(A little early, but I'm taking off the rest of the year. See you in 2004!)
LIFE IMITATES THE FIRST VELVET UNDERGROUND ALBUM COVER: Roger Kimball looks at Europe's fruit police.
2003 WAS AN ASTONISHING YEAR FOR FREEDOM: Saddam Hussein was toppled, Khaddafi is allowing nuclear inspections, and Al-Qaida is on the run. The stock market, a forward-looking economic indicator, and a pretty reasonable benchmark for the privately owned wealth of the nation's citizens, had its first positive year since 1999. And most Americans have had their eyes opened to the dangers of terrorism and its appeasement. So what does AP have to say about all this?
"World Rings in 2004 Amid Grim Backdrop"
But of course.
THOMAS SOWELL LOOKS AT TWO RECENT EARTHQUAKES and their results under two different social systems.
MORE BUSH BENEFITING STAGECRAFT by the evil Karl Rove.
WHAT HE SAID! Glenn Reynolds doesn't mince words when it comes to the Palestinians' war against Israel.
Or as Charles Johnson frequently quips, "Lovely people. Let’s give them a state, right away!"
Why do I get the feeling that a big chunk of the Blogosphere won't be attending Peter Jennings' new year's eve party--or Willie Nelson's?
JOHN GREGORY DUNNE, novelist, screenwriter and husband of fellow author Joan Didion, died Tuesday of a heart attack at age 71. Newsday reports:
The grandson of an Irish immigrant, he often focused on the Irish-American experience--particularly in his million-selling novel "True Confessions." The 1977 breakthrough book involved a Los Angeles murder and its effect on two Irish-Catholic brothers, one a police detective and the other a priest.Dunne and Didion were also championed by Tom Wolfe in his classic New Journalism anthology of the mid-1970s.Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall starred in the movie, which Dunne adapted with Didion.
"'True Confessions' was a major novel, one of the best books ever written about politics," said Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam, a friend and fellow writer. "He was a very important writer, and a wonderful friend--talented, edgy, combative."
Dunne's book "The Studio" provided an unflinching look behind the machinations at Twentieth Century Fox, a major motion picture studio. It was hailed for its insider's take on Hollywood.
Dunne eventually became part of the movie industry, working with Didion on several screenplays. Their first, "Panic in Needle Park," starred Al Pacino and captured an award at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.
BRASS COJONES: FrontPage magazine.com names Col. Allen B. West their Man of the Year.
KENNETH SILBER of Tech Central Station has seven "Things to Look For in 2004".
MORNING IN AMERICA UPDATE: AP reports that "Late sales give retailers best holiday in four years".
UPDATE: Larry Kudlow has some thoughts on the coming election year's economy.
MICHELLE MALKIN rounds up the whiners of the year.
DID THE AIR FORCE INTERCEPT an Air France flight headed towards LAX earlier tonight?
SE7EN: Bill Callahan's been fired as head coach of the Oakland Raiders.
SO THIS IS WHERE CRUZ BUSTAMANTE sends his kids to high school.
Hey, whatever happened to "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"?
(Link via InstaPundit.Com.)
UPDATE: Kimberly Swygert has some thoughts.
SARAH SMILE: "Every day I wake up and find more things about America that I love," says a woman rescued from Saudi kidnappers.
ANOTHER PERNOD, SMEDLEY: "Armavirumque", the weblog of The New Criterion looks at the year in blog.
Meanwhile, John Hawkins has the top ten list (actually 12!) of top ten lists.
And National Review has fired up its crystal ball, to look at what's to come in 2004.
FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN MORDOR: "50 Reasons Lord of the Rings Sucks".
I think #35 is spot-on. Just ask the people of Springfield.
THE REASON FOR THE SEASON: James Taranto writes that a few of his readers disputed his questioning the sincerity of Howard Dean's assertion that he is a "committed believer in Jesus Christ."
In response, Taranto simply runs Dean's December 25 message to his supporters, and notes, "Dean manages to mention Thomas Jefferson and FDR--admirable men, to be sure--but he says not a word about the man whose birth we celebrated last Thursday. He can't even bring himself to use the word Christmas".
Yeah, that's the spirit that'll woo the red states.
UPDATE: Chris Muir seems to agree.
HOPLOPHOBIA? "Gun-rights group touts new 'word'". Of course, this would require, under the ADA, that the Times hire a certain amount of hoplophobes for their paper.
Oh wait, they already do!
NUMBER SIX: Steve Spurrier, the ol' ball coach, is now the ol' unemployed coach.
UPDATE: Or is he?
ANOTHER UPDATE: He gone.
SKIP BAYLESS writes that Bill Callahan, head coach (for the moment) of the Oakland Raiders, sealed his fate months ago.
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS KILLS: "Sky marshals could be placed on British flights to and from the United States this week, but the U.K. pilots' union says its objections to guns on planes could lead its members to refuse to fly".
Meanwhile, perhaps the New York Times is having second thoughts when it comes its hatred of the Second Amendment.
ALMOST FREE: Glenn Reynolds writes:
Already, ownership of fancy goods is less a mark of social status than it used to be. Huge wide-screen TVs are, in my part of the world at least, associated as much with trailer parks as with wealth. ("You never see a double-wide without at least a 50-inch TV," a salesman told me. A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but a common view). Fancy watches, now no more accurate than the cheap ones, are a mark of pretension, not status. And services -- scorned as unproductive in the day of Adam Smith -- are now moving up the ladder. Massage therapy and restaurant meals are comparatively high-margin growth businesses, while television sellers are fighting things out in a market where prices are plummeting. Plumbers and cleaning services, meanwhile, are doing well.Me too. As Tom Wolfe wrote a few years ago, we are "fulfilling Saint-Simon's and the other nineteenth-century utopian socialists' dreams of a day when the ordinary workingman would have the political and personal freedom, the free time and the wherewithal to express himself in any way he saw fit and to unleash his full potential".A glimpse of the future? I suspect so.
MY GOD, this could singlehandedly destroy the World Wide Web!
UPDATE: And now..the rest of the story! (Via Stephen Green.)
REDNECK PLANET: In Redneck Nation, Michael Graham wrote that during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the left castigated the South for its obsession with race, and then, rather than moving towards a color-blind society as Martin Luther King had rightly demanded, became race-obsessed itself.
Glenn Reynolds links to merely the latest in a long line of exhibits that prove Graham's thesis.
Doesn't it strike any of the conspiracy mongers that looking endlessly for racism in PC-obsessed Hollywood is more than a little silly?
UPDATE: Speaking of the South...
JEFF JACOBY looks frighteningly like Michael Moore in the photo that accompanies his articles. Fortunately, he doesn't sound like him, as he writes about hate speech from the left.
SADDAM SQUEALS: Reuters reports that Hussein "has given his U.S. captors information on hidden weapons and as much as $40 billion he may have seized while he was Iraq’s president".
Byron York, in a rare Wall Street Journal article, looks at George Soros and declares, "At any given time, there is some small sliver of the American population that believes the president--any president--is a Nazi. Those people are usually thought of as nut cases. Now they can count among their number one of the world's richest and most influential men."
SAY WHAT? "FBI urges police to watch for people carrying almanacs".
UPDATE: Nick Gillespie has more.
CLIFF HARRIS AND CHARLIE WATERS were the Batman and Robin of the NFL during their playing days with the Dallas Cowboys in the 1970s, and I have a review of their new book on Blogcritics.
THE CONTRARIAN: Howard Dean has a lock on being the Democrats' nominee, right? Not so fast, writes Stephen Green, who looks at the Democratic front runners' poll numbers and says, "Not only is this primary race not over, it's hardly even begun".
MORNING IN AMERICA UPDATE: The Nasdaq cracks 2000, for the first time since January of 2002.
And the Dow gained 125 to stand at 10450.
WHO'S GOTTEN THE AXE IN THE NFL? ESPN.com has a running list of NFL coaching changes.
There's four five currently on there. Watch for more, shortly.
(Incidentally, what's with ESPN's new page design that puts all sorts of ads and links above the main story, making it not even be visible on most monitors without scrolling down?)
AS JIM MORA WOULD SAY...PLAYOFFS!! PLAYOFFS!? The playoff picture in the NFL is all firmed up, as Green Bay, Seattle and Baltimore are the last teams to straggle into the postseason.
THE FUN 'N' GUN GETS STUNNED AND DONE: Jim Litke of AP sticks a fork in Steve Spurrier.
ABBEY ROAD IN A BOX, VERSION 3: My review of Cakewalk's Sonar 3.0 Windows-based recording program is online at Blogcritics. My review comes complete with a tune I recorded with the program, playing all the instruments...and singing as well!
UPDATE: Instalanche!
MEET LUCKY THE DINOSAUR: He's the newest creation of Walt Disney's Animatronics department, and the subject of my cover story in Servo magazine. And for a 20 foot high green fellow covered in scales, he's cute as a button, to boot!
Look for Servo on your newsstand today! (Or, wait until a nice civilized hour on Monday. Or subscribe via Amazon.)
QUESTION: Who was the first black American to spend a night as a guest of the White House, and which president made it happen?
Answer: Neither are who you think.
LILEKS ON THE IRANIAN EARTHQUAKE:
I wonder if this disaster might be the Iranian Chernobyl. (Or the 21st century equivalent of the Lisbon earthquake, if you remember your Voltaire.) Just as that catastrophe laid bare the lies and the failures of the Soviet system, so might a horrible earthquake call into question the Mullahs’ claim to rule at the behest of the Almighty. It’s hard to insist that Allah wants Israel destroyed but never gets around to leveling Tel Aviv with natural disasters.Read the rest.Do I think that all Iranians believes the Mullah’s claims? No. Neither do I think that the contributions of America will change public attitudes - because I don’t think they’ll come as a surprise to most, and certainly not to the classes who can change the nature of the government. But the adminstration's aid effort is a surprise to certain domestic elements. I heard a network news feed on the radio say that the US was sending aid despite having branded Iran as a member of the Axis of Evil. Oy. Did the author of that dispatch believe that the administration regarded the Iranian people as a seething mass indistinguishable from the calculated madness of the ruling clerics?
If US aid to Iran comes as a surprise to anyone, then they don’t understand the US.
AN IMPROVED CLIMATE: Ian Murray writes that statist environmentalists will remember 2003 as a very bad year for their credibility.
They're not the only left-leaning group who will have bad memories about this year.
