Betsy Newmark is angry with Nancy Pelosi.

You'll like her when she gets angry.

Update: Airbrush alert! Betsy catches the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post touching up Pelosi's quotes to make them sound less dippy.

They don't call it the liberal cocoon for nothing.

It's Orson a-go-go in the Blogosphere! We look at how Welles' last movie prophesized men like Ward Churchill; Iowahawk, the man who gave Churchill his "Chutch" sobriquet looks at The War of the Worlds: The Lost Version.

James Panero of the New Criterion's "Armavirumque" Weblog observes the ongoing crushing of dissent in Bush's/Ashcroft's/Gonzales'/Rove's America:

The other day we received a Penguin paperback edition of Lewis Lapham's latest book Gag Rule: On the Supression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy. Here is the blurb, in part:

... Never before, Lapham argues, have voices of protest been so locked out of the mainstream conversation, so marginalized and muted by a government that recklessly disregards civil liberties, and by an ever more concentrated and profit-driven media in which the safe and salable sweep all uncomfortable truths from view.

Gag Rule.

Penguin Press.

Now in paperback.

By the editor of Harper's Magazine.

Oh, will the supression ever end?

If there's one man who would know--who can predict the future, Yoda-style, it's Lewis Lapham, Master of Time and Space.

When I was Googling for articles on Brian Williams, I came across this piece from the April 2005 Philadelphia magazine, a slick, glossy magazine whose advertising (and there's lots of it) and articles serve as a guide to shopping and dining in the City of Brotherly Love. Here's its opening paragraph:

Arby's! NASCAR! South Jersey! It's a white-trash bonanza this month as we chat with anchorman Brian Williams, who covered the Garden State for WCAU-TV (Channel 10) in the '80s before going network and succeeding Tom Brokaw in the NBC Nightly News chair.

If I wrote a piece that began "Ribs! Rap music! It's a black-trash bonanza this month...", whoever my editor was would strike out that phrase so fast it would make your head spin--and either give me a serious dressing down or never hire me again.

And quite rightly so.

But as Larry Elder wrote in 2000, "white trash" remains a perfectly acceptable phrase in America's PC-obsessed media:

We live in an era where radio talk-show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger catches fire for calling homosexuals "biological errors."

Schlessinger apologized, but protesters remain unappeased. On the NBC program "Will & Grace," critics attacked the show when a character referred to her Salvadoran maid as a "hot tamale." In response, the network dubbed in a less offensive expression. We call illegal aliens "undocumented workers." We call blacks "African-Americans." Fine.

But why, then, is it perfectly OK in polite company to call to low-income, often southern-dwelling people "white trash"?

Take the President Bill Clinton-Paula Jones scandal. Is there a greater example of the harsh treatment and media pile-on against so-called "white trash"? Recall that Jones, then an Arkansas state employee, claimed then governor Bill Clinton groped her and solicited sex.

* * *

As for Jones? Remember Clinton defender James Carville's famous line, "Drag $100 through a trailer park and there's no telling what you'll find."

In today's era of racial sensitivity, safe targets like white trash remain. Former California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown once called political opponents "white boys." Al Gore's campaign manager, Donna Brazile, referred to the GOP as the "party of the white boys."

Comedian Jeff Foxworthy makes a good living by poking fun at "rednecks."

But Foxworthy, himself a Southerner, calls his humor respectfully self-deprecating, rather than insulting or dismissive. But apparently anybody can ridicule low-income, uneducated whites by branding them "white trash." Could someone like Bill Maher go on national television and suggest that only "black trash" or "Latino trash" appear on such programs?

What's the point? When a guest or host appears on a show like "Politically Incorrect" and derides a category of people by race, that's entertainment.

But were the host to blanketly ridicule low-income minorities, that's hate speech. Indeed, many colleges have passed "speech codes," outlawing insensitive or demeaning language directed towards racial or ethnic groups.

Try it. Substitute "black trash" for "white trash." After all, a disproportionate number of blacks appear on these tabloid shows. Frankly, by not calling black guests "black trash," aren't we suggesting blacks who appear on "Springer" represent mainstream black America? Now that's insulting.

Picking on, demeaning, and ridiculing whites is OK. But by demeaning any group by race, we open the door and grant permission to demean others.

Bottom line, either race-based insults are offensive or they're not.

Pick one.

The irony in Philadelphia's case is that the magazine makes a great deal of its revenue--both from advertising and from purchases of individual issues--from South Jersey suburban readers looking for a guide to the big city on the other side of the Delaware.

I purchased it for years when I lived in South Jersey myself. Of course back then, I had no idea how condescending its publishers were to those of us unfortunates in the hinterlands.

Ed Morrissey writes that NBC's Brian Williams (who in the past has attempted to pay favorable lip-service to his viewers in the Red States, but trashed bloggers) said on the Nightly News that America's founders "probably were considered terrorists of their time by the Crown in England". Morrissey responds:

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

Williams indulges in the same, tired moral equivalency that led Michael Moore to declare Zarqawi as the Iraqi version of the Minutemen from our war of independence. This minimizes the cruelty and inhumanity of the enemies of freedom that use civilians as their targets while trying to impose tyrannies far worse than anything George III could ever have dreamed in his most feverish illusions. It also continues the generation-long effort to rewrite American history to eliminate the idea of American exceptionalism, where all forms of government are relatively equal and democracy is simply another choice with no special moral value over monarchies or autocracies.

Shame on Brian Williams, and shame on NBC.

The Punitive Liberalism introduced into the American culture during the late '60s and the McGovern-era early seventies has radically cheapened our national dialogue. I'll second Ed's remarks: Shame on Williams--and his writers--for cluelessly uttering such rhetoric, and thinking, ala Dick Durbin, that no one would notice.

