m., said Cpl. Rudy Lopez, a West Covina police spokesman.

Connole's roommate, Emily Lutz, 25, said he was a peace activist who has protested the war in Iraq and actions of the Bush administration.

She told the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin in Saturday's newspaper that Connole and Lutz belonged to the Regen Co-op, a housing cooperative.

"There are about a dozen of us who live together, and we're trying to promote communal living, environmental sustainability and social justice," she said. "We do demonstrations, we have workshops, we attend informational meetings and we attend protests."

THE JESSE JACKSON, NORMA DESMOND CONNECTION explored by Shelby Steele in a devastating essay in the Wall Street Journal.

Read the whole thing.

ORWELL'S LIST: Timothy Garton Ash writes about George Orwell's 1949 list of 38 writers and journalists, whom Orwell had concluded "are crypto-communists, fellow-travellers or inclined that way and should not be trusted as propagandists." Ash writes:

In February 1949, George Orwell was lying in a sanatorium in the Cotswolds, very ill with the TB that would kill him within a year. That winter, he had worn himself out in a last effort to retype the whole manuscript of 1984, his bleak warning of what might happen if Britain succumbed to totalitarianism. He was lonely, despairing of his own wasted health, at the age of just forty-five, and deeply pessimistic about the advance of Russian communism, whose cruelty and treacherousness he had personally experienced, nearly at the cost of his own life in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. The communists had just taken over Czechoslovakia, in the Prague coup of February 1948, and they were now blockading West Berlin, trying to strangle the city into submission.

He thought there was a war on, a "cold war," and he feared that the Western nations were losing it. One reason we were losing, he thought, was that public opinion had been blinded to the true nature of Soviet communism. In part, this blinding was the product of understandable gratitude for the Soviet Union's immense role in defeating Nazism. However, it was also the work of a poisonous array of naive and sentimental admirers of the Soviet system, declared Communist Party (CP) members, covert ("crypto-") communists, and paid Soviet spies. It was these people, he suspected, who had made it so difficult for him to get his anti-Soviet fable Animal Farm published in the last year of the last war.

(Link via Reason's "Hit & Run" Blog.)

STANLEY CROUCH, writing in the New York Daily News, says "Only wartime tactics will secure U.S. now".

Since you're reading our Website, your first reaction is likely to be some variation on "Duh!". (Picture a headline like that in 1943 London. Pretty difficult to imagine, huh?) But unfortunately, Crouch's opinion is one that is all too rarely heard in the Big Apple's newspapers, with the exception of The Post.

THE REUTERS CANDIDATE: Reading between the lines, you just know that Howard Dean really digs the Hamas:

Dean has been under fire for suggesting the United States should not take sides in the Middle East conflict and Israel should get out of disputed territories of the West Bank. While he has insisted that he backs U.S. policy supporting Israel, statements made on Wednesday about Hamas raise new questions.

"There is a war going on in the Middle East, and members of Hamas are soldiers in that war," Dean said Wednesday.

Dean condemned terrorism but his description of Hamas--designated by the United States as a terrorist group--as "soldiers in a war" conflicts with U.S. policy. The European Union also approved last week the designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization.

UPDATE: In a related article, Jim Geraghty asks, "Will campaigning Democrats talk about terrorism beyond this week"?

UPDATE: Charles Johnson and the readers of Little Green Footballs have some thoughts on Dean's statement.

REUTERS: Ricki Hollander asks, is it a "news agency or political advocacy group", when it comes to the Middle East?

Regular readers of this Blog should know by now what we think about that topic.

THE MAN IN BLACK: Johnny Cash dies as well, at age 71.

OCTOBER 31st WILL BE the last flight of the Concorde. Forbes has details.

JOHN RITTER DEAD AT AGE 54: Ironically, as I posted on Monday, I saw him the day before at Disneyland. The Washington Post article doesn't give any details about how he died, but he didn't appear in ill-health there. I only glanced up at the Jumbotron, but he certainly looked and sounded like the same old John Ritter.

I hated Three's Company, but Ritter appeared to be a genuinely nice guy--and of course, his father was a legend in country music.

UPDATE: Apparently, Ritter died of a massive heart attack after taping the most recent episode of 8 Simple Rules for Dating my Teenage Daughter, his ABC comedy series.