MISSING SURVEY BODES ILL for 2004 Democrats: The missing exit polls for the 2002 mid-term elections have finally been released--and there's some interesting data there.
TIME MAGAZINE'S "PERSON" OF THE YEAR: Mona Charen has some end of year reflections on Time's decision to name the American solider as the man person of the year:
Meaning no disrespect at all to the world's finest fighting force, I have a feeling that the excellence of our men at arms had little to do with this decision.Time needs to work on its judgement, period.No, it seems pretty evident that the editors of Time were desperate to find someone, anyone, to name instead of George W. Bush. The person of the year is supposedly selected for having had the most influence on events of the past year, for good or ill. But this standard is not always strictly applied. Think back to 2001, for example. It is blindingly obvious that the one person who shaped the world the most that year, very much for ill, was Osama bin Laden. But Time's editors could not bring themselves to name him -- not when they were receiving daily warnings from readers threatening to cancel their subscriptions; not when so many continue to see the person of the year as some sort of honor. So they punted and chose Rudolph Giuliani.
But (again let me stress that I bow to no one in my admiration for the U.S. military), the persons of the year Time chose would be sitting in Fort Benning and Camp Pendleton, not in Saddam's palaces today had it not been for George Bush. Not only has Bush shown the courage to take the fight to the terrorists and made this a victory year for American forces and American values, he has begun the process of remaking the Middle East in a more democratic mold, a challenge he created and embraced, and on which he will be judged by history. You may consider it too ambitious, or you may think him a visionary, but either way, it seems to me, George Bush must be acknowledged as a huge actor on the world stage. Time magazine needs to work on its news judgment.
THE VEGGIE VIGILANTE: NewYorkish.com checks in with Bernard Goetz and finds him "Still Crazy After All These Years".
Indeed.
(Found via H.D. Miller.)
A THOUSAND POINTS OF LIGHT: Virginia Postrel, in an all-too-rare these days Reason article, describes how Christmas displays illuminate a strong economy.
"XMAS PRESENT FROM PROGRESSIVES: STARVATION": David Horowitz wants to know "how many poor people have progressives starved since 1917"?
The number is easily in the eight digits. Easily.
HEDGED IN BY THE LAW: Palo Alto is one of the more curious cities in the Bay Area. With its concentration of venture capital firms, it's a very wealthy community. But because of its leftist bent, its beautiful city streets have more than an average share of homeless people.
But rather than try to reduce its problems with transients (as Rudy Giuliani successfully did with Manhattan in the mid-1990s), the Palo Alto police department are arresting middle-aged homeowners whose curbside hedges are more than two feet tall.
Great PR move guys--just brilliant.
YES VIRGINIA, There is a 'United' States of America.
A CHURCHILLIAN CHRISTMAS? Not a bad analogy for this year's "Holiday That Dare Not Speak Its Name", actually.
AS HEADS IS TAILS: In two recent statements, Howard Dean flip-flops radically on Osama Bin Laden's guilt.
Richard J. Rosendall of FrontPage magazine.com goes "Shopping for Roots". See also this Tony Snow piece from 1999.
Incidentally, I wonder if Kwanzaa and its relatively recent creation was the inspiration for Seinfeld's "Festivus" episode.
GOOD QUESTIONS: Charles Johnson asks, "Has our airport security improved so much that Islamic terrorbots think it’s safer to commandeer a foreign flight? Or are they more afraid of American passengers, filled with fury and visions of Flight 93, who will do whatever it takes to stop the hijackers?"
Yet another reason to get more U.S. pilots armed, as well.
JUST ASK WALT GARRISON: Jacob Sullum writes, "No one claims smokeless tobacco is completely safe, but it is indisputably safer than cigarettes—by a very wide margin. Obscuring this fact, as the public health establishment routinely does, leaves smokers with the impression that they have nothing to gain by switching to snuff, when the truth is that they can dramatically reduce their risks".
STRONG EARTHQUAKE IN IRAN: Quake deaths could reach ten thousand.
UPDATE: Reuters is reporting twenty thousand killed.
ANOTHER UPDATE (Via InstaPundit): Jeff Jarvis has a round-up of additional links. Jarvis writes, "To all my newfound Iranian blogging friends: I hope you and your families are safe and secure".
Amen.
TINFOIL HAT UPDATE: This is just pathetic--but not all that surprising. But hey, the truth is out there!
TINFOIL TURBAN UPDATE: "The Islamic Republic of Iran accepts all kinds of humanitarian aid from all countries and international organizations with the exception of the Zionist regime (Israel)."--Jahanbakhsh Khanjani, Iranian Interior Ministry spokesman.
DOIN' THE CHA-CHA SLIDE: Writing about Howard Dean's use of the Internet in his campaigning, Arnold King of Tech Central Station writes, "Howard Dean is the left's Cha-Cha Slide. He did not create the parties that dance to his tune. He just replaced the Macarena".
King fears the 'Net may turn America into Weimar Germany--I think it's too soon to judge the 'Net's impact on politics to come to such a depressing conclusion, but King's article is well worth reading.
STEVEN DEN BESTE IS NOT HAPPY about how the French authorities handled the suspected terrorists on Air France's Christmas Eve flight to L.A.
And I can't say I blame him.
OH, XENU! Julian Sanchez writes that "Between Christmas, Chanukah, Solstice, and Kwanzaa, Scientologists may feel a bit left out".
But not anymore! There's a new off-Broadway musical "based on the life of schlock sci-fi author cum Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard".
DON'T LET OLIVER STONE see this.
Hope everybody had as nice a Christmas as we did!
GREAT CHRISTMAS CLASSICS: The Digital Bits looks at Christmas movies from the 30s and '40s on DVD. (I realize this is a bit late, but your local video store may be open late).
Or stock-up on Friday (or from Amazon) for next year!
FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN REDMOND, WA: "Researchers Outline Microsoft's Top 10 Challenges For 2004".
KILL BILL: As that phrase all the cool kids are saying these days goes...heh.
Here's Rosie O'Donnell from October, 2001:
Talkshow host and ardent Democratic activist Rosie O'Donnell stunned Los Angeles radio listeners Thursday morning by declaring she's changed her opinion of President Bush.And here's Rosie O'Donnell, December 11, 2003:"I love him now!" O'Donnell told KRLA-AM's Dennis Prager.
O'Donnell said she even got to Yankee Stadium an hour early for a World Series game so that she could videotape Bush!
'I brought a videocamera and my six year old son and no security so that my son could see the president," said O'Donnell.
"We left at 6 o'clock in order to do that. And since September 11, I have had nothing but accolades for the job he has done for this nation... I am in full support of the President."
O'Donnell added: "Honey, I love him now! He is our President. We are at war."
"The country was really taken over. It was a coup. This man was not elected, he sits in the White House and he's declaring war. That's a coup d'etat. America should be in the streets picketing. And our boys and our girls, our teenagers and 20- year-olds, are off there killing people. And war begets war.Rosie, a coup d'etat is a brief and bloodless revolution. Essentially, our government has one every four to eight years, as a new administration replaces the old one, bringing new people and new ideas, without firing a shot.
You're a passionate supporter of gays and lesbians in America--why not share a little sympathy for their counterparts in the Middle East?
Contrast Rosie's "BUSH SUX" cliches to this carefully nuanced essay by Paul Varnell, from Gay City News.com, which I found at the top of a Google search using "Gays, Iraq, Hussein". It's from February, shortly before we began to liberate Iraq:
Saddam Hussein's one-party dictatorship severely oppresses gays and lesbians. As British gay activist Peter Tatchell points out, two years ago Hussein decreed homosexuality a capital crime. Doing so was either a further effort to control the lives of his subjects or one of his many recent efforts to display zealous support for Islam. Eliminating Hussein and installing a more secular, pluralist regime would benefit Iraqi gays.Mr. Varnell gets it. You sounded like you did for a moment in the fall of 2001, Rosie. What changed?* * * To the extent gay progressives vocally oppose the war in order to ensure heterosexual progressive support for gay equality, that sounds like exactly as good a reason for all the rest of us to vocally support the war--to show moderate and conservative Americans that gays share many of their fundamental values and have the general interests of the country at heart. After all, the underlying benefit the Iraqi war will be the pressure on neighboring Arab states to moderate and modernize, reducing their tendency to tolerate, support, or generate fundamentalist terrorism.
SELF-SABOTAGE? Interesting theory about Dean by Roger L. Simon:
It may be that deep down Dean does not want to be elected. I know that sounds like an outrageous comment, especially since he is so obviously ambitious, but some of his behavior would seem to indicate self-sabotage. In this reading, which I am coming to believe, what Dean really wants is to win the nomination (he'll get probably get that) and then go down in flames. This way he gets to feel he's "right" without the terrible responsibility of governing, which I think only part of him wants.Simon believe he's guilty of "cheapjack analysis here", but I think there's a real validity to his hypothesis.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, SADDAM! From the 1-22 Battalion of the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division.
(Bet that photo's driving the folks at Reuters absolutely nuts.)
IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP FOR THE HOLIDAY SEASON: Friends don't give friends pan & scan DVDs.
THE PAUL KRUGMAN-JOHN McCAIN CONNECTION, as discovered by Jonah Goldberg.
I think it's a fair analogy, myself.
REMEMBERING THE LOWS OF 2003: Brent Bozell writes:
Fifty years from now, school children may learn that 2003 was the year President Bush liberated Iraq, creating a prosperous powerhouse of democratic capitalism in the Middle East. We don't know how it will turn out, of course. But we know one thing: the first draft of history out of our national media came from the angry left, furious at the exercise of American power and solicitous of the dictator now in the dock.The list is available here.
The worst media eruptions of 2003 are now collected in the Media Research Center’s annual greatest-misses collection known as the Best of Notable Quotables. Forty-six judges selected the ugliest of the ugly, lest we forget how ridiculous our media elite can be.
But remember...there's no media bias!
THE RUNNER STUMBLES: Dean lies about the role of his brother's involvement in Vietnam, and the New York Times picks up on it, meaning there's a slight chance that the rest of the media will as well. (Maybe.)
Either way, this should be interesting to watch.
UPDATE: NRO's "The Corner" has more on Dean and his late brother. Start here and scroll up.
Am I the only one who thinks it's more than a little weird that TIME Magazine names "The American Soldier" as their "Person of the Year," only days after publishing a story by a TIME reporter who's hangin' out with the mujahideen trying to kill that same "Person of the Year?"No, he's not. And be sure to read Johnson's comments section as well. As commenter #4 wrote, "Someone was saying the other day about the Time "WE GOT HIM!" cover that suddenly it's 'we'? How convenient."
