IT'S MEME-KILLING TIME, over at Ballon-Juice.com.

"THE PROMISED LAND" is the title of David Brooks' latest essay in The Times. It's tremendous; here's the money graph:

This week the G.O.P. behaved as a majority party in full. The Republicans used the powers of government to entrench their own dominance. They used their control of the federal budget to create a new entitlement, to woo new allies and service a key constituency group, the elderly.

As Orrin Judd writes, "One does wish that Ronald Reagan were in possession of his senses so that he could see his people arrive in the Promised Land."

As the spiritual leader of the Republican party, no doubt, the Gipper would enjoy the destination. But would the small government-oriented conservative who gave the legendary "Rendezvous With Destiny" speech in 1964 approve of the route taken to get there?

UPDATE: Somewhat related to Brooks' essay, Donald Lambro writes:

The last three Democrats to occupy the White House were Southerners, two of them governors. Fewer governors means fewer chief executives to promote for higher office, a gloomy picture indeed of the Democrats' political future.

THE STORY OF LAST WEEK was of course, President Bush's secret trip to Iraq. I didn't know about it until Thanksgiving afternoon, when my parents mentioned it over the dinner table, after they heard the story reported on TV. Here's one very, very good reason why it was kept secret from the press.

UPDATE: John Cole asks, "Who has become more predictable regarding their reactions to President Bush? Al-jazeera and the Arab Press or the American Left?"

H IS FOR HATRED, HOLLYWOOD, AND HYPOCRISY: In the Bay Area, you certainly see a fair number of bumper stickers that read "Hate Is Not A Family Value" (usually written in 72 point Helvetica bold, in all caps, on a fluorescent neon background, for maximum emphasis). But for some folks on the left coast, hate seems to be just fine.

UPDATE (12/01/03): Aaron Russo, the producer of Trading Places is quoted as saying, "Iraq was not a threat to me, and personally I'd be more afraid of George Bush than I would of Saddam Hussein," he said."

Of course, Russo wouldn't be the first Hollywood tycoon to turn a blind eye towards a mass-murder.

NOW THAT'S A GREAT HEADLINE: The purpose of the headline, in both newspaper and advertising copy writing, is to grab the reader's attention by giving him a headline that's so provocative, he's got to read the rest of the story. This headline by Nicholas Stix certainly fits the bill:

Does The New York Times Wish The President Dead? It's a great article, as well. Be sure to read the paragraph that's third from the bottom.

HAPPY (BELATED) THANKSGIVING! Back from a four day visit to the east coast, to visit parents and friends. Watch for regular blogging to resume shortly.

RTWT: Roger Kimball, managing editor of New Criterion brilliantly deconstructs--and deflates--political correctness.

COMING SOON TO A THEATER NEAR YOU: The WWII Italian(!) production of Ayn Rand's We The Living is scheduled to be re-released to theaters (presumably before being released on DVD), beginning in December. Here's an interview with the man behind its restoration.

UPDATE (12/01/03): Here's the second part of the interview.

THE GREAT REJUVENATION: Hidden in David Brooks' latest column in the New York Times are the landmines he planted in these key passages:

As we settle down to the Thanksgiving table in a few days, we might remind ourselves that whatever other problems grip our country, lack of vitality is not one of them. In fact, we may look back on the period beginning in the middle of the 1980's as the Great Rejuvenation. American life has improved in almost every measurable way, and far from regressing toward the mean, the U.S. has become a more exceptional nation.

* ** The U.S. economy has enjoyed two long booms in the past two decades, interrupted by two shallow recessions, and perhaps now we're at the start of a third boom. More nations have become democratic in the past two decades than at any other time in history.

Wonder how paragraphs like those are sitting with the average reader of the Times who feels, based on the information he's been spoonfed by the Times, that (a) George H.W. Bush was right when he called Reaganomics "voodoo economics" (and then later lost his bid for reelection when he steered away from its central tenant) and (b) that the "worst economy of 50 years" recession was actually, as Brooks accurately labels it, shallow and minor.

JOHN PODHORETZ ON 2004:

There's quite a ways to go before Election Day 2004. But the race may already be over, and, to their grief, the Democrats know it.

He gives three reasons ("one minor, one middling and one major") why.

The Democrats' debate last night probably didn't advance their cause.

UPDATE: Michael Barone would seem to agree with Podhoretz.

MONA CHAREN IDENTIFIES "the new counterculture". I think she feels it's growing--which would be a good thing.