THE PHONE CALL: Reading the chats that John Hawkins found (see post directly below this one), brought back to me how 9/11 started for Nina and I, with "a sudden Proustian rush", as Woody Allen once quipped. At about 6:45 am that terrible day, when we were both still fast asleep, the phone rang. A friend of ours from England (who would later become known to many of you as "Group Captain Mandrake") was on the other end calling from England, where it was 2:45 in the afternoon:

GC: Sorry to wake you up at this time.
Nina: [yawning] Hi, what's up?
GC: Turn on your TV.
Nina: What station?
GC: Any station, it doesn't matter!

COMMENTS FROM 9/11, AS IT HAPPENED, via John Hawkins.

FINAL INSTRUCTIONS: Charles Johnson links to Mohammed Atta's final instructions--an astonishing perversion of religion.

READ THE WHOLE THING: Victor Davis Hanson on "The Great Divide".

James Taranto writes:

"Everything may have changed on Sept. 11 two years ago, but not necessarily in the ways one would have expected. American politics is the most striking case in point. Given the bipartisan unity that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on America, one had reason to hope for a revival of the early Cold War adage that 'politics stops at the water's edge.' And indeed, except for the lunatic fringes of the Democratic left, this seemed to be the case for better than a year after the attack.

The turning point seems to have been the 2002 election. Having lost control of the Senate, the Democrats lost control of themselves. The party is now dominated by 21st-century Copperheads who exult in every setback and refuse to acknowledge any success--all because they have convinced themselves that it is the 'Bush administration,' rather than their country, that is fighting the war."

Two years later I take a certain grim comfort in some people’s disinterest in the war; if you’d told me two years ago that people would be piling on the President and bitching about slow progress in Iraq, I would have known in a second that the nation hadn’t suffered another attack. When the precise location of Madonna’s tongue is big news, you can bet the hospitals aren’t full of smallpox victims. Of course some people are impatient with those who still recall the shock of 9/11; the same people were crowding the message boards of internet sites on the afternoon of the attacks, eager to blame everyone but the hijackers. They hate this nation. In their hearts, they hate humanity. They would rather cheer the perfect devils than come to the aid of a compromised angel. They can talk for hours about how wrong it was to kill babies, busboys, businessmen, receptionists, janitors, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers - and then they lean towards you, eyes wide, and they say the fatal word:

But.

And then you realize that the eulogy is just a preface. All that concern for the dead is nothing more than the knuckle-cracking of an organist who’s going to play an E minor chord until we all agree we had it coming.

I’ve no doubt that if Seattle or Boston or Manhattan goes up in a bright white flash there will be those who blame it all on Bush. We squandered the world’s good will. We threw away the opportunity to atone, and lashed out. Really? You want to see lashing out? Imagine Kabul and Mecca and Baghdad and Tehran on 9/14 crowned with mushroom clouds: that’s lashing out. Imagine the President in the National Cathedral castigating Islam instead of sitting next to an Imam who's giving a homily. Mosques burned, oil fields occupied, smart bombs slamming into Syrian palaces. We could have gone full Roman on anyone we wanted, but we didn’t. And we won’t.

Which is why this war will be long.

UPDATE: Orrin Judd has some thoughts on Kaplan's essay.

ANOTHER UPDATE: So does Andrew Sullivan.

STEPHEN GREEN WRITES:

Now go on and let yourself relive that day, just a little.

Remember the first reports that "a small plane" had crashed into the World Trade Center. Firemen who didn't just run into a burning building, they ran up into collapsing skyscrapers. Grounded planes. The stock exchanges, closed. The doubt, the fear, the "what will they do next?" And the realization: Oh my God, we're at war. War in the Old Testament sense, when the barbarians came to rape and to slaughter.

Relive, too, the days after.

The wall of inkjet "have you seen. . .?" photos. You, me, your friends, crying over obituaries in The New York Times. Widows grieving at Ground Zero, who breathed – breathed in – their husbands' ashes.

Remember, too, our just vengeance.

Our president told us, "I hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." And they do hear us, in Iraq and in Afghanistan. They hear us, not because we used our weapons to murder their civilians, but to bring down their tyrants. From our loss, we gave them hope. The loss felt in Baghdad and Kabul is that of Sisyphus without his stone. The sound they hear is the ring of freedom. And they hear us, even if only a whisper, in Syria, in Iran, and – yes – they hear us in Saudi Arabia, too.