Pick a side boys, so the readers know where you stand.
MENTAL THERAPY: Brett Favre's father passed away suddenly on Sunday. So what does Favre do for therapy on Monday?
Pass the daylights out of the Oakland Raiders on Monday Night Football, for a final score of 41 to 7.
As Rich Eisen said on the NFL Channel after the game, when Favre dons his yellow blazer at Canton, they'll be talking about this game.
"SAVOR IT", Mona Charen writes:
Adolf Hitler deprived the Allies of the satisfaction of executing him. Josef Stalin died in his bed. Pol Pot died of natural causes. But Saddam Hussein, that vicious, depraved worm of a man, was plucked from his rathole. Ah the great warrior. The author of the Mother of All Battles. The man who claimed he would drive the "invaders" from Iraq. The man who forced thousands of Iraqis to sacrifice their lives so he could continue his squalid and luxurious spree in his many palaces.Read the whole thing.This modern-day Saladin (another of his conceits) didn't even have the courage to kill himself in the end, but submitted meekly, with an offer to "negotiate."
SISTER CITIES: Dean's World has a modest proposal to help fight terrorism.
I like it, myself.
SOLSTICE SWOON: Dolphins out of playoffs even earlier this year, the first time since 1989 the team missed the postseason in consecutive seasons. Could head coach Dave Wannstedt get the axe?
HEARST CASTLE APPARENTLY UNDAMAGED:
Hearst Castle reported no obvious damage and no injuries, said Roy Stearns, spokesman for the state Department of Parks and Recreation. A crew was to go over its 150 rooms in detail; the only damage found immediately was a blown transformer at a campground, Stearns said.The castle is particularly popular this time of year because it is decorated with the Hearst Christmas ornaments.
"People come from far and wide to see that, because it's pretty spectacular," Stearns said.
At least three dead in the city of Paso Robles, California.
Minor damage to Vanderberg Air Force Base.
Pacific Gas & Electric, said about 40,000 customers were without power after the quake triggered rockslides that brought down power lines near San Luis Obispo, but no damage was reported at PG&E's Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, about 100 miles from the epicenter.
Buildings in San Jose and other parts of Silicon Valley swayed.
In San Francisco, the upper floors of the 20-story federal courthouse swayed for about 30 seconds.
Very Late Update: 10/30/07: This post is from 2003. For those searching for details on today's earthquake in San Jose via Google, click here.
There was an earthquake, 6.5 on the Richter scale, at about 11:15 in San Simeon (home of the Hearst Castle). I typically blog out of my home office in a San Jose suburb 130 miles or so away, and I definitely felt it. My office chair began to feel like it was pivoting on the joint that connects the wheels to the bottom of the chair, and then I noticed the Venetian blinds swaying a bit back and forth.
Here's a map of the epicenter, as well as details of the quake.
UPDATE: Drudge has the police gumball on, and links to this report.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Police gumball off, but he's doing continuous updates. Blogger's being a bit hinkey, but it was like that before the quake, when I uploaded the post below.
A THOUGHT: Hey, this Internet thing seems to be holding up pretty good. Of course, it was designed to handle much bigger bangs than this one.
ANOTHER OTHER UPDATE: Here's a report from the AP wire.
The CIA told the Clinton administration about ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda as early as 1996, according to Stephen F. Hayes of The Weekly Standard, who also includes quotes from a news report run by ABC:
The al Shifa [pharmaceutical plant] in Sudan was largely destroyed after being hit by six Tomahawk missiles. John McWethy, national security correspondent for ABC News, reported the story on August 25, 1998:As Hayes writes, "Democrats who before the war discounted the possibility of any connection between Iraq and al Qaeda have largely fallen silent".Before the pharmaceutical plant was reduced to rubble by American cruise missiles, the CIA was secretly gathering evidence that ended up putting the facility on America's target list. Intelligence sources say their agents clandestinely gathered soil samples outside the plant and found, quote, "strong evidence" of a chemical compound called EMPTA, a compound that has only one known purpose, to make VX nerve gas.Then, the connection:The U.S. had been suspicious for months, partly because of Osama bin Laden's financial ties, but also because of strong connections to Iraq. Sources say the U.S. had intercepted phone calls from the plant to a man in Iraq who runs that country's chemical weapons program.
As well they should.
CAPTURE OF SADDAM BRINGS "CLOSURE" to retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf.
MARK STEYN: "A good week, I would say, for cowboy ''unilateralists.' "
THE GHOSTS OF TECHNO-CHRISTMAS PAST, and present, as explored by Ralph Kinney Bennett, of Tech Central Station.
"A MAN OUTSIDE": Scott W. Johnson looks at the Minneapolis Star Tribune's permissive attitude towards, and lax reporting about transients. Johnson asks the tough questions of the Strib that once, a long time ago, newspapermen used to ask of their interview subjects.
UPDATE: Johnson also has a hard-hitting editorial in the Strib today, reminding Walter Mondale that, given the administration he served in, criticizing George Bush's foreign policy might not be such a good idea.
OSAMA BIN BOGUS: "Busted", writes Glenn Reynolds.
CLARK DROPS AN S-BOMB, live on C-SPAN, a couple of weeks after Kerry used the F-word in an interview with Rolling Stone.
Personally, I like to see a much more careful and nuanced use of language amongst would-be presidents. And let's face it: a crude, cowboy-like use of profanity isn't likely to go over well with a crowd that favors a more metrosexual approach to presidential discourse.
TINA BROWN ON WEDNESDAY:
It had been a particularly obnoxious week for a crowd that favors a more metrosexual approach to foreign relations.Steven Den Beste, today:
In the wake of the capture of Saddam Hussein and a very broad roundup of other insurgents, those who have been hoping for American failure have now been blindsided with another hammer blow: Qaddafi announced that Libya would abandon all its secret programs to develop WMDs and would cooperate with international verification efforts.(Emphasis mine.)What makes this even worse is that this is a purely diplomatic achievement, not a military one.
So will Tina and her cocktail party crowd admit that maybe, just maybe, they were wrong about Bush and his team?
ONE YEAR TO THE DAY since Bill Parcells interest in coaching the Dallas Cowboys became public, they're in the playoffs for the first time since 1999, and have a winning record for the first time since 1998. Parcells becomes the only head coach to lead four different teams into the playoffs.
Here are the rest of the NFL playoff scenarios.
INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST RESTORATION: There's an interesting profile on Apple's Website of John D. Lowry, the man who restored the Indiana Jones films for DVD.
Needless to say, he did a helluva job--they look great.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: Orrin Judd turns conventional wisdom on its head and writes:
No belief requires greater and more repressive conformity than that every individual is entitled to their own faith. The reasons for this are twofold and rather obvious: first, any manifestation of an organized and popular belief system must be attacked, lest those who differ be made to feel so much as uncomfortable--this is variously referred to as multiculturalism, tolerance, or political correctness; second, because there are no longer any socially imposed shared behavioral standards, the State must step in and dictate and enforce its own standards. So does Ms Hunt's imagined freedom lead inevitably to its opposite. Brits and other Europeans are no less conformist than Americans, they just conform to a belief which is so indivualistic as to make society untenable and to make statism necessary.He's absolutely right: individual liberty requires great personal responsibility. Just ask that sage philosopher, the late Ben Parker.
CHARLES JOHNSON WRITES that the media is criticizing the plan by the Coalition Provisional Authority to transmit news footage from Iraq directly via satellite, for use by local media outlets:
So in other words, they admit the media focus on violence and aren't very interested in the reconstruction of Iraq, but at the same time would also like to reassure us that they're unbiased. They've simply decided what information is appropriate for us to consume. Shh! Relax! Just go back to sleep!And we can't have that, can we?I must have missed the part where the government was planning to force people to watch C-SPAN Baghdad, in Clockwork Orange-style restraint chairs with eyelid clamps. Media elites sure do start to seethe (in their mild-mannered fashion) at the possibility of losing the tiniest bit of control over the information spigot.
It's hard to see anything wrong with another point of view from Iraq, even if it does come from (horror!) the US government. If people aren't interested, they won't watch. What the elites are really worried about is that people will begin making up their own minds.
THE REVOLUTION WILL BE DRISCOLL-IZED, PART II: I have an article on NFL Films in the January issue of Videomaker magazine. Having grown-up literally 15 minutes away (by car) from their offices in Mt. Laurel, this was a treat to write.
I also have a fun rant in defense of cell phones on the back page of the December issue of Electronic House.
And be sure to check out these other Ed-equipped publications, available at your local newsstand!
IS IT TIME FOR THE BBC TO RETIRE? Oh God, yes.
IS IT TIME FOR JERRY RICE TO RETIRE? Skip Bayless thinks so.
HAWKISH DEMOCRATS AND WMDs:
Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process. The responsibility of the United States in this conflict is to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, to minimize the danger to our troops and to diminish the suffering of the Iraqi people.-- House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, in a statement in December 1998 supporting President Clinton's four-day bombing of Iraq.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "I think your moral compass has gone crazy"--David Welch, US ambassador to Egypt.
Read the whole thing.
"SAD BUT TRUE, defending America has truly become a partisan issue", writes John Hawkins, riffing on a comment that James Taranto made yesterday.
GETTING LOOPY: I have an article on getting started with Acid Loops, titled "Meaningful Arbitrary Collisions of Events" in Blogcritics.
Complete with my own MP3s, for your listening pleasure!
TRANSNATIONALISM AND SADDAM'S TRIAL: Steven Den Beste writes that its the last gasp for the tranzis to be taken seriously.
(If you're unfamiliar with epithets like "tranzis", be sure to read Den Beste's original post on transnational progressivism, which we linked to back in August of last year.)
NEAL O'DONNELL REJOINS TITANS: O'Donnell had been cut before the season because of the salary-cap, but Tennessee needs a QB that's healthy and knows their system:
Getting O'Donnell back became a necessity after Billy Volek suffered a lacerated spleen in the Titans' 28-26 victory over Buffalo on Sunday. Rookie Jason Gesser has been the only healthy quarterback, with Steve McNair nursing a cracked bone spur in his left ankle.Prior to serving as McNair's backup in Tennessee, O'Donnell is best known for his role as the Steelers' QB of the early to mid 1990s, when he led them to four playoff appearances and a Super Bowl appearance.The Titans had been working since Tuesday to reach a deal that would make O'Donnell happy and keep the team under the salary cap.