VERMOUTH IS OPTIONAL: Stephen Green, the one, the only VodkaPundit, is blogging up a storm this morning.

THE RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE: Tom DeWeese of MichNews.com looks at the far fringes of environmentalism.

It's not pretty.

I'M GOING TO GO OUT ON A LIMB HERE, but those orange uniforms the Dolphins are debuting tonight against the Redskins are really, really ugly.

With the white pants and helmets, on my TV, they look vaguely like the old New England Patriots' duds--which weren't necessarily the height of NFL fashion, either.

NOTE TO SELF: Stick to the drive-through at Burger King.

The New York Times' protypical Soviet dupe gets to keep his Pulitzer Prize. The Times and, as InstaPundit noted, Robert Fisk dodged a bullet.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan despairs:

Arthur Sulzberger Jr describes the work of Walter Duranty as 'slovenly.' That simply misses the point. Duranty wasn't slovenly; he was an active and knowing apologist of mass murder, tyranny, and brutality. If the Times had won a Pulitzer for someone denying the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, there would not even be a question of the Pulitzer standing. But what Duranty did was no different. It was a wilful attempt to disguise mass murder in order to promote Communist ideology. It wasn't slovenly; it was extremely diligent and entirely malign. The NYT doesn't see this. They still fail to see that tolerating mass murder on the left is no different than the same on the right.

Not all that surprising, actually.

THE FINAL CUT: Composer, arranger and conductor Michael Kamen died this past week at 55. He contributed some wonderful orchestral flourishes to Pink Floyd's later records, as well as scoring the Lethal Weapon movies.

BET YOU CAN'T EAT JUST ONE: Or...maybe you can. The Roger Clinton, Frito-Lay Funyuns connection is explored at Flak magazine.

COUNTERWEIGHT: Linda Chavez writes:

Proponents of affirmative action were quick to claim victory last summer when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that colleges could continue to consider race in their admissions policy in order to promote "diversity," but they may soon be singing a different tune. A number of schools have already abandoned some race-based programs, and others may be about to follow suit.

Read the rest for Chavez's explanation as to why.

THE MEDICARE BILL: Arm-twisting wins a 220-215 vote in the House. On to the Senate on Monday.

IT'S 1938 ALL OVER AGAIN, according to Roger L. Simon:

Yes, of course I am being rhetorical and, of course, history does not repeat itself exactly. It comes back as farce, Marx famously said, but the farce seems to get darker with each passing year. Well, here we are with yet another 1938-like episode, this time enacted by the faceless bureaucrats of the European Union's own racism watchdog committee--the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia in Vienna. These apparatchiks of the "New" Europe had asked for a study of anti-Semitism in the EU and guess what they did when they received it? ... They completely SHELVED THE REPORT!

Which makes incidents like this none too surprising.

"THE CASE FOR G.I. JOE": I'm sure the same folks concerned about subversive "B.C." cartoons are equally outraged over the toy that this post on "Armavirumque" links to.

Right?

SHUT UP AND PLAY YOUR COMPUTER! I have a detailed review (complete with sound clips of yours truly!) of Roland's USB-equipped guitar synthesizer system online at Blogcritics.

TEMPEST IN AN OUTHOUSE: Check out the controversy that a "B.C." cartoon(!) has caused.

I don't know which is more preposterous--that Johnny Hart is trying to draw subliminal messages into his cartoon, or that someone would find them there if he were.

TRY SAYING IT TEN TIMES FAST: Sgt. Stryker studies psychedelic sheiks.

MICHELLE MALKIN WRITES that "It's time to verbally roast the vegan marshmallows".

COULD SOMEBODY CHECK THE WEATHER CHANNEL, PLEASE? Hell must have frozen over, because I agree with Gloria Allred completely on this one.

THE BAD OLD DAYS, REVISITED: James Pinkerton takes us "From Here to the Great Society", and back again, in apparently, the first of a two part series.

SULLIVAN TO DVORAK: "Get over it".

QUOTE OF THE DAY: It's too funny to not see first hand, so click on over to Roger L. Simon, who's sending his regrets...

HERE'S A HEADLINE YOU DON'T SEE EVERY DAY:

"Mary Kay Denies Taking Part in Religious Persecution of Falun Gong"

I'm torn on this one: I actually think Mary Kay in China is somewhat of a good thing: it allows Chinese women to earn an few extra shekels for selling the products, and its reminds them just how much better things are for women living in the US. The latter is a particularly important, long term. (See: Union, Soviet.) But in order to sell their products there, Mary Kay has had to cozy up with a brutal dictatorship. Is it worth it?