Maybe defiance will prove as irresistible an export as Levi's, Coke, and MTV.

Two years later, I'm still angry – and I hope you are, too. But are we terrorized?

Hell, no.

UTTERLY CHILLING: Stephen Den Beste coolly and logically describes the suicide (or homicide--call 'em what you prefer) bombing methods of the Hamas in military terms, and places them in perspective along with the '93 and 2001 attacks against the WTC, and the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing of '95:

If they could do it, Hamas would certainly use a higher-intensity campaign. If they had the means to make several successful attacks per day, they'd be doing so. If they had better weapons, they wouldn't be using the ones they are. Terrorist war is war on a shoestring, and in the last year the Hamas shoestring has gotten a lot shorter.

And Israel's targeted assassinations have hurt them badly, which is why they're squealing and making dire threats. But their threats are meaningless; all threats amount to making the claim that we could be doing a lot worse than we are, but we've been holding back until now. There's no reason to believe that they are holding back.

Having made this threat, they may well launch a token attack or two against Israeli residential areas (most likely against settlements in Gaza). But they won't keep doing so, because such attacks won't turn out to be as effective as the ones they have been making until now.

All of the Arab/Islamic terrorist groups have shown themselves to be utterly ruthless and merciless. And because of that, in every case if they're making threats it's an indication of weakness. al Qaeda is the same way, and has made dire threats against the US and issued dire warnings to us many times since 9/11, but without actually launching any attacks at all. For instance, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, al Qaeda claimed to have some unreasonably huge number of "sleeper cells" in the US, primed and waiting for orders, who would unleash hell on us if we actually invaded.

There are advantages and disadvantages to being utterly ruthless. It gives you more flexibility for planning if you don't consider any kind of attack to be off-limits. But it also leaves you no ability to escalate as a means of deterrence, and gives your enemies little incentive to be anything other than ruthless in return. Hamas cannot use threats to make Israel stop trying to kill its leaders, because Israel's leaders don't believe anything Hamas says, either about escalation or about truces.

MODERNITY: Great line by Mackubin Thomas Owens in National Review Online: "9/11 revealed an emerging geopolitical reality: that the world's most important fault line is not between the rich and the poor, but between those who accept modernity and those who reject it."

The rest of the piece is worth reading as well.

THE CASE FOR ANGER: Andrew Sullivan gets it exactly right:

On this anniversary, the tritest thing to feel is mere grief. Not that grief isn't justified. But grief is a natural response to unforeseen tragedy, to random events, to things beyond human control. And what happened two years ago today wasn't merely tragedy. It was a conscious atrocity, an act of war. The free West was attacked by a pathological ideology that still holds a whole region of the world in its grip. And the very forces that tried to destroy us then are still trying to destroy us - as that grotesque videotape yesterday only underlined. Any attempt to hide that fact, minimize it, gloss over it, or complicate it into vagueness is an insult to memory.

DESECRATING THE GRAVES: Michele Malkin writes:

Across the nation, public officials will strike somber poses and shed television-friendly tears and bow their blow-dried heads in memory of the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

They'll hold hands, light candles, and pass around a plateful of platitudes: "Never forget," they'll intone. "Let's roll," they'll thunder. "God bless America," they'll warble in perfect harmony.

They'll assure us they are committed to fighting terror and securing our borders and doing whatever it takes to protect the homeland from another horrific mass murder at the hands of freedom-hating fanatics. And then?

And then, from Washington state to Washington, D.C., they'll go back to work, roll up their sleeves, and spit on the graves of the September 11 dead.

TWO YEARS LATER: For lots of 9/11-related links, here's what I posted last year on the first anniversary of September 11, 2001.

Here's the Tech Central Station piece I wrote on how Moody's, located just a block or so away from 9/11 experienced the crisis.

Here's my interview with Alvin Toffler from the week after.

Here's a piece I wrote for National Review Online on the day the financial markets reopened.

And here's the piece I wrote about what it was like for my wife and I on 9/11.

It will be business as usual for most of the television networks today. (And it's business as usual for much of the far left as well today, apparently.)

But it's important to remember, not only the death and destruction in Manhattan and Washington on 9/11/01, but just how black the nation as a whole felt--and that horrible feeling of not knowing what would come next.

Fortunately, we now know what came next. America woke up from a decade of slumber--and our eyes were clear and wide.