Ol' Chutch, who is permanently trapped in a 1969 causality loop, is now advocating the killing of military officers.

(See our post below for additional thoughts on Churchill.)

You might remember the review I wrote in late April when Orson Welles' last movie, F For Fake was released on DVD, and the brief, related blog post that it inspired. The gist of that post was that in a way, Welles' movie could be seen as foreshadowing today's' media-savvy--and media-friendly--hucksters such as Michael Moore, Al Sharpton, and Ward Churchill.

I eventually combined several of those elements into a detailed article, which just went online at The New Partisan. Click on over to read it.

What I found interesting when writing it was the element that ties together Sharpton, Moore, and Churchill: The Big Lie that has become an almost entirely accepted method to break into the national scene. It gets the press's attention, launches your national career, and then quickly gets either whitewashed or ignored as the press happily quotes your latest utterances. In a way, Welles' foreshadowed this with his War of the Worlds mock-newscast radio broadcast, and his reaction to it. He simply laughed off the terror it caused amongst the people he viewed as the hicks and rubes in the hinterlands...and, next stop Hollywood and Citizen Kane. (The first line of dialogue Welles speaks in Kane is of course, "Rosebud". But the second is perhaps even more telling: "Don't believe everything you hear on the radio!")

I didn't get into this in the article, but you get the feeling that perhaps that the modern media eventually got jealous of abetting the hucksters, and decided to get into the game themselves. Hence, their willingness, seemingly new-found, to invent their own news to match their worldview, such as CBS's "fake but accurate" Ra^therGate and Newsweek's retracted "Piss Koran" story, which led to Dick Durbin's recent 15 minutes of fame.

In a post titled, "The Dumbest Controversy Ever", Ed Morrissey writes that "The New York Times eats up several column inches on what has to be the pettiest controversy of recent memory -- The Case Of The Missing Applause.":

from the moment that Bush walked into the auditorium -- the troops stood at attention, and didn't utter a peep when Bush had them sit -- but as I noted, his delivery made it obvious that he planned on no interruptions. The Fort Bragg soldiers maintained the discipline requested by their officers and the White House.

* * *

If the same soldiers had greeted Bush with wild cheers and hoo-ahs, or had repeatedly interrupted the speech with cheers, we'd be hearing that the White House had secretly arranged that reception. Instead, we now have Clapgate, which doesn't have nearly the fun that such a monicker might suggest, where the big question is who initiated the applause that followed the one line where Bush told the nation that we would stay in the fight to the finish.

Well, this certainly qualifies as a national emergency. Can we say, "Slow News Day"?

If any of the soldiers at Fort Bragg has information on what happened, please e-mail me from your military e-mail accounts before the conspiracy theorists spin this into a passive mutiny against the current Commander-In-Chief. I guarantee readers that within 24 hours, that's exactly how this meme will be spun in the more radical corners of the political arena.

Whoever serves on the Times' "Credibility Committee" is sure going to earn their pay.

Even the Russians, I guess. AP reports that "Russian President Vladimir Putin walked off with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft's diamond-encrusted 2005 Super Bowl ring, but was it a generous gift or a very expensive international misunderstanding?":

Following a meeting of American business executives and Putin at Konstantinovsky Palace near St. Petersburg on Saturday, Kraft showed the ring to Putin -- who tried it on, put it in his pocket and left, according to Russian news reports.

It wasn't clear if Kraft, whose business interests include paper and packaging companies and venture capital investments, intended that Putin keep the ring.

Patriots spokesman Stacey James said Wednesday that Kraft was traveling and he hadn't talked to him in four or five days, despite e-mails and calls. ``He's still overseas, I can't even tell you where. ... He's not due back until next week.''

``It's an incredible story. I just haven't been able to talk to Robert Kraft to confirm the story,'' James told The Associated Press.

However, a Kremlin official who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of compromising his position told the AP the ring was a present. ``Such a present was made,'' the official said.

He said Putin had given the ring to the Kremlin library where other foreign gifts are kept.

James said the ring's worth was ``substantially more'' than $15,000, as the value had been reported. He refused to be specific, but noted that the ring has 124 diamonds.

Kraft handed out Super Bowl rings to players and coaches at his home two weeks ago.

Bob--let him keep it. It'll be better for your health that way.

Update:The story quoted above was its first draft. If you click on the Yahoo link above (and what the heck, here, too), here's how it now reads:

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In his interview with John Hawkins, Mark Steyn has a great take on one of American newspapers' (many) ills--their bland liberal corporate dullness:

Well, there are two answers to that: the first is that it's true US newspapers are not exactly beating my door down. The second is that, when they do beat my door down, my loyal retainer sets the dogs on them and peppers their retreating posteriors with buckshot. I'll explain that second part first. I appear in newspapers in a lot of different countries, and the sad fact is that, mainly as a consequence of local newspaper monopolies, US syndication fees represent some of the lowest publication rates in the world - that's to say, to take one recent example, you'd earn more from a single reprint in a Fijian newspaper than one certain prominent US statewide daily was proposing to pay for my column for an entire year. The US syndication business is the publishing equivalent of vaudeville, and I don't particularly see why it's in my interests to fill up Gannett’s newspapers for free. If I'm going to give it away, I'd rather folks had to come to the website to see it, where there's a chance they'll hang around long enough to buy a book. So I've no interest in US syndication as a business model. We make exceptions for certain newspapers whose op-ed editors are genuinely eager to carry the column. But I have no great ambitions within US journalism.