WHEN DID THE MIDDLE INITIAL IN NFL stand for France? AP reports that the "NFL fines Bengals QB Jon Kitna for wearing cap marked with cross".
BEHIND "ENEMY" LINES: Roger L. Simon blogs about his recent trip to France. Needless to say, things are not pretty there:
A look at this photograph I took of a Jewish school tells you a lot. Despite its almost block-length size there is no sign or name on the building, certainly no Hebrew letters or Jewish words of any kind to identify it as if it were a secret government installation or think tank. You would have no idea what it was except for a simple "College" written by one of the doors. When I stopped to take this picture, a barrel-chested man who looked like an expert in karate or krav maga, obviously a security guard, rushed out the door in seconds to see who I was, demanding to know what I was doing there. I had to repeat for him several times that I was Jew from California before he relaxed and asked me to please put away my camera. On second thought I'm not going to post the picture. Instead I will post this--the graffiti in the sidewalk all over the 13th Arrondisment where this school was located.Read the whole thing.The French Jewish culture, which gave our world, among so many others, Modigliani, Soutine, Chagall, Proust, Bergson and Serge Gainsbourg may soon be gone.
KYOTO: "All is well that ends well", says Hans H.J. Labohm, senior visiting fellow, Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael, in Tech Central Station.
THE MOTHERSHIP LANDS IN NEVERLAND: According to the New York Post, Michael Jackson became a member of the Nation of Islam yesterday. Given the racist epithets that Jackson was quoted as saying last year about Sony's Tommy Mottola, is it really all that surprising?
THE KAMA SUTRA...of Imperial Scout Walkers.
That's it--I've officially seen everything possible on the Internet. Night all! Drive safely!
(Found via Across The Atlantic.)
Speaking of drifting out of the mainstream, This column, by Tina Brown, titled, "Tough Time For Democrats" is ripe for satire. Check out this bit, from the opening paragraph:
I was at a media-heavy Manhattan dinner party that vividly dramatized the pre-spider hole mood. The guests -- mostly Democrats, with a smattering of moderate Republicans -- were unanimously kissing off Bush. It had been a particularly obnoxious week for a crowd that favors a more metrosexual approach to foreign relations..."A more metrosexual approach to foreign relations"?
That's a staggeringly silly sentence--and Brown's attitude throughout this piece (much like Maureen Dowd's tone) is so 1990s in its lack of seriousness. But wait--she's just getting started!
"Good riddance" may not be a particularly eloquent thing for Bush to say about Saddam -- but comic-strip heroes don't have to be eloquent. In his interview with Diane Sawyer, Bush was like a guy in a sports bar, not much inclined to big-think. Dirty Harry doesn't talk much, and always in words of one syllable, but while the police commissioner is still fretting about getting a proper search warrant Harry has already offed the bad guy with his great big pistol.But we didn't "off" Hussein--he's still alive, and no matter what his fate is, it will be more merciful than those that he put--feet first--into the shredder.
And as far as Bush being "a guy in a sports bar, not much inclined to big-think", maybe Brown should read the recent article by Jonathan Rauch, which portrays Bush as nothing less than a latter day FDR.
Brown ends, astonishingly, with Hillary Clinton as staunch cold warrior (and die-hard American ally) Margaret Thatcher:
Planted solidly behind the lectern with only intermittent reference to her notes [Hillary] exuded the sense of a well-filled mind and life. Maybe not yet a credible commander-in-chief but at least a Democratic Major Barbara. Distantly one could hear the voice of Maggie Thatcher during the Gulf War in 1990, commanding Bush 41 not to "go wobbly." She will wait this one out. Self-discipline, not self-doubt.If Hillary had commanded her husband not to go wobbily, Al Gore would be far more likely to be president today, and either way, Bill Clinton would have gotten the glory (not the least of which would have come from Brown herself) that Bush is receiving from the American people--largely by cleaning up the messes in the Middle East that Clinton (Bill, not Hillary) ignored.
Brown, and her cocktail party coterie, "mostly Democrats, with a smattering of moderate Republicans"--in other words, RINOs--favor "a more metrosexual approach to foreign relations".
Unfortunately, out in the real world, Saddam, al Qaida, the PLO and other terrorists rarely reciprocate such niceties. And Bush, (whose campaign slogan against would-be metrosexual Howard Dean could be, as James Lileks recently wrote, "He doesn't moisturize. He doesn't tweeze. And he never had a pedicure"), seems to get that.
Which explains the title of Brown's cri de coeur.
THE OLIVER STONE WING OF THE DNC: The Washington Times has a nice roundup of some of the conspiracy theories blowing through the Democratic Party, as espoused by supposedly serious people, such as former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and leading Democratic presidential candidate, Howard Dean. The article quotes Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore's presidential campaign in 2000, who understands the danger of these wild rumors and innuendo:
[Brazile] said the comments of Mrs. Albright and Mr. Dean and Mr. McDermott have "no place in our dialogue on this very serious issue. I think most Americans have some lingering doubts about what happened on September 11, but until the commission and Congress completes its investigation, I think it best if people hold these views to themselves. But because we don't yet have a nominee, it's all out in the open."And having all these Oliver Stone and X-File conspiracy theories risks, as one unnamed Democrat is quoted as saying, the party drifting out of the "mainstream."
UPDATE: Heh.
OTTO GRAHAM DEAD: The Hall of Fame QB of the Cleveland Browns, back when Paul Brown was their coach, was 82.
JIM FASSEL OUT AS GIANTS COACH: He'll coach the remaing two games (including Sunday's against Dallas, who will be in the playoffs with a win) and then move on.
YOU KNOW WHAT'S REALLY DEPRESSING about the John Rhys-Davis interview that Andrew Sullivan quotes?
That Rhys-Davis has to add, "I'm burying my career so substantially in these interviews that it's painful". The fact that he's merely speaking logical, common sense statements, and that he's worried how it could affect his career, speaks volumes of how out of touch the artists' enclave in Los Angeles is.
ARMING PILOTS: The Bush Administration (and the TSA) continue to drag their feet, according to this report.
BUT WHAT WOULD VIRGIL SOLLOZO THINK? Dick Morris believes that Hillary could become Howard Dean's candidate for vice president.
Of course, given Morris's track record of previous prognostications...
THE GOREFATHER: Daniel Henninger of the Journal looks at the DNC through a Puzoian eye.
NEXT TUESDAY ON BRAVO, it's a special episode of Queer Eye For The Straight Guy...
SHOOT THE PRESIDENT, receive unsupervised visits to your parents. What a smart move, judge.
Willie Horton could not be reached for comment.
UPDATE: Wow--now it makes a little more sense. Check out the judge's track record. (Via Drudge.)
THE BIKE PATH LEFT: Brilliant Mark Steyn piece in The Wall Street Journal:
There was a revealing moment on MSNBC the other night. Chris Matthews asked Dr. Dean whether Osama bin Laden should be tried in an American court or at The Hague. "I don't think it makes a lot of difference," said the governor airily. Mr. Matthews pressed once more. "It doesn't make a lot of difference to me," he said again. Some of us think what's left of Osama is already hard enough to scrape off the cave floor and put in a matchbox, never mind fly to the Netherlands. But, just for the sake of argument, his bloodiest crime was committed on American soil; American courts, unlike the international ones, would have the option of the death penalty. But Gov. Dean couldn't have been less interested. So how about Saddam? The Hague "suits me fine," he said, the very model of ennui. Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude.That's just a taste--read the whole thing.So what does get the Dean juices going? A few days later, the governor was on CNN and Judy Woodruff asked him about his admission that he'd left the Episcopal Church and become a Congregationalist because "I had a big fight with a local Episcopal church over the bike path." I hasten to add that, in contrast to current Anglican controversies over gay marriage in British Columbia and gay bishops in New Hampshire, this does not appear to have been a gay bike path: its orientation was not an issue; it would seem to be a rare example of a non-gay controversy in the Anglican Communion. But nevertheless it provoked Howard into "a big fight." "I was fighting to have public access to the waterfront, and we were fighting very hard in the citizens group," he told Judy Woodruff. Fighting, fighting, fighting.
And that's our pugnacious little Democrat. On Osama bin Laden, he's Mister Insouciant. But he gets mad about bike paths. Destroy the World Trade Center and he's languid and laconic and blasé. Obstruct plans to convert the ravaged site into a memorial bike path and he'll hunt you down wherever you are.
I think a meme was born today.
UPDATE: Charles Johnson is not happy:
Being a cyclist, however, and a member of the Bike-Path Right, I have to say that I'm mortally offended by Steyn's heinous conflation of cycling with the Dean campaign. I hereby declare a fat-tire-wa on Steyn's narrow Canadian tuchis.Actually, I think he'll get over it. Charles has a pretty good handlebar on things.Bike paths aren't just for angry dwarves.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO the great Arthur C. Clarke, who turns 86 today.
A PICTURE SPEAKS A 1000 WORDS, even when CNN doesn't.
OF HOWARD DEAN, Orrin Judd writes, "Here's a guy who was on top of the world last Friday, having won the endorsement of his Party's fallen martyr. Today he has the dean of Iowa journalism asking if his candidacy is viable..."
UPDATE: Charles Johnson adds:
Remember, this is the same Howard Dean (unless he has an equally evil twin) who, a week ago, was using the Bush administration's "failure to catch Saddam or bin Laden" to score political points from the incredibly addled Deaniacs. Suddenly, he's trying to argue that capturing Saddam is no big deal. In all the years I've been following politics I don't believe I have ever seen a more blatant case of the old switcheroo.And Andrew Sullivan fisks the recent speeches by Dean, and Hillary, to boot.
CLASS ACT: Sports Illustrated's Peter King calls Green Bay's Mike Sherman "the coach of the week":
Call me sentimental. But when Sherman brought a wheelchair-bound U.S. soldier -- who had served in Iraq and was in San Diego to watch the Pack's win over the Chargers -- into the locker room after the game ... and then gave him the game ball ... well, on the day Saddam Hussein was captured, no coach made a better call.And that's rather classy of King to write, as well.