WHY DO THEY HATE HIM? John Podhoretz has an answer: "They hate him because he calls their values into question".

TO SAY THAT Nicholas Stix is not happy with George Soros would be a gross understatement.

LILEKS IS ANRGY--and quite rightly so. RTWT.

TOM DASCHLE, LIBERTARIAN: Like Dukakis in the tank, bet this photo will come back to haunt him? Me too.

In the long run, the Republicans' prescription bill will no doubt end up being as costly as Medicare, Medicaid, and the rest of the Great Society programs. In the short term however, it's a great piece of triangulation by President Bush and Karl Rove: it's fun watching Daschle, Ted Kennedy, and rest of the Democrats squirm and contort their speeches into Clintonian "what the meaning of 'is' is"-style rhetorical pretzels.

It takes the "Republicans want to kill old people" mantras of '94 off the table. And Newt Gingrich is for it, which should make his infamous (because it was infamously distorted) "wither on the vine" quote...wither on the vine.

OK, that's the long and short term. Medium term? Ramesh Ponnuru isn't too happy with the bill.

BIASED BBC: David Frum witnessed it firsthand:

Before the three of us got to business, “Newsnight” broadcast an introductory video clip. It was that clip that was my perfect moment of news slanting. A reporter at the gates of Buckingham Palace told us that a small crowd was waiting for President Bush, and that its mood was mixed. Cut to clips from three members of that crowd: all negative. (One of the negative voices was American – that was apparently all the balance the broadcaster required.) Now here’s the punchline: I recognized one of the three – I’d seen him earlier that day at an anti-Bush rally in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. [Which Frum wrote about here--Ed.] In the interim, he’d changed into casual tourist clothes – and the BBC was now presenting him as a representative of ordinary British opinion.

I pointed out this distorting selection bias in my first answer to one of moderator Jeremy Paxman’s questions. He was very impatient with me. But I persisted. How can you do a program that purports to study why British people are so hostile to President Bush – without taking note of the state broadcaster’s role in creating and magnifying that hostility? The BBC is not just reporting this story; it is in many ways the story’s most important actor.

Fortunately, a few calmer voices exist as well in the UK.

MICHAEL JACKSON STILL DOESN'T GET IT: MSNBC contributor Michael Ventre has written a brutally funny article on Michael Jackson's possible future, full of lines I really wish I had written first.

LET IT BE...NAKED: Don't worry, I'm not planning to get X-rated with the blog. Unfortunately, I probably won't be doing much with the blog at all today--I have a couple of articles on deadline. In the meantime, Matt Rowe has some thoughts on the "new" Beatles album.

THE CHOMSKY CHOP: As Andrew Sullivan says, it's a beaut. Check out the full quote from The New York Times that Noam Chomsky (or whoever wrote the copy for the back cover of his latest book) truncated to describe Chomsky as "Arguably the most important intellectual alive".

If I had a "rolling on floor laughing out loud" emoticon, I'd paste it in here.

FIVE GREAT LIES about Internet taxation.

"O.J. HUSSEIN": James Taranto writes, "Have you noticed how Saddam Hussein has become the O.J. Simpson of the Angry Left?"

Heh--to coin a phrase.

"THE EXPLOSIVE EUROPEAN STREET": Mark Steyn writes:

After two years of warnings from clapped-out Arabists that the incendiary 'Arab street' was about to explode in anti-American rage across the Middle East, it remains as unrousable as ever. Instead, it is the explosive European street that remains implacably pro-Saddam, pro-Yasser, pro-jihad, pro-Taliban misogynist homophobes, pro-anyone as long as they are anti-American.

Glenn Reynolds has more.

EL RUSHBO IS BACK: Rush Limbaugh returned to the airways today, after a month in rehab.

IT'S OFFICIAL: "Schwarzenegger Takes Office in California".

DC SNIPER SUSPECT MUHAMMAD FOUND GUILTY.

BAR OWNERS' PROFITS GO UP IN SMOKE IN NY: This article talks about a bar owner in Kirkwood, New York, on the border of Pennyslvania, which has no smoking ban. Guess where his customers go, to smoke and drink?

THE UN: THE LAST BEST HOPE--of smokers in New York.

(Found via Reason's "Hit & Run" blog.)

UPSET! Congrats to Cincinnati, who upset the Kansas City Chiefs 24 to 19, and spoiled their undefeated season. Time for the '72 Dolphins to pop the champagne!