But, to go back to your first point, the reason they're not exactly beating the door down is because I'm not a good fit for American monopoly dailies. In London, the most competitive newspaper market in the world, papers thrive by encouraging distinctive controversial voices. In America, the average Gannett or other monodaily prefers a tone of self-regarding dullness. As my friend John O'Sullivan put it, "They neither offend nor delight" - as a matter of policy. Yes, they're broadly “liberal,” but not in a lively virtuoso engaging way, only in a dreary J-school way. I think they're missing the point here. They don't realize that they do have competitors now, in new media. In 1978, having driven your print competitors out of business, you could afford to be a dull city newspaper. I don't believe you can now.

In the 1960s, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and other writers tried to use their "New Journalism" techniques to end-run that blandness. That was in an era where many American cities still had multiple, competing newspapers (Wolfe was with The New York Herald Tribune, Talese with the Times, for example.) But once newspapers became monopolies in most cities, as Steyn says, there was little need--at least at first--for that sort of exciting style.

The Blogosphere of course, changed all that. Beyond the news that the Blogosphere picks up that isn't thought to be of immediate interest by newspaper editors (see Rather, Dan; Durbin, Dick; and Soldier, Winter), a huge part of the Blogosphere's popularity is its lively collection of voices, and that it's a meritocracy.

That extends not just to which bloggers link to each other the most often, but also to which writers outside the Blogosphere get frequent favorable mention. To paraphrase Steyn's comment to Hawkins, while US newspapers are not exactly beating his door down, Bloggers happily link to him, as they do writers such as Victor Davis Hanson and James Lileks, neither of whom will be appearing in a New York Times op-ed soon, much to that paper's detriment.

Kathryn-Jean Lopez writes:

Dick Durbin yesterday on Inside Politics blamed us for why he had to apologize: “Well, I think there were a lot of critics who's tried to blow my remarks up as much as they could, and to run them in some aspects of our press over and over and over again. I think they bear some responsibility, too. That speech might never have been noticed but for that activity on that side of the media.”

What's the purpose of entering a speech into the Senate records? Doesn't one give a speech with the hope that it will be noticed?

One fellow who definitely noticed it was attorney James H. Warner, who previously served as domestic policy adviser during the second Reagan administration. And prior to that, in the Marines:

As a Marine Corps officer, I spent five years and five months in a prisoner of war camp in North Vietnam. I believe this gives me a benchmark against which to measure the treatment which Sen. Richard Durbin, Illinois Democrat, complained of at the Camp of Detention for Islamo-fascists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The senator's argument is silly. If he believes what he has said his judgment is so poor that his countrymen, assuming, of course, that he considers us his countrymen, have no reason not to dismiss him as a witless boob. On the other hand, if he does not believe what he said, the other members of the Senate may wish to consider censure.

Consider nutrition. I have severe peripheral neuropathy in both legs as a residual of beriberi. I am fortunate. Some of my comrades suffer partial blindness or ischemic heart disease as a result of beriberi, a degenerate disease of peripheral nerves caused by a lack of thiamin, vitamin B-1. It is easily treated but is extremely painful.

Did Mr. Durbin say that some of the Islamo-fascist prisoners are suffering from beriberi? Actually, the diet enjoyed by the prisoners seems to be healthy. I saw the menu that Rep. Duncan Hunter presented a few days ago. It looks as though the food given the detainees at Guantanamo is wholesome, nutritious and appealing. I would be curious to hear Mr. Durbin explain how orange glazed chicken and rice pilaf can be compared to moldy bread laced with rat droppings.

In May 1969, I was taken out for interrogation on suspicion of planning an escape. I was forced to remain awake for long periods of time -- three weeks on one occasion.

On the first of June, I was put in a cement box with a steel door, which sat out in the tropical summer sun. There, I was put in leg irons which were then wired to a small stool. In this position I could neither sit nor stand comfortably. Within 10 days, every muscle in my body was in pain (here began a shoulder injury which is now inoperable). The heat was almost beyond bearing. My feet had swollen, literally, to the size of footballs. I cannot describe the pain. When they took the leg irons off, they had to actually dig them out of the swollen flesh. It was five days before I could walk, because the weight of the leg irons on my Achilles tendons had paralyzed them and hamstrung me. I stayed in the box from June 1 until Nov. 10, 1969. While in the box, I lost at least 30 pounds. I would be curious to hear Mr. Durbin explain how this compares with having a female invade my private space, and whether a box in which the heat nearly killed me is the same as turning up the air conditioning.

The detainees at Guantanamo receive new Korans and prayer rugs, and the guards are instructed not to disturb the inmates' prayers. Compare this with my experience in February 1971, when I watched as armed men dragged from our cell, successively, four of my cell mates after having led us in the Lord's Prayer. Their prayers were in defiance of a January 1971 regulation in which the Communists forbade any religious observances in our cells. Does Mr. Durbin somehow argue that our behavior is the equivalent of the behavior of the Communists?

Yes he does. And apparently, he's still only sorry that he got caught by "that side of the media"--the one that won't insulate him from his rhetoric.

I guess it's slice and dice day in the Blogosphere. In a post titled, "Remember When Medicine Was About Healing?", Orrin Judd links to this story in Australia's Age:

Two Australian philosophers believe surgeons should be allowed to cut off the healthy limbs of some "amputee wannabes".

Neil Levy and Tim Bayne argue that patients obsessed with having a limb amputated should be able to have it safely removed by a surgeon, as long as they are deemed sane.

"As long as no other effective treatment for their disorder is available, surgeons ought to be allowed to accede to their requests," the pair wrote in the Journal of Applied Philosophy.

Meanwhile, Charles Johnson looks at surgery of a different sort:

Shari’a law in action: Iranian court orders man to be blinded.

An Iranian court has sentenced a man to have his eyes surgically removed for a crime he committed as a teenager 12 years ago. Amnesty International has condemned the sentence, reported in the Iranian daily Etemaad, but local human rights groups say these unusual punishments are hardly ever executed. ...