SUSPENSIONS WOULD STOP SHOWOFFS: Steve Wilstein of AP writes:
Old standards of sportsmanship have been dying for a long time. Ages ago it was considered cool for a player scoring a touchdown to flip the ball nonchalantly to the ground and run, head down, off the field. Then came ball spins and other tricks, dancing, prancing and in-your-face taunting. The sublime, indeed, had turned ridiculous.I agree. I don't necessarily want to return to the old days of coolly flipping the ball to the ref after a score, but I think there's a balance--I don't want to see the NFL become the XFL, either.After the [Terrell Owens Sharpie incident], NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue sent a memo around the league clarifying that if a player has objects that are not part of the uniform on the field or sideline he will be given an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. Everyone knew it also would mean a fine, something Owens escaped because no one had anticipated a player being quite so boorish.
* * * Fans have a stake in it because this kind of stuff doesn't enhance games, it diminishes them. When sportsmanship goes, the sport is cheapened.The way to end the nonsense is to skip a fine and suspend [New Orleans Saints wide receiver Joe Horn] for a game.
How big a grin do you think Horn would be flashing if he were sidelined next Sunday against Jacksonville with the 7-7 Saints' playoff hopes on the line?
Sitting a star like Horn, or any starter, would affect the whole team and the outcome of the game.
UPDATE: Don't hold your breath, sports fans. Horn will be fined $30,000 by the NFL. No suspension planned.
FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN TIKRIT, David Letterman's "Top Ten Questions Asked by Saddam Hussein When He Was Captured".
I kind of like number four, myself.
THE 2003 DISHONEST REPORTING "AWARD", from HonestReporting.com: Two guesses as to which "news agency" won the "award" for the most skewed and biased "coverage" of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
(Somebody should give the winner an award for most use of scare quotes as well.)
THE REVOLUTION WILL BE DRISCOLL-IZED! While I usually have a few articles in print each month, I haven't written a flagrantly self-promotional update lately, so here's a quick round up of the some of the more unusual stuff I have out there right now.
Because the new buzz word du jour is "internationalization", I have a nifty (if I do say so myself) article on music arranging in this issue of England's Computer Music magazine, which is available at Borders, and other US book and magazine sellers--or click here to subscribe. The magazine is bundled with a CD-ROM of music programs, samples, loops, and other fun stuff.
And I'm in the debut issue of Servo magazine. (That's me on the cover, in a rare early-morning photograph.) The article that I mentioned back in August, on the history of robots in the movies is the first cover story of the magazine. I interviewed Don Bies, who operates R2-D2 for LucasFilm, David Gerrold (who created the tribbles of the original Star Trek series, and helped program Mr. Data for The Next Generation), and David Stork, the author of Hal's Legacy, a book which looked at what it would take to actually build the famous computer of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Finally, I'm writing, two--two--TWO newsletters a month (actually three, because one is bi-weekly) for Electronic House magazine, one on home entertainment, and another on electronic ideas for every room. Click here to subscribe, or to simply read 'em online--they're free!
TALK ABOUT PHONING IT IN: The NFL is considering a fine or suspension for New Orleans Saints wide receiver Joe Horn. Horn pulled out a cell phone that he had previously hidden in a goal post and made a call after scoring a touchdown in last night's game against the Giants. The game--and Horn's stunt--was covered nationally by ESPN.
AP reports that last year, "after San Francisco's Terrell Owens pulled a pen out of his sock and autographed a football after scoring a touchdown in a game, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue sent a memo to all teams warning that other such stunts would be punished." For the sake of sportsmanship, lets hope the NFL keeps its word.
THAT WAS FAST: Rich McKay, formerly of the Tampa Bay Bucs, was hired as general manager of the Atlanta Falcons today.
IS THERE ANOTHER FORD in the Republicans' future? Orrin Judd writes that Karl Rove should be getting 33 year old Harold Ford on the blower--and quick.
PETER JENNINGS NEVER FAILS: "There’s not a good deal for Iraqis to be happy about at the moment. Life is still very chaotic, beset by violence in many cases, huge shortages. In some respects, Iraqis keep telling us life is not as stable for them as it was when Saddam Hussein was in power."
Guess Peter forgot to interview these folks.
Which is why Glenn Reynolds' latest MSNBC column is all about, as Glenn puts it, "the dictatorship of the Big Media, which is losing its stranglehold over news".
UPDATE: Too bad Peter doesn't read Steven Den Beste. Maybe he should start.
PASS THE ICE TEA, AL: Matt Drudge writes:
Frustrated with the lack of domestic support, left-leaning website MoveOn.org has apparently been reaching beyond American borders to generate cash revenue over the internet!As usual, Drudge signs off with "Developing..."The provocative international fundraising strategy threatens to embroil the presidential candidacies of General Wesley Clark and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean. Both men are named on international fundraising websites suggesting donations to MoveOn.org.
* * * "To avoid even the appearance of impropriety, we are not going to take contributions from overseas," Wes Boyd, one of the founders of MoveOn.org, explained this weekend.Boyd refused to disclose how much revenue had already been generated from overseas sources.
WAITING FOR ANTAR: Charles Paul Freund looks at the cultural reasons why Saddam was supposed to kill himself--and the shame that many in the Middle East felt by his not doing so.
JAMES TARANTO:
The Angry Left is America's equivalent of the Palestinians: a self-destructive political movement based on nothing but a collection of grievances rooted in a falsified, self-justifying history. These grievances so distort their view of the world that they lose the capacity for ordinary moral judgment and cannot understand something as simple as that the fall of a genocidal tyrant is a good thing.Or it all could be because of Colin Powell's prostate, as angy leftist Eric Alterman suggests...
FRENCH KISS: Charles Johnson looks at "Killers in Love".
THE GALLOWAY AWARD: Andrew Sullivan has lots of nominees, for his award named after the British Labour Party politician who was in a certain recently captured tyrant's pocket.
"THE POOR MAN'S STALIN": Nice turn of the phrase by the folks at Samizdata.net.
WHERE WAS N.O.W.? The New Criterion asks why feminists have been so silent about a man, and a place, that treats women so despicably. Read the whole thing.
I’ve read all the nutball far-left sites worrying about the worrisome worries – does this help Dub? Was it all faked? Surely America will see that the man paraded before the cameras was a soy-based simulacrum cooked up in the Halliburton labs? It’s amusing to troll the fevered swamps, but nothing they say matters in the end. The history texts will note that Baghdad fell on this date, Saddam was captured on that date, and the events between the two events will fill up a paragraph at best. Cruel but true. This was a big event, but there are bigger events to come.Exactly.We live in an age where we’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop. And drop it does. And drop again it will.
Charles Johnson has a link to the Telegraph's story on Saddam's connection with Mohammed Atta and Abu Nidal, and astonishing photos, to boot.
KERRY STILL CRITICAL OF BUSH ADMINISTRATION: Even if they can't call it a great day for Iraq and Americans, why can't any of these guys (or their speechwriters) do the classy thing and simply say, "Many Iraqis and Americans are rejoicing today, and it wouldn't be right to interject politics into things at this moment. We'll have plenty of time for that later".
Instead the Copperhead Conjunction reigns supreme for most of the Democrats (Joe Lieberman and Joe Biden being the notable exceptions).
UPDATE: George Will writes:
No Democrat is running for president as a little ray of sunshine, but John Kerry used the occasion Sunday morning to tell Fox News that although the capture was good, the administration still has not done enough about AIDS. Can someone that tone-deaf govern?Howard Dean was more gracious than he was when Hussein fled Baghdad. Then Dean said 'I suppose' that Hussein's removal was a good thing. The capture was the third element in last week's trifecta for George W. Bush, coming after Al Gore strengthened the candidacy of Bush's preferred opponent and the Dow passed 10,000. But perhaps Sunday's euphoria among the majority of next November's voters will cause Democrats to pause on their double-time march toward nominating the one serious candidate of whom it can be indisputably said that, were he president, Hussein would still be a president too.
NEW IRAQI LEADERS CONFRONT THEIR FORMER DICTATOR: Devastating article in the New York Times, which quotes, among others, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, one of the members of Iraq's Governing Council, and someone who was tortured in 1979 by Saddam's henchmen:
Mr. Rubaie said: "One thing which is very important is that this man had with him underground when they arrested him two AK-47's and did not shoot one bullet. I told him, `You keep on saying that you are a brave man and a proud Arab.' I said, `When they arrested you why didn't you shoot one bullet? You are a coward.'I'll bet the French government used some rather colorful language themselves today as well."And he started to use very colorful language. Basically, he used all his French."
Mr. Rubaie added: "I was so angry because this guy has caused so much damage. He has ruined the whole country. He has ruined 25 million people.
"And I have to confess that the last word was for me: I was the last to leave the room and I said, `May God curse you. Tell me, when are you going to be accountable to God and the day of judgment? What are you going to tell Him about Halabja and the mass graves, the Iran-Iraq war, thousands and thousands executed? What are you going to tell God?' He was exercising his French language."
ANDREW SULLIVAN:
This event must, of course, come as a terrible blow to many ordinary Arabs, who have been fed for years on the possibility that Saddam might be the next Caliph. He wasn't deposed by Arabs; he didn't put up a fight; he is no martyr either - just a coward in a miserable little hole. The point of this is not to humiliate Arabs, of course. But it is to attempt to break the mass delusions that have both kept other dictators in power and prevented progress in the Arab world. Taking Saddam alive - and giving him all the dignity of a bedraggled hobo - is about as big a propaganda victory as the forces against terror can hope to accomplish.Be sure to also read the post below about the Telegraph's discovery of a document that they claim proves a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda.
OH, THAT LIBERAL MEDIA: Read the comments that Robert Kaiser, associate editor of the Washington Post, said in an online chat today.
BEST OF THE WEB's James Taranto has a rare Sunday column, linking and thinking about Saddam's capture.
JOY TO THE WORLD: Peggy Noonan writes:
All the journalists and politicians, they are always embarrassed to feel joy when something like this happens. They fear it will show a lack of understanding that history is a heavy and ponderous thing, a big tragedy machine, and all progress is illusory. Celebrating a military triumph--and this was among other things a military triumph--seems to them tantamount to Kiplingism, quaintly ignorant and unhelpfully nationalistic. That's why everyone on TV today is furrowing his brow. They know joy is the wrong thing to be feeling. It's unsophisticated.Thanks, God.But normal people don't have to be sophisticated. They can be normal. And happy. And say what normal Americans say when something great in history happens. 'Thanks, God. Thanks a lot.'
CLICK FAST, Because I'm sure it will be deleted quickly, but as of the time of this post, Saddam's lice are up for bidding on eBay!
(Link via John Hawkins, who's also linking to more serious stuff.)