BLOGGER BUG SOLVED? Congrats to Google and Blogger--it looks like they've finally fixed the bug that stopped early Sunday morning posts from not archiving. Many, many weeks, I had to manually adjust the times of everything I posted on Sunday morning, to Sunday afternoon, because of that bug.

Blogger gets lots of shots--and many of them quite rightly so--but I'm happy to give them credit for fixing this one.

THE HILLARY FACTOR: Howard Fineman thinks she'll enter the election race in June.

Orrin Judd says that would be suicidal for her chances.

Meanwhile, Michael Graham writes that, as Zell Miller feared they would, the Democrats have all but written off the south in this election.

RAIDER WOES: Lots of problems for the defending AFC champs: four Oakland players may be suspended for THG, a designer steroid:

A report on SportsLine.com identified tackle Dana Stubblefield, center Barret Robbins, linebacker Bill Romanowski and defensive tackle Chris Cooper as the Raiders who, pending appeal, will be banned for a violation of the NFL's drug policy...The suspensions will not take effect until the completion of an appeal process that could include testing of a backup sample and/or a hearing.

Here's an article that explains more about what THG is.

Meanwhile, AP is reporting that Raider running back Oakland Raiders running back Tyrone Wheatley "hit a photographer outside a federal courthouse Thursday, hours prior to testifying before a grand jury probing a nutritional supplements lab".

And Rich Gannon is done for the season--and possibly his career, after shoulder surgery.

And they haven't been selling out home games, despite the fact that they went to the Super Bowl in January!

BUH-BYE: Via Glenn Reynolds, I read that MP3.com is shutting down. I feel badly for people like Glenn who hosted their songs there, but when I tried to join in the summer to upload my tunes, it was quite an abortion: all of the tunes had to be pre-approved by their management, their customer service took about a week to write back a terse, unhelpful email.

With a new customer experience like that it's no wonder that they're shutting down.

BOEING WANTS TO EJECT from the digital cinema business.

THREE STRIKES AND YOU'RE BROKE: Cal Thomas writes:

After two decades of being "tough on crime" by "locking them up and throwing away the key" — to recall two of the effective political slogans of the past — the bill has come due. Many states have become incapable or unwilling to pay the cost of housing record numbers of inmates.

Thomas--who's never going to be accused of being soft on criminals--has some interesting ideas on solving the problem.

OCTOGENARIANS ON WHEELS: More and more accidents are occurring as too many elderly people "with deficits in cognition, reflexes, neck rotation, and the ability to multi-task" are getting behind the wheels of their automobiles. Christopher Orlet of the The Texas Mercury writes:

Here, then, is one of those lovely American paradoxes. Local and federal governments bent on sanitizing, sheltering and protecting American life, who force motorists to buckle up, motorcyclists to wear helmets, hunters to put safety locks on guns, until they have succeeded in draining all of the risk and fun out of life, have done everything in their power to make it necessary for the elderly and teens to get behind and stay behind the wheel.

VERY, VERY FUNNY new "Day by Day" cartoon.

Does this finally cinch it?

As Orrin Judd writes, "When Dick Cheney keeps going on Meet the Press and saying there's an Iraqi connection to al Qaeda you can either assume he's a complete pathological liar, as Democrats have, or that he knows something you don't, yet".

UPDATE: Speaking of Iraq, how much does our negative media coverage of the situation influence what other nations think of us?

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Weekly Standard's server was down for much of last night and today. It's now back online. Here's the article in question.

MASTER AND COMMANDER, starring Russell Crowe, has been getting some very, very good reviews lately, including this one by Jami Bernard of the New York Daily News and these two brief but favorable posts by National Review's John J. Miller.

WHOPPER OF THE WEEK: as spotted by Andrew Sullivan. Of course, it's far from the first time such a thing has happened.

KEITH RICHARDS, CLOSET CONSERVATIVE: I love it.

Link via Reason's "Hit & Run" blog.

UPDATE: Add Christopher Lee to the list as well.

ACTING UNILATERALLY: Shell of Across the Atlantic has a run down of the countries who have troops in Iraq.

ABORTIONS FOR SOME! MINIATURE EU FLAGS FOR OTHERS! Jonah Goldberg looks at how Europe will inevitably adopt American-style politics.

UP ON BLOGCRITICS: Collecting Vintage Synthesizers--complete with photos of Pete Townshend and Paul McCartney, and their vintage gear!