Etemaad says the accused, identified only as Vahid, was 16 when he threw a bottle of acid at another man during a fight in a vegetable market in 1993. The top opened - Vahid insists accidentally - and blinded his victim in both eyes. A court said the crime should be judged as qisas, a category for which the Koran stipulates specific punishments, in this case an eye for an eye. The paper said the sentence was to pour acid on Vahid’s eyes, but an appeals court ruled it should be done surgically so as not to harm other parts of his face.

What planet are both sets of surgeons living on that they would sanction either procedure??

Byron York wonders why the Washington Post is wondering why Robert Byrd enjoys his image as a "pillar of the Senate", as the Post recently called him:

There was a striking passage in last Sunday’s Page One Washington Post story about Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) headlined, “A Senator’s Shame: Byrd, in His New Book, Again Confronts Early Ties to KKK.”

“Historians, political analysts and admirers have long sought to reconcile Byrd’s early Klan affiliation with his image as a pillar of the Senate,” reporter Eric Pianin wrote. “More extraordinary is how he managed to overcome such a blot on his record to twice become Senate majority leader.”

It’s true. Byrd has indeed enjoyed an image as a pillar of the Senate. And given his history, that seems a bit odd.

How do you suppose it happened? Do you think a newspaper — say The Washington Post — might have had something to do with it?

* * *

Over the years, the Post has often steered clear of Byrd’s history with the Klan.

There were very, very few exceptions, such as the story in 1981 in which reporter Martin Schram directly confronted Byrd over the issue and got an extremely chilly response. Much more common was the admiring Post profile of Byrd from 1999 — the paper was lauding Byrd’s opposition to the Clinton impeachment — which began this way:

“Sen. Robert Byrd is a believer in holy documents. They are the sacred tools for defending his Senate against the savages. The Bible is one such holy book. He learned to read with the King James Version and, seventy-some years later, has little use for any other Bible. Something about modern translations seems to sap the words of their sacred power. The U.S. Constitution is also holy writ. Watch him wield it. ...”

Not until 2,532 words into a 2,779-word story did the Post say this:

“As a young man campaigning for the West Virginia legislature in the ‘40s, Byrd briefly joined the Ku Klux Klan, hoping to gain votes. He quickly quit and has spent the past half-century publicly regretting it.”

The Post didn’t even go on a crusade when, in March 2001, Byrd twice used the N-word on national television. The paper published just one story, when Byrd apologized.

And now, after all these years of mostly soft-pedaling Byrd’s past, the Post wonders how it is that Byrd has managed to be regarded as a pillar of the Senate.

How do you suppose that happened?

Interesting how the cocoon can wrap itself around both a newspapers' readers and its favored politicians.

Meanwhile, Don Suber looks at a related topic that I probably should file under Muggeridge's Law:

The Robert C. Byrd Memorial for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Roll that last sentence around in your head for a few minutes.

Last August, Nick Schulz of Tech Central Station coined the phrase "Laphams", alternately spelled "Laphamism" or "Laphamisms" for violating the space-time continium, and filing reports from the future:

[Harper's magazine editor Lewis Lapham] wrote about the GOP convention speeches before anyone even stepped to the podium. Lapham has apologized for what he's calling a "rhetorical invention," use of "poetic license," and a "mistake."

But the only "mistake" Lapham made is in revealing for all to see what has long been known by anyone who pays attention to the news: the major media routinely bring to their coverage of significant political events a predetermined storyline -- you might want to call it a "Lapham". Facts that undermine the storyline are ignored or explained away as aberrations to The Truth. For the editor of Harper's and other establishment press figures, it really makes no difference to them what will be said at Madison Square Garden because the Laphams are already set, loaded in the scribblers' word processors and television anchor tele-prompters and ready to go.

We at TCS have seen Laphams at work at a number of gatherings we've covered over the years.

Charles Johnson spots another example, as AP writes up President Bush's speech tonight--before he gives it. Meanwhile, Power Line has some background on the article's author.

Hillel Halkin and Jim Siegel examine what Siegel calls the "three ideologies [that] are aligning to create a new strain of anti-Semitism that threatens Jews first in Israel, second in Europe, and third throughout the world", and how intertwined anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism often are.

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

As we were a moment ago; according to the Associated Press, "A newspaper investigation of a former columnist for The Sacramento Bee could not verify 43 sources she used in a sampling of 12 years of her work".

As Blogger USS Neverdock writes, "What's even more disturbing is the paper admits this is only a 'sampling' of her work".

I'm sure.

Via Instapundit, who writes, "The whole high-horse act" of the mainstream media "needs to be given a rest".

Roger L. Simon has links to a couple of reviews of the upcoming book on Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday that we mentioned here and here.

Sadly though, unlike Roger, we didn't title either post, "Papa Mao Mao Mao, Papa Mao Tse Tung!". And that is to our ever-lasting regret.

Jonah Goldberg writes:

About a month ago, I helped a Muslim woman with her groceries in a supermarket parking lot. She was dealing with her kids and her shopping cart started to roll away from her car with the groceries still inside. As it rolled, I saw a decent society of tolerance and kindness rolling away. The cart’s one wobbly wheel — going chapocketa, chapocketa, chapocketa — was onomatopoetically tapping out a small drumbeat for the forced march to oblivion of all we hold dear.

Thank goodness I was there.

Thank goodness this country produces heroes like me.