"AL GORE MUST BE THINKING LIFE IS PRETTY UNFAIR ABOUT NOW": Mackubin Thomas Owens has some thoughts on how the left is viewing Saddam's capture.
And there are several other articles on Saddam's capture on NRO's homepage.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. HUSSEIN: Orrin Judd has some thoughts on Saddam's capture. Be sure to read the comments, as well.
"THANK GOD HE'S ALIVE", writes Lee Harris:
We took Saddam Hussein alive, and, in doing this, we have done a great deal more than simply knock down a statue of a dictator -- we have vanquished a collective nightmare. We have turned the light on a bogey-man, and revealed him to be a broken old man, hiding fearfully in a six by eight hole.I wonder if Saddam can be coerced (by any means necessary, as far as I'm concerned), to issue a final "surrender, lay down your arms" speech to the remaining pro-Baathist troops still fighting.We can see now how foolish we were to regret not rubbing him out that first night, when we dropped the bunker-piercing bomb on what we had been told was his hide-out. Had we pulverized him then, he might well have returned to claim a permanent place in the Iraqi imagination, like a kind of Mesopotamian Freddy Krueger. But, luckily, we missed him, and now we can see that there was a providence in our failure -- as so often there is in our ordinary lives as well.
That is the problem of living through history, rather than reading about it when it is over. What at first appears a triumph may be just a prelude to disaster; what at first seems a failure may prove to be merely a necessary step toward a final success. The capture of Saddam Hussein may not prove to be the turning point when, decades from now, we look back on this period; but, for right now, it certainly feels like it.
I wonder how many of them will listen.
PAYBACK: Stephen Green writes, "Remember when some Palestinians danced in the streets on 9/11? They ain't dancing now".
GOT HIM! InstaPundit has lots of links and thoughts on Saddam's capture. Start here, then go to his main page.
I'LL BELIEVE WHEN I READ FURTHER REPORTS and more details, but as of now, there's a headline on the AP wire that reads:
UPDATE (2:54 AM): Fox News is certainly acting like it's true, reporting "multiple US sources" who confirm Saddam's captured.
CONGRATULATIONS TO ERIC AND DAWN OLSEN of Blogcritics: It's a boy!
"NOSTALGIE POUR LA DEFAITE": American Digest looks at the root causes of the media's subconscious yearning for American defeat.
GET WELL, SCOTTY MOORE: Elvis's great guitarist, 71, is in serious but stable condition after surgery to remove a subdural hematoma. His doctors believe he'll be able to continue to play guitar after some physical therapy.
A BRAVE, HEROIC REPORTER: No, it's not necessarily an oxymoron.
CHARLES JOHNSON HAS "The Bush Zinger of the Month".
Johnson writes, "I can see already that the bastions of correct opinion (i.e. The New York Times, The Washington Post) are going to have twitching fits over this one. But I predict it’s going to play very well with most Americans."
I agree.
FIGHT ON THE RIGHT: Byron York looks at Grover Norquist, “Muslim outreach” and a feud between activists.
I DOUBT JACK WEBB WOULD APPROVE (and I'm not sure I do, either, to be honest), but this sheriff department's decaled slogan is more than a little amusing.
GOOD INTERVIEW OF THE LATE ROBERT BARTLEY by Rush Limbaugh, which makes a nice bookend with Bartley's interview from the early '90s with Brian Lamb of CSPAN.
ENEMIES OF THE GOOD: Michael Vlahos writes that:
The Administration is missing a strategic opportunity -- if it has not already lost it -- to change the way Muslims understand this war. This change would not move us to the outcome Americans desire, but it could promote what may be the best possible and only practical resolution of this war. The problem is that what is desired -- an all-American "triumph of democracy" -- makes the perfect the enemy of the good.Read the whole thing.
NICHOLAS STIX has a hard-hitting look at racial profiling.
MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL, TIMES TWO? The NFL is looking into two Monday night games each week.
Rumors that Paul Tagliabue is collecting DNA samples to produce multiple clones of Howard Cosell are unfounded, however.
JAMES CARVILLE HAS GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS regarding Howard Dean, in a staggering quote from a fiercely loyal Democratic partisan.
NO PAIN, NO GAIN: Robert Ellison, a reader of The New Criterion's Weblog, writes:
The genius of capitalism is that it harnesses the natural force created by the inverse correlation of risk and reward. Risk more (by investing and hiring, for example), and your potential reward rises. Risk nothing, and you can be sure to reap no reward.Of course, expecting the nations who make up the EU to understand risk and reward--or capitalism in general--is asking too much, isn't it?A year ago, the Bush administration offered a risk/reward game to America's allies over Iraq: make war, and reap the rewards of increased security and Iraqi liberty. Some nations refused the risk. The Bush administration has now announced that non-players will not reap the ancillary reward of American-financed contracts for the re-building of Iraq.
The administration's claim that the policy is driven by national security is, of course, a lie. But the policy is nonetheless a sound one that reinforces rather than harms free and fair trade, because it reinforces the capitalist risk/reward calculus. To include France, Russia, and Germany in the contract competition would be to spread risk-free reward.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, Bush is asking Europe to forgive Iraq's debt. This sounds like another of Bush's patented "making them an offer they can't accept" deals...
KARL ROVE IS QUAKING IN FEAR: Sid Blumenthal endorses Gore endorsing Dean.
Curious that Blumenthal mentions JFK, and dredges up the hoary Gore is the "rightfully elected president" canard in the same paragraph, when by some accounts, Nixon actually won the popular vote in '60!
MORNING IN AMERICA UPDATE: The Conference Board reports "2004 Will Be the U.S.'s Best Year Economically in Last 20 Years".
You heard it here first, folks...
UPDATE: The Dow closed at 10,008.16 today, above 10,000 for the first time since about May of 2002.
WILL THE LAST PERSON OUT OF CNN'S financial division please turn off the lights? Stuart Varney joins Fox News.
Incidentally, the article adds that Fox is considering adding a business channel to their line-up.
THE LATEST SUBSTITUTE FOR THE T-WORD IN REUTERSVILLE: "Civilian Gunmen"!
UPDATE: Meanwhile, the Times buries the pro-American Iraqi protests yesterday.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Geez, is this true, or what?
WHAT'S IN IT FOR AL: The Washington Times' Jack Kelly has a nice round-up of the chessboard that Al Gore examined when he decided to endore Dean:
So what's in it for Al?Scroll down for our previous coverage of Al and Howard.First, attention. Outside the Dean campaign, the number of Democrats thinking about Mr. Gore these last few months could be counted on fingers and toes. Now Al is back on the evening news. Fame is fleeting, but it is balm to a bruised ego.
Second, ambition. Mr. Gore would still very much like to be president. If a Democrat other than Mr. Dean wins the nomination and loses to Mr. Bush, Hillary Clinton will be the odds-on favorite for the nomination in 2008.
If Mr. Dean is nominated, he could choose Mr. Gore to replace Clinton apparatchik Terry McAuliffe as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, a post that would give Mr. Gore a platform from which to lay the groundwork for a campaign against Hillary, a campaign in which he, presumably, could have the grateful support of activists supporting Mr. Dean this time.
If Mr. Dean is routed, Mr. Gore's near victory in 2000 will look awfully good by comparison. Mr. Gore might enjoy reminding people that he got more votes, and a higher percentage of the vote, than Bill Clinton ever did.
And if Mr. Dean should win, Mr. Gore could be secretary of state, a handsome booby prize.
Mr. Gore isn't as smart as he imagines himself to be, but he's no dummy. He's no doubt noticed that real power in the Democratic Party has shifted to left-liberal special interest groups like MoveOn.Org, which can accept the big buck donations from fat cats like George Soros that the McCain-Feingold law forbids the Democratic Party from taking.
FREEDOM'S BEST FRIEND: A moving tribute to Bob Bartley by Peggy Noonan.
THE BUS COULD OVERTAKE FRANCO, and more than likely will this weekend, as Jerome Bettis is 5 yards away from passing Franco Harris (a fellow Steeler) on the NFL career rushing list.
OH, THAT LIBERAL MEDIA: This has to be one of the most vile metaphors I've seen yet from the Times.
DAN REEVES GETS THE AXE, with 3 games left in the Atlanta Falcons' season.
"DUKAKIS AFTER DARK", THE SEQUEL: Yeah, raise taxes, that's the ticket!
ANTI-TERRORISM MARCHES IN BAGHDAD: Glenn Reynolds has a thorough roundup of coverage, complete with links and photos.
SENATOR BUSYBODY: Hillary Clinton joins fight for national seatbelt law.
I love this statistic: "According to the highway safety advocates, about 79 percent of Americans buckle up on a regular basis - not good enough, they say". So naturally, we need more intrusive laws and more motorists pulled over, to get that remaining 21 percent buckled up.
STEVEN DEN BESTE HAS SOME THOUGHTS on the nations that opposed Iraq's liberation being excluded from the Iraqi rebuilding contracts.
THE BALTIMORE SNIPERS: Charles Johnson and Michelle Malkin take the PC-obsessed media to task for ignoring the snipers' jihad motivations.
Having read Bernard Goldberg's Arrogance over the weekend, I'm not at all surprised at the media's omissions in this story.
ROBERT BARTLEY, RIP: The great editor of The Wall Street Journal passes away at 66, after being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. James Taranto has a brief tribute.
ANTI-SEMITISM IN EUROPE: Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse...
CHANGING MOTIVES: In his syndicated column, Jonah Goldberg looks at Al Gore's sell out of Joe Lieberman for Howard Dean:
In 2000 Al Gore insisted that Joe Lieberman was the most qualified man to fill his shoes should a President Gore be unable to complete his term. Obviously, politics were a consideration, but Gore nonetheless made the plausible and necessary case that Lieberman was the best man to take his place.Read the whole thing.Since then we've been brutally attacked on our own soil, we've fought two conventional wars and we are continuing to fight a third on global terrorism. In the time since then, Joe Lieberman has been at the forefront of the war on terrorism in the Senate. He was pretty much the original drafter of the Department of Homeland Security, and in 2001 and 2002 he was the chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs committee. In short, not only is Lieberman more qualified than he was in 2000, but the things that made him qualified to be Al Gore's stand-in back then are all the more important after 9/11.
Meanwhile, Howard Dean was still an ex-governor of the second smallest state in 2000 and nothing he's done since then has made him any more qualified to be president. Like many of his fellow contenders, he sees the war on terrorism as a law enforcement issue. He sees nation-building (once an important issue for Gore) in Iraq to be so much imperial folly. Dean ridicules pretty much all of the centrist positions on defense and domestic policy that both Gore and Lieberman used to be synonymous with.