WILL THE NEW YORK FOOTBALL JETS (as Chris Berman always describes them) actually be returning to New York? BusinessWeek says they could be movin' on up from the Meadowlands in North Jersey to a dee-luxe stadium on Manhattan's west side, where former a Penn Central railroad yard currently resides.

But considering how many times developers have tried to tackle this area and failed (Donald Trump planned to build condos there, and the article mentions that former mayor Rudolph Giuliani "championed a west side stadium in the 1990s as part of the city's bid to host the Summer Olympics."), I'll believe it's happening when construction starts.

NFL SUNDAY TICKET CHANNELS BLACKED OUT: Why is DirecTV blacking out channels on their NFL Sunday Ticket package this year, if those channels are also available locally? This is a new phenomenon, that's a real pain in the neck--especially if you're programming your PVR to timeshift the big game, and up with nothing but yellow text reading "Channel Unavailable In Your Area" over an otherwise all-black screen.

Paul Zimmerman of Sports Illustrated investigates.

DEAN'S CONFEDERATE FLAG FLAP: It's reached all the way to Dartmouth, according to "Armavirumque".

TO PARAPHRASE STEPHEN GREEN, Wynonna--and this is coming from me, fer crissakes -- lay off the booze.

STEVEN DEN BESTE has a brilliant post on the concept of "total war", born out of the industrial revolution, versus how the war on terror is being fought. Every reporter should understand this stuff. Sadly, few of them do.

THE BILL BOWL: On Sunday night, Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick (and their football teams, the Dallas Cowboys and New England Patriots respectively, each 7-2) will face off against each other.

Don Banks of Sports Illustrated analyzes the common bonds the two men share.

THE CHICKENHAWK SLUR: It reappeared just in time for Veterans Day. John Hawkins has some thoughts. So does Chris Muir.

WHAT PRESIDENTS WILL BE REMEMBERED 100 years from now? Shell of Across the Atlantic has some thoughts. Be sure to read her original post on the subject as well.

THE FRINGE: Are the people who lead the anti-war movement "the fringe"? Glenn Reynolds writes:

Whenever I mention people who want the United States to lose, I'm told "yeah, but they're the fringe". But they're NOT. Misha and the [the people associated with FreeRepublic.com] don't have syndicated columns. They're not winning awards from allegedly-mainstream outfits. They're not published with those views in allegedly-respectable newspapers. [Cartoonist Ted] Rall is.

Ditto with ANSWER -- they're the indispensable core of the antiwar movement. You can try to dismiss them as a fringe, but no alternative group has been able to replace them because, in fact, they aren't the fringe of the antiwar movement. Their hostility to America, their desire for America to lose, is just a more distilled version of something we see all over.

Reynolds adds, "Fringe? Of society, maybe. Of the antiwar movement? Doesn't sound like it."

Read the rest--if you haven't already.

RED AMERICA: Is it growing?

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "those who must deal with the Federal government would also be wise to remember Flounder's lesson".

Don't remember Flounder? Click on over to read the whole thing then!

"THE INSURGENT AND THE SOLDIER": As the Monty Pythoners would say, there's no moral equivalence here. And when I say there is none, I do mean that there is a certain amount.

AP HUNG UP on a caller who complained about the omission of Israeli victims from their article titled "Recent [Islamic] Terror Attacks Around the World".

"BELATED VETERANS DAY NOTE": Be sure to read this wonderful letter received by Andrew Sullivan.

"A PERFECT STORM OF ANGRY LEFTISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM centered on one man: George Soros", writes James Taranto.

UPDATE: Meryl Yourish also has some thoughts.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Speaking of angry leftism and anti-Semitism, Mikis Theodorakis, 78, who wrote the score for Zorba The Greek was quoted today in an AFP article:

"Today, we can say that these little people are the root of evil," said Theodorakis, 78, a committed leftist and political activist who was jailed under the fascist junta that held power in Greece in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

What is it about today's environment--especially in Europe--that allows anti-Semites to feel that they can express their hatred so openly?

ATLAS DRANK: And for more Vodka-fueled goodness, the Ayn Rand-oriented Atlasphere.com features an interview with Stephen Green.

IT'S GORE VERSUS GORE over at Stephen Green's VodkaPundit, who features dueling sound bites. Pick one, Al! Meanwhile, Green writes that Al's former boss fears that Howard Dean could steal his party out from under him.

OFF TO THE GREAT RACCOON LODGE IN THE SKY: Art Carney, co-star of The Honeymooners, has died, at age 85.