I sprang into action. Walking more than a dozen yards without concern about the parking-lot traffic, heedless of the SUVs barreling along at 5 perhaps even 10 MPH — not even caring about what my fellow Americans might make of me giving aid and comfort to a Muslim woman. I knew that this woman’s faith in the American way of life was on the line! And I was going to do what was necessary! I grabbed that shopping cart and I pushed it through all the fear and bigotry this country has smothered that poor woman with. I pushed that shopping cart back to that woman’s minivan not so much so she could more easily unload her Cocoa Puffs, but because I have a dream. I have a dream that one day little Muslim boys and little Jewish boys, little Arab girls and little Scots-Irish girls will be able to join hands as sisters and brothers and push that great shopping cart we call “America” together — with their one free hand.

I don't use the word "hero" lightly, but I am the greatest hero in American history. Except, maybe, for Al Gore.

Meanwhile, the object of Gore's heroism is apparently the Times' female answer to Greg Packer. Or maybe Jayson Blair.

Mark Steyn writes that "there aren't many examples of successful post-religious societies":

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Hollywood screenwriter Barbara Nicolosi is that rarest of rare birds--a conservative Christian working in Hollywood and openly discussing her faith and politics.

Oddly enough, this seems to frighten the New York Times:

This is a somewhat paraphrased and somewhat literal transcription of an interview I did Sunday night with a NY Times reporter named James. This was the follow-up interview to one he did with me a few weeks ago. That first interview started with the following exchange (after intro comments):

James: So, in the last six months, there have been 37 pairings in the Times of the word "Christian" with words like "scary", "frightening", "theocratic" and "intimidating". My question is, what is it about Christians that makes you so scary?

Barb: (loud, snorting and sneering laughter) Are you kidding me?

James: What?

Barb: I finally get interviewed by the New York Times, and you ask me a question like that?! (more snorting and laughing)

James: (sniffs) Are you laughing because you think it's funny that people find Christians frightening?

Barb: No. I'm laughing because you want me to tell you why you and your friends are scared of Christians -- and I think you should ask your therapist!

Here's the article that James contacted her for.

Okrent wasn't kidding when he wrote this piece last summer, huh?

(And neither was Rod Dreher, of course.)

Update: Related thoughts from Tom Maguire, who has a quote from Times editor Bill Keller which tacetly reinforces Dreher's thesis:

I also endorse the committee’s recommendation that we cover religion more extensively, but I think the key to that is not to add more reporters who will write about religion as a beat. I think the key is to be more alert to the role religion plays in many stories we cover, stories of politics and policy, national and local, stories of social trends and family life, stories of how we live. This is important to us not because we want to appease believers or pander to conservatives, but because good journalism entails understanding more than just the neighborhood you grew up in.

As Tom writes, "I will know they are pandering when they assign a sports columnist to NASCAR".

Scott Ott puts the last few Supreme Court decisions into humorous perspective: "Court Allows 10 Commandments on Seized Land".

In the New Partisan, Jonathan Leaf writes:

Here’s a riddle:

Which American publication this week objected to Vice-President Dick Cheney’s remark that he didn’t take seriously Amnesty International’s description of the U.S. internment camp at Guantanamo as a “gulag”? Which also presented bribed English parliamentarian and Saddam Hussein stooge George Galloway as a hero?

The Nation? Mother Jones?

Here are some more clues:

In its cover story this magazine also defended “the culture of protest of the 1960’s” and lamented the collapse of the Black-Jewish alliance, going on to say that “the New Left in great degree [was] the direct off-spring of the old. Without the radical Jewish children, there would have been no early SDS, no Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, no New York kids going South for Freedom Rides to turn the civil-rights movement into a matter of national consciousness.” Too, the periodical criticized the rise of the Christian Right and called Robert McNamara “the fire-bomber of Tokyo, napalm-bomber of Vietnam”.

Dissent? The American Prospect? Or something still more nostalgically left-wing?

Nope. The magazine was The American Conservative. Yes, the one edited by Pat Buchanan and funded by socialite and sometime coke fiend Taki Theodoracopulos.

Read the rest, for as the last sentence quoted above implies, it's fascinating, if in a slightly bitchy sort of way.

Of course, this isn't the first time that Pat and the left have been accused of coming full circle.

Via Roger L. Simon, we learn that the Checkpoint Charlie Monument in Berlin--which memorializes the over 1,000 killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall to the west and freedom--is scheduled to be bulldozed--on July 4th.

As we were saying...

Warren Bell writes that "According to Amnesty International's website, today is United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture". But it gets even better:

I thought I would poke around their website and see if there was a local rally against the beheadings in Iraq or the murder of Daniel Pearl. I didn't find anything like that (shocking!), but there is this: "Please join Survivors of Torture, International in commemorating United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture--Chocolate and Cabernet Reception to Follow".

Bell writes, "I am not a good enough writer--I only wish I could make this up". Congratulations Warren, you've just run smack into Muggeridge's Law.

Update: This qualifies as well, of course.

John In Carolina explains that the Washington Post has a two-speed spin-cycle--and that Karl Rove knew exactly how to set it for fast agitation.

Betsy Newmark and Prime Minister Ibrahim Al-Jaafari of Iraq take turns explaining to the media the difference between insurgents and terrorists.

Mark Steyn isn't too crazy about a flag-burning amendment passing, and he makes some great points along the way as he explains why:

And maybe a few would feel as many of my correspondents did last week about the ridiculous complaints of ''desecration'' of the Quran by U.S. guards at Guantanamo -- that, in the words of one reader, ''it's not possible to 'torture' an inanimate object.''

That alone is a perfectly good reason to object to a law forbidding the "desecration" of the flag. For my own part, I believe that, if someone wishes to burn a flag, he should be free to do so. In the same way, if Democrat senators want to make speeches comparing the U.S. military to Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, they should be free to do so. It's always useful to know what people really believe.