I understand Gore sees in Dean one qualification Lieberman doesn't have: the potential to win. But when you think about all that has happened since 9/11, for Gore to say that the post-9/11 world makes Howard Dean more, not less, qualified to be president than Joe Lieberman really shows how unserious Al Gore and his party have become.
THE WRIGHT STUFF: Thomas Sowell uses the upcoming 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first flight as a jumping off point for an essay on the dangers of "diversity" in education:
This mania for "diversity" has spread far and wide. When I looked through my nieces' high school math book, I saw many pictures of noted mathematicians but -- judging by those pictures -- you would never dream that anything worth noting had ever been done in mathematics by any white males.Sowell concludes, "In trying to cheapen those people as 'dead white males', we only cheapen ourselves and do nothing to promote similar achievements by people of every description. When the Wright brothers rose off the ground, we all rose off the ground."This petty-minded falsification of history is less disturbing than the indoctrination-minded "educators" who are twisting reality to fit their vision. Those who cannot tell the difference between education and brainwashing do not belong in our schools.
History is what happened, not what we wish had happened or what a theory says should have happened. One of the reasons for the great value of history is that it allows us to check our current beliefs against hard facts from around the world and across the centuries.
But history cannot be a reality check for today's fashionable visions when history is itself shaped by those visions. When that happens, we are sealing ourselves up in a closed world of assumptions.
There is no evidence that the Wright brothers intended the airplane to be flown, or ridden in, only by white people. Many of the great breakthroughs in science and technology were gifts to the whole human race. Those whose efforts created these breakthroughs were exalted because of their contributions to mankind, not to their particular tribe or sex.
HILLARY IN '08? Dean Esmay has some thoughts.
SOON TO BE A NEW BOOK BY JONAH GOLDBERG: CPO Sparkey takes a look at what the Socialism in National Socialism meant.
THE ULTIMATE DIFFERENTIAL THEORY OF US ARMED FORCES, as discovered by Sgt. Stryker.
Last week, I linked to a couple of jaw-dropping quotes from the 1940s and early '50s by Paul Robeson. When I was going through my archives, I found this recent classic about Communist Cuba, from Al Sharpton. And of course, Nelson Mandela and Harry Belafonte have paid a fair amount of lip-service to Castro as well.
Ayn Rand once said that "The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities". So why do men such as Mandela, and the late Robeson, who hold themselves out as seeking civil rights, admire leaders who crush them?
U.S. BARS IRAQ CONTRACTS FOR NATIONS THAT OPPOSED WAR: Payback time, for nations that opposed the liberation of Iraq. The New York Times reports:
The Pentagon has barred French, German and Russian companies from competing for $18.6 billion in contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq, saying the step "is necessary for the protection of the essential security interests of the United States."61 other countries? But I thought we acted unilaterally!The directive, which was issued by the deputy defense secretary, Paul D. Wolfowitz, represents perhaps the most substantive retaliation to date by the Bush administration against American allies who opposed its decision to go to war in Iraq.
The administration had warned before the war that countries that did not join an American-led coalition would not have a voice in decisions about the rebuilding of Iraq. But the administration had not previously made clear that French, German and Russian companies would be excluded from competing for the lucrative reconstruction contracts, which include the rebuilding of Iraq's infrastructure and equipping its army.
Under the guidelines, which were issued on Friday but became public knowledge today, only companies from the United States, Iraq and 61 other countries designated as "coalition partners" will be allowed to bid on the contracts, which are financed by American taxpayers.
MUGGERIDGE'S LAW* IN ACTION: Colin Powell appoints James Brown as "secretary of soul and foreign minister of funk", a a new and unusual, but apparently fictitious, senior diplomatic position, according to the State Department.
Hey, at least he didn't pick George Clinton.
LOTS OF THOUGHTS ON GORE AND DEAN, on James Taranto's "Best of the Web Today" column.
Taranto's first post is a hoot.
I BLAME GLOBAL WARMING: "Earthquake rumbles across Virginia".
THERE'S NO MEDIA BIAS. And when I say there is none, I do mean that there is a certain amount...
NOT THE SINGER: Former Democratic senator Paul Simon died after undergoing heart surgery yesterday. He was 75.
CAN'T SAY I LIKE THIS HEADLINE: "Bush Opposes Taiwan Bid for Independence".
"I WAS CAUGHT COMPLETLY OFF-GUARD", says Joe Lieberman, about Gore supporting Dean. Andrew Sullivan says he shouldn't have been--and I agree.
UPDATE: Rick Brookhiser has some thoughts on Gore's decision. "Politics is a harsh mistress; following her in youth makes her even harsher", Brookhiser writes. "After decades of self-discipline and deprivations, the experience of being repudiated by the voters, especially in a presidential run, has powerful and disturbing effects."
HOW THE SECURALIST GRINCHES stole Christmas at Ground Zero is the subject of this WSJ "OpinionJournal" piece.
THE JAY GATSBY/HOWARD DEAN CONNECTION, explored by Kevin Patrick.
Hey, at least Gatsby served his country during the war, unlike Dean.
GORE SUPPORTS DEAN, screwing the candidate backed by his former bosses (Clark) and his own running mate in 2000 (Lieberman) in the process.
Orrin Judd writes, "Say what you will about the Clintons, but they seem concerned about the Party, while Mr. Gore would seem to have picked the most anti-Bush candidate for that reason alone."
Andrew Sullivan's take? Sullivan writes:
You have to remember that just because almost everyone else on the planet thinks Al Gore's political career is over, Al Gore doesn't. By endorsing Dean now, he stands to get a major job in a potential Dean administration. Secretary of State? Supreme Court Justice? Who knows what elaborate scenarios Gore has been contemplating in his own mind. And if Dean goes down in flames (which must surely be the likeliest eventuality), Gore has allied himself with the energized, leftist Democratic base, and could position himself in 2008 as the real soul of the party - unlike that centrist opportunist, Senator Clinton. In fact, the minute after a Bush re-election, the Gore-Clinton struggle for control of the party begins again in earnest.RTWT.
UPDATE: And be sure to read Stephen Green's post on the subject, as well as the comments to it.
THE ULTIMATE STRAWMAN: Fred Barnes writes that President Bush "has never used the words 'Democrat' and 'unpatriotic' in the same sentence or in nearby sentences. In fact, he's never uttered the word 'unpatriotic' in public in any context."
That hasn't stopped Democrats complaining about it, however.
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: Silicon Valley, which has some of the most expensive property values on the planet, has an affordable housing glut, because developers can't find seniors and other low-income tenants to rent them out to.
Meanwhile, a wind-turbine energy production complex in the Altamont pass east of San Francisco--the type of power that the Greens love--has killed an estimated 22,000 birds. (Maybe PETA really will go nuclear!)
Anti-Semitic attacks in New York more than tripled since last year, according to the New York Post:
The statistics are chilling to even those who don't want to believe them: The number of anti-Semitic attacks in the city last month was more than triple that of a year ago - an ominous sign of "global anti-Semitism coming home," Jewish leaders warn.Meanwhile, when asked if anti-Semitism is on the increase, Noam Chomsky replies, "In the West, fortunately, it scarcely exists now".The vast majority of the attacks occurred in Brooklyn and mostly on the fringes of Jewish neighborhoods like Borough Park.
Of course, as Andrew Sullivan writes, "Chomsky has to deny it. Or else he would have to answer for consorting with those who practice it."
UPDATE: Here's another Chomsky whopper.
ANOTHER UPDATE: New York magazine has more, on anti-Semitism worldwide. They refer to "the new p.c. anti-Semitism". Parse the words in that sentence for a few moments--it's now politically correct for the left to be reflexively against Jews. Roger L. Simon's right: it feels very much like 1938.
RUN RALPH, RUN! Nader to test waters with fund raiser.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Al Sharpton run as an third party (fourth party?) candidate, as well.
"IF IT'S FROM MATTEL, IT'S SWELL", went the line about M-14s in The Short-Timers, one of the two books (along with Michael Herr's Dispatches) that Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket was based on. Charles Johnson is keeping track of the number of Palestinian boys carrying what AP and Reuters are dubbing "toy guns".
But as Johnson points out, in several cases, those guns are anything but toys. And even in the cases that they probably are, what sort of parents allows their kids to carry toy guns in a war zone?
"THE AGE OF HILARIOUS": England's Samizdata.net looks at San Francisco's mayoral election, (which is occurring tomorrow).
Be sure to read the comments.
CALIFORNIA'S FRANCHISE TAX BOARD: Worse than the IRS?
DR. EVIL'S FAVORITE NUMBER: Why is Lyndon LaRouche raking in nearly one million dollars from taxpayers?
PETA BEATER: A consumer group is taking on the animal 'rights' activists.
JOHN KERRY FINALLY REVEALS what his middle initial stands for.
THE PEACE-LOVING NEW YORK TIMES: Did one of the Times' bodyguards threaten to shoot an Iraqi citizen?
AS HEADS IS TAILS: James Taranto writes that while we won't know until next November whether the Republican Party has achieved a durable governing majority, "Democrats and liberals are beginning to sound like a beleaguered minority. They are employing many of the same complaints and tropes that Republicans and conservatives used during their decades in the political wilderness".
And he's got lots of examples to make his point.
FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN PARIS, FRANCE: John Hawkins ranks "Twenty Most Annoying Liberals In The United States".
BACK FROM A WEEKEND JAUNT TO SEATTLE, to see, among other things, the Funk Brothers in concert. They sounded fabulous. And Allan Slutsky did a great job of conducting the band, their supporting musicians, and vocalists.
MORE ON ROBESON, this time from Dave Kopel, who writes in the Rocky Mountain News:
"The U.S. Postal Service has announced a new stamp honoring black entertainer Paul Robeson. According to an Associated Press article by Jennifer C. Kerr (Post, Nov. 24), Robeson 'was labeled a subversive for his mid-century activism against racism and anti-Semitism.'Or to paraphrase something Mark Steyn recently wrote:Nonsense.
Sen. Hubert Humphrey and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt were mid-century activists against racism and anti-Semitism, and they were not labeled as subversives. Robeson was labeled as a subversive because he was one. Robeson was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA, which was under the direct control of the Soviet Union. Robeson was a fervent admirer of Josef Stalin, even after Stalin's genocidal tyranny became well-known.