"THE MOST TRUSTED NAME IN"--er, on second thought...

Of course, considering what its founder and his former wife think of their American viewers, CNN's attempts to manipulate them aren't all that surprising.

UPDATE: John Hawkins has more.

AMON'S LAW* IN ACTION: Cris Carter, the retired superstar wide receiver for the Minnesota Vikings, who's now a sportscaster, said this:

Black coaches can't be too picky. A great percentage of owners never will hire a black coach.

Really?? Even with the Rooney Rule now in place? Care to explain why and name some names, Chris?

That's the kind of line that Rush Limbaugh was crucified for--but I doubt there will be much of a firestorm over Carter's comment.

"EDUCATIONAL QUAGMIRE" is the phrase of the day over at Instapundit.com and National Review's "The Corner".

I kind of like it, myself--it would be a fun phrase to see worked into sound bites on TV.

THE AXIS OF CHAOS: Nicholas Stix is none too pleased with the war against the Geneva Conventions.

One of the trailers before The Matrix: Revolutions was Disney's The Alamo, starring Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett, and scheduled for a Christmas release. My mind started going through my Hollywood checklist, as my hackles started to raise:

1. American history--always a subject for politically correct Hollywood revisionism.
2. Set in Texas, where our current president, who's up for reelection next year, governed. Since the late 1990s, Texas has become the butt of many a joke in Hollywood films, even before GWB was elected.
3. At the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, its star once said, "Gosh, I would't care if the President had been involved in bestiality if he runs the country right."
4. It's being released just before an election year, and as the country itself is at war. And on Christmas day, too!

Evidently, I wasn't the only one having those thoughts, as the film is being re-edited "after preview audiences complained it was 'too politically correct' and pointed out that Disney had tried to portray the Mexican side sympathetically to appeal to Mexican-Americans and other Hispanics living in the US", according to this article on NorthernIreland.co.uk.

Expect another battle similar to what just happened with CBS's The Reagans, when this film is released.

WHY NEW EUROPE LOVES US: Matt Welch looks at how rock helped defeat communism.

WHY OLD EUROPE HATES US: American rock and roll exported to England produced the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, and Led Zeppelin.

American rock and roll exported to Sweden produced these acts.

LAST WEEK, James Lileks wrote about what's obvious and unspoken (and obviously unspoken) in the Matrix films:

I took away something else from the Matrix trilogy: it is a product of deeply confused people. They want it all. They want individualism and community; they want secularism and transcendence; they want the purity of committed love and the licentious fun of an S&M club; they want peace and the thrill of violence; they want God, but they want to design him on their own screens with their own programs by their own terms for their own needs, and having defined the divine on their own terms, they bristle when anyone suggests they have simply built a room with a mirror and flattering lighting. All three Matrix movies, seen in total, ache for a God. But they can’t quite go all the way. They’re like three movies about circular flat meat patties that can never quite bring themselves to say the word “hamburger.”

Thomas Hibbs explores that point further in his National Review article.

UPDATE: Jesse Walker of Reason also has some thoughts on the trilogy.

JEFF JACOBY on Al Sharpton:

There should be no room in American politics for a race-baiting charlatan of any color. Honorable Democrats ought to be able to look Sharpton in the eye and say so. Their failure to do so is a moral and political disgrace.

Read the whole thing.

GOOD MORNING MESOPOTAMIA: Rich Galen is in Iraq, and sending back regular reports, via his Mullings Website.

TO COIN A PHRASE....Heh.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: William Sjostrom of AtlanticBlog: "The military conflicts we have been 'marched into' by Mr. Blair are Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq. That isn't because the PM never understood the words of 'Imagine', but because it transpired that the Taliban, the hard men of the Baath, the amputating militias of West Africa, the Hutu Interahamwe and the Serb army of Radko Mladic had been brought up on something other than Joan Baez."

Read the rest of his post as well.

MASS GRAVES may hold as many as 300,000 Iraqis.

OPEN MOUTH, INSERT FLORSHEIM: Wesley Clark chimes in on Dean's Confederate flag flap.

UPDATE: Here's another unintentional gaffe by Clark.

LIBERAL COCOONING UPDATE: Mark Steyn picks up the theme that Mickey Kaus first labeled.