For example, two years ago, a young American lady, Rachel Corrie, was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza. Her death immediately made her a martyr for the Palestinian cause, and her family and friends worked assiduously to promote the image of her as a youthful idealist passionately moved by despair and injustice. ''My Name Is Rachel Corrie,'' a play about her, was a huge hit in London. Well, OK, it wasn't so much a play as a piece of sentimental agitprop so in thrall to its subject's golden innocence that the picture of Rachel on the cover of the Playbill shows her playing in the backyard, age 7 or so, wind in her hair, in a cute, pink T-shirt.

There's another photograph of Rachel Corrie: at a Palestinian protest, headscarved, her face contorted with hate and rage, torching the Stars and Stripes. Which is the real Rachel Corrie? The "schoolgirl idealist" caught up in the cycle of violence? Or the grown woman burning the flag of her own country? Well, that's your call. But because that second photograph exists, we at least have a choice.

Have you seen that Rachel Corrie flag-burning photo? If you follow Charles Johnson's invaluable Little Green Footballs Web site and a few other Internet outposts, you will have. But you'll look for it in vain in the innumerable cooing profiles of the "passionate activist" that have appeared in the world's newspapers.

One of the big lessons of these last four years is that many, many beneficiaries of Western civilization loathe that civilization -- and the media are generally inclined to blur the extent of that loathing. At last year's Democratic Convention, when the Oscar-winning crockumentarian Michael Moore was given the seat of honor in the presidential box next to Jimmy Carter, I wonder how many TV viewers knew that the terrorist ''insurgents'' -- the guys who kidnap and murder aid workers, hack the heads off foreigners, load Down's syndrome youths up with explosives and send them off to detonate in shopping markets -- are regarded by Moore as Iraq's Minutemen. I wonder how many viewers knew that on Sept. 11 itself Moore's only gripe was that the terrorists had targeted New York and Washington instead of Texas or Mississippi: ''They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, D.C. and the plane's destination of California -- these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!"

In other words, if the objection to flag desecration is that it's distasteful, tough. Like those apocryphal Victorian matrons who discreetly covered the curved legs of their pianos, the culture already goes to astonishing lengths to veil the excesses of those who are admirably straightforward in their hostility.

This past week, PoliPundit linked to a Chicago Tribune article that diagrammed how Senator Dick Durbin's (D-IL) speech was ignored or quarantined by the MSM, but was heard or read by millions first via Laura Ingraham (whose producer happened to catch it live via C-Span), then Rush, Hewitt, and the Blogosphere. Nothing must gall the left more than the fact that unlike during the 1970s and '80s, so many end-arounds now exist for information about their excesses and radical hyperbole. (Something that Senator Kerry didn't seem to factor-in last year.)

So if you're going to light up Old Glory, just be sure a photographer with Internet access is present.

Update: Related thoughts from Power Line.

Hugh Hewitt has a great comparison between two governmental organizations, both of which have literally burned others--and themselves--in the past. But only one of which might have learned not to repeat the same mistake:

On May 4, 2000, officials of the U.S. Forest Service started a fire in the Bandelier National Monument. The was was supposed to be a "controlled burn," but the Service miscalculated conditions on the ground and the weather forecast was wrong, and the fire became a runaway disaster, eventually consuming 235 homes and 47,000 acres. The Service did not intend to start the fire, but it surely caused the destruction, and it admitted responsibility. No criminal charges were brought. The United States government paid for the losses not covered by insurance.

If the Forest Service were to initiate another controlled burn in the same spot under the same conditions and with the same weather forecast as it did in 2000, the public would be outraged. Not only would the Service' proclamation of innocent intent be insufficient to quell the anger, but demands for criminal investigation into culpability would surely follow.

Indeed, if any controlled burns get away from the Service for years to come, they will be under immediate suspicion of fecklessnes and and best gross negligence. The public assumes they should know better, and the Service will be held to a much higher standard of care for years to come, a standard that will brand them as arsonists in fact if not in intent if any more of their experiments in forest management result in the destruction of private property, especially homes.

The Democratic Party and its liberal/left supporters negligence with regard to southeast Asia in the '70s bought about the deaths of millions and the enduring communist governments of Vietnam and Laos and the desperate circumstances of Cambodia. They did not intend that result. In his famous testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry predicted of the aftermath of a unilateral withdrawal of American troops that the United States would have "an obligation to offer sanctuary to the perhaps 2,000, 3,000 people who might face, and obviously they would, we understand that, might face political assassination or something else." His blindness was neither unique nor even notable. They did not see the carnage coming, or the consequence of American retreat from Vietnam as it would manifest itself in Africa, Central America and ultimately in Afghanistan.

Now the same Democratic Party, the same liberal/left, the same John Kerry and Ted Kennedy and some of the same anti-war protestors grown old and respectable are urging that timelines for unilateral withdrawal be set, the words "bug out" and "quagmire" and back, and once again an ally is beginning to feel the full support of the Democratic Party like a knife in the back. The same tactics, the same denunciations, the same theater that cloaked the approach of disaster are in play in D.C. The Democrats want to start a controlled burn.

If they succeed again, the deaths will surely occur far away and by the hundreds of thousands if not millions.

But they will also occur here. The president knows this, as does the vice president, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State. What Rumsfeld must have been thinking when Kennedy ranted on about the need for the controlled burn to begin in Bandelier Monument immediately.

What Rumsfeld could not say, Rove did, and good for him. More and more people should say it, and are saying it. Serious people don't have to rely on MSM for repackaged talking points from the left. There are new voices and new sources, and they know the one key political fact: The leadership of the Democratic Party is now committed to a strategy of retreat that will inevitably lead to disastrous defeat and the deaths of Americans here at home. They have reverted to type, and the type is naive and dangerous. Their intentions don't matter, and their predictions can't be trusted. The voters have taken away most of their matches. In 2006, they should take away the rest.