ROLL TIDE! John Berthoud of the National Taxpayers Union writes that Alabamans struck a blow against elitism this week.

UPDATE: Scott Ott "reports", "Now that Alabama voters have rejected a $1.2 billion tax hike, the Governor has been placed on methadone therapy for withdrawal symptoms."

CALIFORNIA ROUND-UP: Glenn Reynolds has links to a variety of California items, including this classic:

The California Senate voted 19-2 on Tuesday to demand an apology from Democratic Gov. Gray Davis for what many regard as an ethnic slur made against Arnold Schwarzenegger.

DID AIRLINE DEREGULATION FAIL? Paul Craig Roberts analyzes the airlines' burn rates (of money, not JP-4 jet engine fuel), and predicts massive consolidation is coming. "You think you hate air travel now? Just wait", he says.

OVERHEARD AT THE DEBATE: A reader of Stephen Green's VodkaPundit Weblog asks, "Al Sharpton is the voice of reason tonight. What does that tell you about the field?"

Pretty much everything you need to know, actually.

But if not, Steve blogged the debate in realtime, so visit his home page, and keep scrolling down. Glenn Reynolds also has some interesting links. And I'm sure James Taranto will, as well.

UPDATE: Michael Graham, the author of the hilarious Redneck Nation, says that the winner of last night's debate was...Bruce Springsteen!

EDWARD TELLER, DEAD AT 95: Between Teller and Leni Riefenstahl, as Rod Dreher wrote, "farewell, 20th century".

NOT A BAD IDEA: Thomas Sowell suggests that Republicans should consider a Contract with Black America in 2004.

THE WONDERFUL, HORRIBLE LIFE OF LENI RIEFENSTAHL is over, at age 101. Jesse Walker has some thoughts on her life as a propagandist.

FULL GABARDINE JACKET: Brent Bozell exclaims, "Enough Vietnam Analogies" from TV newscasters:

1. We lost 58,000 American soldiers in Vietnam. Our casualties in Iraq now aren't on the same planet as the losses in that war.

2. We didn't liberate Vietnam from communist dictatorship and then have trouble reorganizing it along peaceful and democratic lines. If we were in Month Six and still struggling to depose Saddam Hussein--while losing thousands of lives in the process--the comparison would be more realistic. In Vietnam, we withdrew in defeat and left with the whole country united under tyranny and concentration camps. In Iraq, we liberated the entire country from tyranny and torture chambers in three weeks.

The anchors are now anxious to make us forget this.

3. In Vietnam, anti-war activists and anchormen could more plausibly argue (though still incorrectly) that the complete consolidation of communism halfway around the world was not a threat to the domestic security of the United States. Since September 11, are these same anti-war activists and anchormen finding it reasonable to assume that America faces no threat, and the proper response to world terrorism and the states that sponsor it is once again withdrawal and negotiated humiliation?

The only Vietnam analogy that works is the comparison in press coverage. As in Vietnam, the press is eager to discredit American military action, to discourage American support at home for military action, to disintegrate the noble cause of the fight, and to bury any victory under a tidal wave of gloom.

As good as Bozell's essay is, I'd argue that there's another Vietnam analogy that works: the protestors of this war, like television anchormen, are also stuck in 1968.

UPDATE: No sooner did I post this, I read this article by John O'Sullivan, in which he argues that Vietnam, properly understood, wasn't a quagmire:

What of the significance of Vietnam as a local skirmish in the Cold War? Here we have the testimony of Asia's principal elder statesman, Lee Kuan Yew, First minister of Singapore. He has pointed out that the American intervention in the war halted the onward march of Communism southwards for 15 years--roughly from 1960 to 1975. In that crucial period, the new ex-colonial states of Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, maybe India itself, took advantage of this incidental American protection to develop their economies from poor agricultural and trading post economies into modern industrial and information societies. By the time the war was over and North Vietnamese tanks were surging into Saigon, these countries were prosperous NICs (i.e. newly industrializing countries), more or less immune to the Communist virus and capable of resisting external attack.

Nor does the story end with the safety of Singapore. In the late 1980s, when the Soviet politburo was debating perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev cited its success--tiny Singapore, exported more in value than the vast Soviet Union--as demonstrating the need to dismantle the socialist command economy. (At the exact same moment, Hanoi was embarking on its own hesitant liberalization. Coincidence?)