I TOOK THE RED PILL LAST NIGHT, and plugged into The Matrix: Revolutions. Much like the previous film, except for the middle sequence (the invasion of Zion), a blow-out, balls-out CGI-gasm of an experience (if totally unnecessary plotwise, as James Lileks pointed out), the film was bad--really bad. Not as bad as The Hulk or Vanilla Sky (to name two recent sci-fi duds), but no great shakes, either. The dialogue is elliptical and nonsensical, and as Jonathan Last notes, the plot totally ignores the questions that the previous film asked.

And Lawrence Fishburn's Morpheus character is totally wasted--he does little but ride shotgun while others do the dirty work of flying the hovercrafts or exploring the Matrix.

Hard to believe that that much money spent on incredible CGI effects could be coupled with such a lousy script. You'll go see it--if you haven't already--because you've seen the first two. But trust me: The Matrix: Revolutions and its incredibly lame ending, will leave a bad taste in your mouth.

WILL HISTORY LOOK BACK at our current period as a single continuum, beginning with World War II, as another Hundred Years War?

Truth be told, it wouldn't surprise me.

DID HOWARD DEAN BLOW IT with his flip-flops on the Confederate flag? Jonah Goldberg thinks he may have.

UPDATE: Tunku Varadarajan writes, "In dictionaries to come, the following entry--'petard, hoist with one's own'--should be accompanied by a picture of a disconsolate Howard Dean."

Ouch!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Clarence Page also has some thoughts.

ONE MORE UPDATE: Robert Novak writes that Dick Gephardt deliberately (and wisely) skipped the debate because he feared it would be "hostile territory".

GREAT MYTHS ABOUT THE GREAT DEPRESSION: Thomas Sowell has some thoughts on how Hoover and FDR's virtually identical policies exacerbated and prolonged the Great Depression.

UPDATE: Bruce Bartlett picks up the theme.

One of the most important books published this past summer was Anne Applebaum's Gulag. In a recent speech, she explained some of the reasons why the horrors of the Soviets aren't as viscerally remembered today by society as a whole as the Nazis were:

Do we, in the West, remember the Soviet past any better [than Russia does today]? One of the reasons I wrote this book was because I really encountered this subject only while living in Eastern Europe, and I started to wonder why.

Since there are a lot of writers in the room today, I think I can also confess that I was further inspired by an irritating New York Times review of my first book, in 1994, which was about the Western borderlands of the former Soviet Union. Although largely positive, of course, it contained the following line:

Here occurred the terror famine of the 1930s, in which Stalin killed more Ukrainians than Hitler murdered Jews. Yet how many in the West remember it? After all, the killing was so--so boring, and ostensibly undramatic.

Were Stalin's murders boring? Many people think so. Put differently, the crimes of Stalin do not inspire the same visceral reaction as do the crimes of Hitler.

Ken Livingstone, a former British member of Parliament, now Mayor of London, once struggled to explain the difference to me. Yes, the Nazis were "evil," he said. But the Soviet Union was "deformed." That view echoes the feeling that many people have, even people who are not old-fashioned members of the British Labor Party: The Soviet Union simply went wrong somehow, but it was not fundamentally wrong in the way that Hitler's Germany was wrong.

Until recently, it was possible to explain this absence of popular feeling about the tragedy of European communism in the West as the logical result of a particular set of circumstances. The passage of time is part of it: Communist regimes really did grow less reprehensible as the years went by. Nobody was very frightened of General Jaruzelski, or even of Brezhnev, although both were responsible for a great deal of destruction. Besides, archives were closed. Access to camp sites was forbidden. No television cameras ever filmed the Soviet camps or their victims, as they had done in Germany at the end of the Second World War. No images, in turn, meant that the subject, in our image-driven culture, didn't really exist either.

I'd like to think that Applebaum's book will help change that, but given how Saddam Hussein's record is being ignored by many today, I'm not very hopeful.

OR, MAYBE IT'S 1947 ALL OVER AGAIN: Andrew Sullivan writes:

I particularly liked the following analogy [in President Bush's speech]: 'As in the defense of Greece in 1947, and later in the Berlin Airlift, the strength and will of free peoples are now being tested before a watching world. And we will meet this test.' That's precisely the right way to frame this battle. This isn't a replay of Vietnam. It's a replay of an earlier, nobler war that changed the world for the better. Those are still the stakes today. And we cannot let cynicism or partisanship prevent us from winning the fight.

Sullivan's got a lot more to say about the war--and its critics.

IS IT 1946 or 1943? Fascinating post by Instapundit.