Click on over and read it on Hugh's site--he has plenty of links to accompany his remarks.

Will Collier links to this US News & World Report article on who is funding the insurgents terrorists killing civilians and American soldiers in Iraq:

Who's funding the insurgents in Iraq? The list of suspects is long: ex-Baathists, foreign jihadists, and angry Sunnis, to name a few. Now add to that roster hard-core Euroleftists.

Turns out that far-left groups in western Europe are carrying on a campaign dubbed Ten Euros for the Resistance, offering aid and comfort to the car bombers, kidnappers, and snipers trying to destabilize the fledgling Iraq government. In the words of one Italian website, Iraq Libero (Free Iraq), the funds are meant for those fighting the occupanti imperialisti. The groups are an odd collection, made up largely of Marxists and Maoists, sprinkled with an array of Arab emigres and aging, old-school fascists, according to Lorenzo Vidino, an analyst on European terrorism based at The Investigative Project in Washington, D.C. "It's the old anticapitalist, anti-U.S., anti-Israel crowd," says Vidino, who has been to their gatherings, where he saw activists from Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Italy. "The glue that binds them together is anti-Americanism." The groups are working on an October conference to further support "the Iraqi Resistance." A key goal is to expand backing for the insurgents from the fringe left to the broader antiwar and antiglobalization movements.

Color me unsurprised. As Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote:

In the words of one persecuted novelist Turki Al-Hamad, "The problem is not from the outside, the problem is from ourselves; if we don't change ourselves, nothing will change."

In the United States, we are told that we have created terrorists. Saudi liberals would beg to differ. So the theologian Al-Maleky confesses, "If Wahhabism doesn't revise itself, it will produce more terrorism."

This is all so strange.

Free-thinking Arabs refute all the premises of Western Leftists who claim that colonialism, racism, and exploitation have created terrorists, hold back Arab development, and are the backdrops to this war.

Indeed, it is far worse than that: Our own fundamentalist Left is in lockstep with Wahhabist reductionism — in its similar instinctive distrust of Western culture. Both blame the United States and excuse culpability on the part of Islamists. The more left-wing the Westerner, the more tolerant he is of right-wing Islamic extremism; the more liberal the Arab, the more likely he is to agree with conservative Westerners about the real source of Middle Eastern pathology.

The constant? A global distrust of Western-style liberalism and preference for deductive absolutism. So burn down a mosque in Zimbabwe, murder innocent Palestinians in Bethlehem in 2002, arrest Christians in Saudi Arabia, or slaughter Africans in Dafur, and both the Western Left and the Middle East's hard Right won't say a word. No such violence resonates with America's diverse critics as much as a false story of a flushed Koran — precisely because the gripe is not about the lives of real people, but the psychological hurts, angst, and warped ideology of those who in their various ways don't like the United States.

I will pass over quickly the day's other sorry stories, but they were equally revealing. From Karachi, we learn that Pakistani Shiite Muslims burned down a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. You see, a Sunni suicide bomber had just blown up 19 Pakistani Shia. In reaction to that attack, the Shiite mob went out and killed six employees of a business owned and operated by a Pakistani Muslim. Follow the logic of the Middle East: When you are angry at your own for their murdering, and are too weak or terrified to do anything about it, go out and destroy anything remotely American-affiliated.

The glue that binds them together.

Fred Barnes writes:

Democrats don't have a death wish. It just seems that way. What they actually have is a habit of falling into the national security trap. They did it in 1972. They did it in 1984. They did it in 1994. They did it in 2002. And they're doing it again this year as they prepare for the 2006 midterm elections, in which they hope to produce a breakthrough as sweeping and decisive as Republicans achieved in 1994.

The national security trap is simple. When faced with a choice between supporting or criticizing the use of military force along with a strong national security policy, Democrats often side with the critics. Which is how they fall into the trap, which leads to electoral defeat. When they back a vigorous defense of America's national security, however, the opposite happens. They usually win. Even when Democrats merely neutralize the national security issue--this happened in 1996 and 1998--or the issue is peripheral, they stand a good chance of winning.

At the moment, Democrats are convinced the country has turned against the war in Iraq. So House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi is quite comfortable declaring the war a "grotesque mistake" and boasting that she has thought so from the start. Senator Edward Kennedy felt confident enough last week to inform American generals home from Iraq that the war is an "intractable quagmire." This prompted a sharp rebuke from General George Casey, the top commander in Iraq. "You have an insurgency with no vision, no base, limited popular support, an elected government, committed Iraqis to the democratic process, and you have Iraqi security forces that are fighting and dying for their country every day," Casey said. "Senator, that is not a quagmire."

Kennedy lost that exchange. And Democrats did no better on a related issue, the treatment of terrorists imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin was forced to apologize for likening the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to that of the Soviet gulag, Hitler's death camps, and the Cambodian killing fields. What was striking was the matter-of-fact manner in which Durbin drew the parallel in the first place. He seemed to be oblivious to the possibility he might be seen as worrying more about the detainees than about America's national security.

Democrats haven't learned the lesson on national security from elections over the past 30-plus years. In 1972, Democrats thought the public had turned strongly against the war in Vietnam. So they nominated a fervent antiwar candidate, George McGovern. He lost in a landslide to incumbent Richard Nixon.

Speaking of Vietnam, Don Suber and Jeff Harrell remind us what a timetable for withdrawl looks like when it's announced to the enemy. Hint: the results are not pretty.

Speaking of The War of the Worlds, Matt Drudge has a transcript of Tom Cruise's interview with Matt Lauer on The Today Show. Based on that transcript, it appears that somehow, the interview went off on a tangent based around one of Cruise's obsessions--psychiatry and antidepressant drugs.