If Lee Kuan Yew is to be believed, then, the U.S. intervention in Vietnam was a major factor is achieving the West's overall victory in the Cold War. It held the line while freedom and prosperity were established in non-Communist Asia--and that provided the rest of the world, including the evil empire itself, with a "demonstration effect" of how freedom led to prosperity.

But be sure to read the rest of Sullivan's piece--he does a remarkable job of placing Vietnam in perspective.

Speaking of Vietnam, but apropos of nothing in Sullivan's article, this is as good a place as any to hang an observation: it says much about how things work in the "red states" of America, that of the stars of Full Metal Jacket, Lee Ermey is a folk hero. And Matthew Modine has largely dropped off the cultural radar.

THE RETURN OF OPUS: Cartoonist Berke Breathed is returning to cartooning, with a Sunday-only strip.

JOHN PODHORETZ WRITES, "President Bush's subdued, powerful and totally straightforward 19-minute address from the White House was a clear message to his critics: Play time is over."

MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL RATINGS up four percent in season debut: And no wonder--terrific matchup and game last night.

But who was that dueting with Hank Williams Jr? Britney Spears? Williams' "Are You Ready For Some FootBALLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!" song is barely tolerable as a solo. It's awfully painful as a duo.

THE MAN FROM "THE KLAN WITH A TAN" (to borrow a phrase from Glenn Reynolds) gets a hand from the man from the original Klan: In post titled, "Unfair, But Very Funny", Orrin Judd notes that former Grand Wizard Tom Metzger of the California Klan has announced his backing of Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante in the upcoming recall election.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy!

As I said earlier, I visited the Reagan Library in Simi Valley on Saturday. One of the highlights of the trip was seeing a portion of the Berlin Wall--its shape is rather reminiscent of the proportions of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but instead of a uniform black, it's covered with some sort of flower-power design on what I assume was the West German side, and nothing but a large spray-painted "E" on the East German side.

My wife was in conferences all day, so I drove up there from Anaheim alone (with an earlier presidential moment of my own--my rented Lincoln was almost run into by a guy whose vanity tags read "HARDING"). I asked a fellow who was there with his wife and young daughters if he could take a shot of me in front of the wall. I think he was surprised that I didn't smile, but how do you smile in front of a slab where so many people died trying to obtain their freedom?

I'll try to post some additional photos of the library, but in the meantime, here's the plaque in front of the wall, and photo of the West German side of the wall without my mug in the shot. And here's what was the East German side of the wall.

Obviously, there are chunks of the Berlin Wall scattered all over the planet (and you can buy little bits of it as a memento--as I did in the library's gift shop.) But the Reagan Library is a perfect place for this memorial--as nobody fought harder than President Reagan to bring the wall down. The sad thing is, more and more it looks Europe hasn't learned the lessons of that period, or why it was built. As Steven Den Beste has noted in several posts, a united Europe should be an economic powerhouse. Instead, socialism killed 10,000 people this past summer in France--and is stifling Germany's economy as well.

GRAY DAVIS' CALIFORNIA ADVENTURE: Virginia Postrel has some thoughts on California's budget crisis, as well as a potential solution.

We were in Anaheim for the annual California State Bar Convention (my wife's an attorney), which alternates between southern and northern California. Friday night and for much of Sunday, we toured Disneyland, or as Nina likes to call it, "Dizzy Land". She wanted to tour Disney's California Adventure, an addition to the park which opened only a few years ago.

I agreed reluctantly--I thought if Disney wanted to really recreate the California Adventure, this part of the park should be filled with lawyers, government employees, social workers, and tax auditors (actually, it probably was this past weekend...). Instead, what Disney has installed is a typically Disney-esque sanitary look at the history of California--there's a stationary California Zephyr streamliner selling food and gifts, a "Taste Pilot's Restaurant" with a handsome recreation of Chuck Yeager's X-1 zooming off the roof of it, a Santa Cruz-like amusement park (now with two-thirds less drug-addled hippies stuck in a 1960s causality loop!) and other such fare. Lots of Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, and Mamas and Poppas music--and even the odd Bing Crosby song(!) about California.