When Stalin died in 1953, Robeson eulogized the 'Beloved Comrade' for his 'deep humanity' and 'his wise understanding,' which left 'us a rich and monumental heritage.'
Robeson supported the Soviet invasions of Finland and Poland in 1939, and until Hitler violated the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Robeson urged Americans to refuse to support the democracies that were under fascist attack. It is also disgusting for the AP to call Robeson an activist against anti- Semitism even though Robeson traveled to Moscow in 1949 to support Stalin at the height of Stalin's anti-Jewish pogrom.
Though [AP] won't tell you the answer to that famous question "Are you now or have you ever...?"--the answer is: yes, he was. The more interesting question is: How do you feel about getting one of the great moral questions of the century wrong?
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU HAVE:
1) nothing to doThis.
2) a sharp knife
3) a large lime
4) a patient cat
5) too much tequila
6) and it's football season?
DAVID HEMMINGS DEAD: The iconic star of the ultra-cool 1960s classic Blowup died of a heart attack after finishing a day's movie shoot in Romania. He was 62.
UPDATE: I have more, at Blogcritics.
THE CULTURE OF MISTRUST: James Bowman puts the events of early October in perspective, when the media simultaneously attacked Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rush Limbaugh. "That is the way the media game is played in a world where outrage is a commodity and is traded on the media markets of left and right for potential gain. And not just political gain either", Bowman writes.
Of course, Schwarzenegger won, and Limbaugh still has his radio show, if not his high profile ESPN gig. This week, the stakes seem somewhat lower in gotcha-land.
SUSAN ESTRICH, referring to the recent "Hate Bush" rally that Hollywood middleweights held Tuesday, writes that the politics of hate won't beat Bush:
The way to defeat Bush is not to advertise how much you hate him. Hard-core ideologues who hate Bush are not going to decide this election. They'll vote for the Democrat, as they do every four years, but there aren't enough of them to elect a Democrat. You need swing voters to do that. Hatred may motivate the left to contribute money, but it is hardly an effective talking point for public consumption if you want to win elections.Of course, it wouldn't be the first time.Ari Emanuel, a talent agent who represents Larry David and whose brother served in the Clinton White House and now in Congress, knew just how bad the Drudge story was for Democrats. "People are assembling over a political issue -- the 2004 election," he told the press in response to the ruckus about hating Bush. "The invite didn't say 'Hate Bush,' and I don't think (the Drudge story) was productive."
Productive? I bet it produced a lot of money for George Bush. And worse, it helps produce votes for him.
The people whose votes Democrats will need to defeat George Bush don't hate him. On a personal level, they like him. They need to be convinced not to vote for him, for reasons that have to do with the war, or special interests or the economy. "Hate Bush" headlines do just the opposite.
OUCH: Tell us what you really think about Gary Trudeau:
Trudeau's political instincts are as unerring as ever. Whether harping on Schwarzenegger's rowdy behavior, cheerleading Wesley 'Help, Mary!' Clark as an intellectual, or getting on the wrong side of every position relating to Iraq, Trudeau is a marvel of the thoughtless conservatism of today's upscale liberal. He represents a faux bohemian class whose political niche appears more like a therapeutic echo chamber than an ideology. They have no solutions to offer, just more bitching.Fortunately, the Internet has allowed a few competitors to emerge...
Trudeau exacerbates the effect with strips that don't read like a dialogue between two characters but like Trudeau talking to himself in a didactic lecture for the reader's benefit. I doubt an example is necessary to anyone who has gotten through more than a week's worth of his material. It's an embarrassing habit moreso because Trudeau does not appear to realize that you can't have a Socratic dialogue with yourself: that's masturbation.
TERMINATED: Schwarzenegger repeals law allowing drivers' licenses for illegal immigrants.
THOUSAND WORDS DEPARTMENT: David Frum writes, "If you wonder how reconstruction is going in Iraq, take a look at these photos of Baghdad by night."
AIDS, REAGAN, PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES, AND THE LEFT: A must-read post by Andrew Sullivan. Be sure to follow the links, as well.
Novelist and screenwriter Roger L. Simon has some new terminology he's using on his blog:
What divides our society now is not the old dichotomy between "liberal" and "conservative," it is those who oppose fascism and those who want to let it be. On this blog, I am going to start calling those sides what they really are -- anti-fascist and pro-fascist.Meryl Yourish adds:
So Roger has the new term: They are now pro-fascists. How else to describe those who insist that Yasser Arafat is 'the sole legitimate representative of the palestinian people' yet refuse to admit that he was elected in a sham election against a prop candidate, while all the true candidates were terrorized into not running? How else to explain those who want Ariel Sharon remanded to an international court for 'war crimes' while insisting that Saddam Hussein must be removed by his own people because that is an 'internal' matter? How else to describe those who protest George Bush's visit to Britain while completely ignoring the destruction of a British embassy and bank by Islamic terrorists, because that is not the message they're trying to get out that day?George Orwell would likely agree.
TAKE THAT, NEW YORK TIMES! The president honors Robert Bartley, editor emeritus of The Wall Street Journal, with the Medal of Freedom, calling him "one of the most influential journalists in American history."
WELCOME MUSICTAP READERS! Matt Rowe was very kind to link to our site via a button on MusicTAP's homepage, and we'd like to welcome those of you who've clicked on it.
If you're unfamiliar with Weblogs, be sure to check out the article I wrote for the late, lamented SpinTech in early 2002, and republished here. We tend to kick around politics, the economy, as well as pop and Internet culture on this blog, but we've written our share of music reviews as well, many for a "meta-blog" called Blogcritics. And be sure to read the many fine blogs on the links page, beginning with the all-mighty InstaPundit, whose Weblog was a direct inspiration.
Of course, my day job is as a freelance journalist. It's in desperate need of being updated, but click here for a list of articles I've written for both the Web and for numerous "dead tree" publications.
We try to update the Weblog on this site several times a day, so check back frequently!
THE NEW, NEW NIXON: Commenting that on her return from Iraq "Senator Clinton struck exactly the right note for a member of the opposition party", David Frum writes that Hillary could very well be taking a page out of Richard Nixon's playbook:
A theory went around a few weeks ago that Wesley Clark was some kind of Clinton stalking horse. After listening to Dean on the stump and then to Senator Clinton, I think she’s got a simpler plan: Stand aside as Howard Dean leads the Democrats to catastrophe, including seat losses in the Senate and possibly the House as well, and then step forward as the candidate of Democratic pragmatism and moderation. In the1990s, conservatives described Hillary’s paranoia and scheming as “Nixonian.” But remember that in 1968, Richard Nixon ran as a “new Nixon.” That’s what we’re going to see in 2008: a “new Hillary” – less nasty, more statesmanlike. Might work; certainly it will work better than Howard Dean’s plan to re-enact the 1972 McGovern campaign – only this time, as Karl Marx might have said, as farce.Unlike some, I doubt very much that we're going to see President Bush replace Dick Cheney with Condi Rice as his VP in 2004. But I could definitely see Condi running for the presidency in '08. And if it's against Hillary, it will be a political wonk's dream come true.
FILMS WE WILL NEVER SEE: Bruce Walker has a provocative list of titles that Hollywood will produce right after the Weather Channel reports arctic conditions in the ninth circle of Hell.
For even more films we'll never see, check out this similar article from June of 2000, by Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley.
Guess who said this, in 1945:
If the United States and the United Nations truly want peace and security let them fulfill the hopes of the common people everywhere -- let them work together to accomplish on a worldwide scale, precisely the kind of democratic association of free people which characterizes the Soviet Union today.Paul Robeson, who joins Frida Kahlo as another unrepentant Stalinist to be honored with his own American Postal Service stamp.
As The New Criterion asks, "what's next, a stamp honoring Julius Rosenberg"?
UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan unearths an even more jaw-dropping quote by Robeson, and asks, "Would anyone who had written such things about Hitler in 1945 now be celebrated on a postage stamp?"
WOW, I'LL HAVE WHAT DENNIS IS SMOKING! Kuchinich's Website has all the happy little animals from the enchanted forest happily voting for him.
(Link via the Corner, which asks, "If a tree in the woods endorses Kucinich, is it even worth making fun of?")
BACK IN THE US, BACK IN THE US, BACK IN THE USSR: James Taranto explores the Howard Dean-Gerald Ford connection.
And scroll down for Jimmy Carter's "final solution" for the Middle East. Of course, given Carter's friends in the region, that's quite a Freudian slip.
UPDATE: Charles Johnson writes "Howard Dean’s appearance on the “Hardball” show last night [is] bursting at the seams with so much idiocy that it must be read to be believed."
AS TIME GOES BY: David Cohen casts a fond look at Casablanca, the greatest film Hollywood made during WWII.
THINKING FOR COLUMBINE: Joanne Jacobs brilliantly deconstructs "The Bowling for Columbine Teachers' Guide". Be sure to read the comments as well.
BAY AREA NFL UPDATE: Skip Bayless asks, are the 49ers "too nice" for their own good?
Meanwhile, Bill Callahan calls his Raiders "the dumbest team in America"!
ADVANTAGE ED II: Rush Limbaugh writes:
Only one 'analyst' has suggested the parallel between Bush's domestic policy and Nixon's domestic policy, and you're reading his website right now.Err, sorry Maharushie, but actually, we noted the comparison in the very early days of this blog, a year and a half ago!
See also this article by James Pinkerton from a year ago, titled "Richard Milhouse Bush".
ADVANTAGE ED! Drudge has a link to an article, and this blurb:
The city of Cerritos, Calif., is planning to become the biggest Wi-Fi hot spot in the nation. The city, southeast of Los Angeles, inked a deal Monday with Aiirnet Wireless to install wireless data transmitters throughout its borders to give residents, businesses and city employees high-speed Internet access...Of course, the idea of city-wide 802.11 is nothing new to our readers.
"HERE'S..... DICK!" That's the caption that Drudge has below this photo of Dick Gephardt's err...profile. I think those are some notes or a pair of gloves he's holding.
I think.
Of course, if it's not, all I can say is...wow!
UPDATE: John Hawkins has picked it up (the photo, that is). His readers are having lots of fun in the comments page.
HEY, AT LEAST IT WASN'T LBJ'S DAISY AD: David Limbaugh writes, "GOP puts TV spotlight on Democrats' undermining".
(Here's what the headline above refers to, for our younger viewers. Err, readers.)
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