UPDATE: The president's speech today certainly makes it sound like the latter. Jonah Goldberg writes, "Whether you think his ideas are monstrous or monumental, one thing's assured: your children will be reading about this speech in school. Mark my words. The rudder of the American ship of state has moved sharply, changing the direction of world history. I believe for the better."

THE MATRIX: REGURGITATED: David Edelstein looks at the final chapter of the Matrix trilogy, and is none too thrilled at what he sees.

He does have spoilers, including the ending, something to keep in mind if you haven't seen the film yet.

I still think my ending is best, though.

UPDATE: Lileks liked the third Matrix movie. Which means Lileks has reviewed the third Matrix movie. Which means one thing...RTWT.

"LIBERAL COCOONING" is a term Mickey Kaus invented. So let's let him describe what it means:

"The point is that reporters and editors at papers like the Times (either one!) are exquisitely sensitive to any sign that Democrats might win, but don't cultivate equivalent sensitivity when it comes to discerning signs Republicans might win. (Who wants to read that?) The result, in recent years, is the Liberal Cocoon, in which Democratic partisans are kept happy and hopeful until they are slaughtered every other November." Kaus' subject was an article in the L.A. Times, but his theory applies equally well to the paper's New York namesake.

David Cohen writes that this week's gubernatorial elections could cause Terry McAuliffe to be cocooned as well--at home and out of a job.

UPDATE: Sean Rushton looks at how the Democrats filibustering of judicial nominees played a factor in the last two years' elections.

ANOTHER UPDATE: We want to give credit where credit is due. As much as we like Mickey's columns, apparently the "liberal cocoon" phrase was actually first coined by J. Peter Mulhern in a July 30, 2001 piece in Washington Weekly.

"NOT ANY MORE": John Podhoretz writes, "With a few exceptions over the years, the Senate Select Committee has been an oasis of reason in an increasing polarized and partisan Washington. Not any more. In their desperate hunger to destroy George W. Bush, they have destroyed the oasis."

Steven Den Beste also has some thoughts, in a detailed essay comparing the leaked memo and the Democrats' decisions with one made by Thomas Dewey in 1944.

CBS pulls The Reagans, decides to run it on Showtime. As Terry Teachout writes:

I’m sure that everybody and his sister will be blogging about this one, and they’ll mostly be right. Of course it’s a new-media story, and of course it wouldn’t have happened five years ago. I’ve been following Big Media’s coverage of the flap over The Reagans, and just two days ago I noted with interest and amusement a wire story claiming that CBS would be pleased by the controversy, since it would inevitably increase the series’ ratings. That is soooooo last year. Those of us who blog, whatever our political persuasions, know better. Boycotts of Big Media have always been feasible in theory. (Newspapers, in case you didn't know, take cancel-my-subscription-you-bastards letters very seriously—if they get enough of them.) In practice, though, they rarely worked, because it was too difficult to mobilize large-scale support quickly enough. No more. Fox News, talk radio, and the conservative-libertarian sector of the blogosphere have combined to create a giant megaphone through which disaffected right-wing consumers who have a bone to pick with Big Media can now make themselves heard.

Not surprisingly, Matt ("don't call me a Blogger") Drudge has some thoughts on the topic as well.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan has an interesting slant on all this:

In some ways, I think Drudge has inadvertently rescued CBS. If the miniseries had run, the backlash would have been so great, the exposure of the poisonous bias in parts of CBS so final, it might have helped destroy the already-flailing old media network. So the new media saved the old media. That in itself, of course, is a major story. And Drudge deserves credit for reporting it. Yes, reporting it. Why do the old media never give him credit when he does journalism as well as any of them?

You know the answer as well as I (and Andrew) do: because Drudge has two strikes against him--he's on the Internet, and he's a conservative, neither of which many journalists trust.

LORNE MICHAELS IS ON KARL ROVE'S PAYROLL: How else to explain this?

MINOR OMISSION: Gee, look what the Times accidentally left out of a story. Ooops!

(Hat tip, Andrew Sullivan.)

HEY, I GET AROUND! Big thanks to Eric Olsen, who reprinted my review of Miles Davis' A Tribute to Jack Johnson in his Blogcritics-spun-off Weblog in Cleveland.com, the Website of the Cleveland Plains Dealer!

15 GIs KILLED, chopper shot down in Iraq: if all wars are Vietnam for the American left, then all wars are Black Hawk Down for Islamofascists. But hopefully we've learned from our mistakes in Mogadishu.

Hopefully.

THERE'S MORE THAN A KERNEL OF TRUTH in this Scott Ott parody.