Because ABC is owned by Disney (or is it the other way around?), ABC was promoting its fall television lineup, and several of its celebrities there--talking on a stage, with an enormous Jumbotron TV to project them into the park. Dennis Franz was scheduled to be there, as was Jim Belushi and his blues band. On our way out of the California Adventure and into Disney proper, I saw John Ritter on the screen, using--for the first and last time I hope--the word "fart" on the giant Jumbotron. (He had been asked what he, Suzanne Summers and Joyce DeWitt would do in a Three's Company reunion by someone attending the park by a poor, confused soul who thinks that would a good thing. Fabulously out-of-date, Ritter suggested that Summers and DeWitt would need "a lot of EST" to work things out.)

CALIFORNIA SENATE BILL 2: John Fund writes that it's a doozy:

Liberal lawmakers, fearing that a Republican might win the governor's mansion, are scrambling to pass as many bills as Gov. Gray Davis can sign before the recall. One bill would give Indian tribes the power to stop development on private land within five miles of a sacred tribal site; the potential for abusive shakedowns of developers should be obvious to anyone. Another bill would water down legislative term limits. A couple of bills awaiting action smell like such blatant attempts to enrich contributors that Gov. Davis may have to shy away from them.

The worst idea before the Legislature is Senate Bill 2, written by John Burton of San Francisco, the liberal president of the state Senate. It would compel businesses with more than 20 workers to pay almost all health insurance costs for employees--even part-time workers--and their dependents. Companies would have to pay at least 95% of health-care costs for low-income workers, and 80% for everyone else.

Jill Stewart, a columnist and former Los Angeles Times reporter, describes the measure as "closer to socialism than anything I've seen heading for approval in 20 years." This bill would create a powerful incentive businesses to stay below the 20-employee limit by stunting their own growth, or drop below the limit by laying off workers. Ms. Stewart reports the bill was ghostwritten by the Service Employees International Union, a major Democratic contributor.

The real beneficiary of the bill may not be the unions, but rather the Indian tribes. The Western Political Report says the bill was rewritten over the weekend and also includes a whopping cigarette-tax increase to $2.37 a pack, up from 87 cents. California's new tax would be the highest in the country outside New York City, creating a massive incentive to buy tax-free cigarettes from Indian stores or their Internet sites.

Normally a bill that raises taxes would require a two-thirds vote of both houses of the Legislature, giving minority Republicans leverage in slowing down the legislation. But Democrats plan to make SB 2 "revenue neutral" by adding a tax credit for employers who will suffer from the costs of mandated health care for their employees. Under that arrangement, the bill could pass with a simple majority. Some Republicans promise to take the issue to court, but that fight would take years to resolve.

Paul Greenberg uses Charles Bronson's obituary to remind us just how bad the 1970s really were:

Back in the 1970s, that most depressing of decades, Charles Bronson found himself at the center of a debate over political correctness--long before there was a phrase for it. He became a cult hero because of one movie, "Death Wish."

The New York Times' always decent movie reviewer, Vincent Canby, hated the story line of "Death Wish": A nice, liberal architect turns into a killer seeking vengeance after his wife is killed and his daughter raped. Whereupon he starts wiping out the city's muggers, making the audience cheer.

To Mr. Canby, this was the vilest heresy. And he wasn't having any of it. He called it "a despicable movie, one that raises complex questions in order to offer bigoted, frivolous, oversimplified answers."

As it happens, the country was ready for some simplified answers: Enforce the laws, even and especially the minor ones, before the vandals and muggers grew into killers and rapists. Lock 'em up. Rudy Giuliani, a tough prosecutor, became a tougher mayor in New York, succeeding a long series of nice, ineffective ditherers who had largely given in to urban terror.

Suddenly the laws were being enforced--with, yes, a vengeance. And it worked. The same attitude could be detected when the issue was the national defense or international diplomacy. And things began to change in this country, and in the world. It was morning in America again, as if we had awakened from our stupor and remembered who we were.

UPDATE: Jesse Walker also has some thoughts in a similar vein.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: The comments section on Reason's "Hit & Run" blog about this article are quite interesting as well.

I'M BACK: Spent the weekend in Anaheim, including trips to Disneyland and a certain presidential library in Simi Valley. Details to follow on Monday after my brain starts functioning again.

Quick note for weary travelers: the Anaheim Marriott has outrageously overpriced, but surprisingly tasty Maker's Mark Manhattans available from room service. Unfortunately though, to get there from San Jose, you need to fly American's "American Eagle" commuter flight service, which consists of a fleet of 1/72 scale polystyrene Monogram airplane models. Hey, if it's Mattel, it's swell!

(Actually, it isn't--but like I said, more to follow later.)

THE BROTHERS JUDD BLOG has moved to a new URL. (and to a Movable Type-based platform. Will the last person to leave Blogger please turn out the lights?) Adjust your links accordingly.

Jonah Goldberg and Byron York have articles on the Bush=Hitler crowd.

Does Godwin's Law work in real life? How many people have tuned the left out because of their hyperbole?

UPDATE: Speaking of Godwin's Law...

ONE LAST UPDATE: I just read Jonah Goldberg's syndicated column, after getting home. As he says, "'Bush equals Hitler' adds up to holocaust denial".

JURASSIC ED: Jeff Taylor is right: To feel perfectly ancient, check out Beloit College's Mindset List for the incoming class of 2007, born in 1985.

UPDATE: Scott Ott has a few more additions to the list.

IT'S NOT THE ECONOMY, STUPID: Jay Bryant has some thoughts on the candidates running against President Bush.

And Glenn Reynolds wants to know what their plans on fighting "the Klan with a Koran".

WHY ESTRADA QUIT: Byron York writes, "The unprecedented Democratic filibuster simply wore him down".

It will be interesting to see how this plays--if at all--in November of 2004.

UPDATE: Randy Barnett has some further thoughts.

TIME FOR JANKLOW TO STEP DOWN: Michelle Malkin writes, "It's all a big joke to Rep. Bill Janklow, the South Dakota Republican with a lead foot, a hollow heart, and an ego the size of his Cadillac deathmobile."

UPBEAT GROWTH NUMBERS: Donald Lambro writes, "The Democrats' chances of beating President Bush in 2004 were sharply reduced last week by one closely watched economic number."

REYNOLDS ON BUSTAMANTE: The InstaPundit writes, "Attacking Wal-Mart shows that he's not a populist, but rather a slave to anti-globo-bobo fashion. Which his sad devotion to MEChA also suggests."

REQUIRED READING: The Onion interviews the great P.J. O'Rourke.

WHAT WAS IN THOSE BROWNIES? "Maybe it was the ginger tea or the homemade brownies", the Washington Post notes, but John Kerry has delivered the first tears of the 2004 presidential campaign.

Can the ponytail guy be far behind?

UPDATE: Orrin Judd has some thoughts.

UPDATE: Did Kerry lie about knowing Bush at Yale?

Even as James Lileks wonders why the left keeps calling Republicans Nazis, Stephen Green wonders why Maureen Dowd is comparing Bill Clinton to a Nazi general!

(I think I'll go watch The Producers.)

UPDATE: Here's more.

BUSTAMANTE AND THE MEChA MESS: John Hawkins has some thoughts.

THE ANTI-DEAN: John Fund explains why Hillary opposes the Democratic front-runner.

Incidentally, this is as good a place as any for a question I have about Dean. InstaPundit has quoted him as saying he's for keeping troops in Iraq and aiding its reconstruction. Since that clearly makes him "an echo, not a choice" compared to President Bush (to coin a paraphrase), why would someone sitting on the fence vote for Dean, and not the man who's been leading the war on terror since 9/11?

Geoffrey Wheatcroft examines how 9/11 finished off the intellectual far left.

NICE WAY TO BEGIN AUTUMN: "Stocks at 14-Month Highs on Economy Hopes".

THE BLEAT THAT ATE MINNEAPOLIS!!! James Lileks is back with a new "Bleat": Michelangelo meets Queer Eye For The Straight Guy meets "Pimp Eye For The White Guy" meets Steve McQueen meets Gnat meets a bee.

No, really!

PURITY OF ESSENCE: The CounterRevolutionary lists the "Top 5 Myths that Leftists believe about themselves (and want others to believe, too)".

FOXANOIA FILE: Byron York ponders why Rupert Murdoch is so reviled by the left.

GREAT SUBJECT, WRONG WOLF(E): I have a brief review of Wired - A Romance at Blogcritics.

Speaking of Blogcritics, thanks to Virginia and Glenn for linking to my Blogcritics piece on Les Paul!

(Is it kosher for one guy to call another guy's article "delightful"? (Not that there's anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld would say. I'm just checking.)