Assuming it's a complete transcript, the interview wraps up with this exchange:

MATT LAUER: Do you want more people to understand Scientology? Is that-- would that be a goal of yours?

TOM CRUISE: You know what? I-- absolutely. Of course, you know. And people--

MATT LAUER: How do you go about that?

TOM CRUISE: You just communicate about it. And the important thing is, like you and I talk about it, whether it's-- okay, if I wanna know something, I go and find out. /Because I don't talk about things that I don't understand. I'll say, you know what? I'm not so sure about that. I'll go find more information about it so I can-- I can come to an opinion based on-- on the information that I have.

MATT LAUER: You-- you're so passionate about it. And I'm--

TOM CRUISE: I'm passionate about learning. I'm passionate about life, Matt.

So why on earth wouldn't Lauer, who I'm sure believes himself to be an objective hard-hitting liberal journalist, who would think nothing of questioning the religious beliefs of any red stater, ask at some point during the interview, "Tom, it's obvious that you think that the psychiatric profession is misguided. And I'm sure there are many who'd agree with that.

"But if I may blunt, like many in Hollywood, you belong to a religion created by a pulp science fiction writer whose critics say believed that mankind evolved from clams, and that 75 million years ago, there was an alien galactic ruler named Xenu who nuked planet Earth. Any thoughts, Tom?"

And let the viewers watch what happens next. It's possible it would produce an exchange similar to what Ted Koppel got, when he asked Louis Farrakhan about Farrakhan's science fiction beliefs:

Farrakahn believes Elijah Muhammad, the (by all accounts deceased) former leader of the Nation of Islam, is living on a spaceship circling the planet. Also, a few years after Elijah "died," the spaceship picked up Farrakhan and the two men had a nice chat with each other. Afterward, Farrakhan says the spaceship let him off near Washington, D.C.

The only major television journalist I've ever seen query Farrakhan about this stuff was Ted Koppel, host of ABCs "Nightline," in 1996. Koppel asked him about the spaceship stuff, saying, "It sounds like gibberish, but maybe you can explain it."

Farrakhan didn't back off. The spiritual leader explained that the huge spaceship is "over the heads of us in North America, and soon you shall see these (spaceships) over the major cities of America." This fact is being kept "above top-secret by the United States government."

Farrakhan didn't stop there. Offended at the "gibberish" remark, he fell back on some hard science: "And if it were gibberish, they made an awful lot of money, Mr. Koppel, on that movie called 'Independence Day' --- it flooded the theaters." Koppel conceded this point, but also alerted Farrakhan to the fact that "Independence Day" wasn't a true story.

Or, Cruise might simply unclip his lavalier mic and storm off the set. No matter how the conversation broke, like Koppel and Farrakhan, it certainly would make for exciting TV.

Update: Joe Gandelman has some thoughts and an additional quote from the interview:

When asked if he could be with someone at this stage in his life who doesn't have an interest in the Church of Scientology — girlfriend Katie Holmes has said she's embracing the religion — Cruise told Lauer: ''Scientology is something that you don't understand. It's like you could be a Christian and be a Scientologist.''

''It is a religion. Because it's dealing with the spirit. You as a spiritual being. It gives you tools you can use to apply to your life.''

Which would have been the perfect opportunity for Lauer to ask about Xenu and friends.

Meanwhile, via Michele Catalano, here's video of "Cruise Gone Wild", along with some surprisingly harsh comments from Canadian talking heads.

As this link-filled round-up from Glenn Reynolds indicates, Karl Rove has gotten the left into a fit over his remarks on Wednesday at a Manhattan fundraiser for the Conservative Party of New York State.

The irony is that this is a strategy the White House has done again and again, arguably since the Adam Clymer maybe it was/maybe it wasn't a gaffe incident during the 2000 campaign.

Perhaps the most impressive example was last August, arguably the pivotal month in the 2004 president race. (click through my archives that month: August bisected both parties' conventions similar to that river that snaked through the Vietnam war like a main circuit cable plugged straight into Col. Kurtz. Whoops--sorry to go all Apocalypse Now on you--and speaking of which, it was also the month when the Swift Boat Vets and Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia debuted as national issues.) Back then, I titled a post, "The Bully Pulpit Boxes Kerry":

President Bush has gotten Senator Kerry to publicly state that he'd also have gone into Iraq, even knowing, as do today, that their capacity to produce WMDs was much more limited than we know now.

One of the commenters on the Brothers Judd Blog makes a great point: Kerry is now in a box. This is one opinion that he can't flip-flop on, because if he does, President Bush can call him on it, via the Bully Pulpit--and the press, which has to cover the President of the United States, has to report it, no matter how much they loathe the man. And as Jim Geraghty wrote, "Somewhere, some Republican operative is emailing that statement to every anti-war voter he can find. Or perhaps the Nader campaign is."

The chief reason that so many on the left would vote for Kerry--that he would have avoided Iraq, is now off the table.

The Bully Pulpit--or at least an adjunct to it, since Rove gets almost as much exposure from an obsessed press as the President does--has boxed the left in again.

One element that makes this strategy work is the fact that neither Rove nor President Bush are extemporaneous, free-flowing speakers--and they know that everything they say will likely be used against them by a hostile press that lives for gaffes by conservatives. I wish I could find the article where President Bush and Senator Kerry's speaking styles were compared, I think during the presidential debates. Kerry's years of rambling extemporaneously in the Senate caused him gaffes throughout the campaign, the most deadly of which was the "I actually voted for the $87 million before I voted against it" line, which tarred him, very early in the election cycle as a flip-flopper in the public's eye when pointed out repeatedly by the president and his aides. As with Rove this week, the press may hate the president and his staff, but they have to report them and quote their speeches.

Similarly, as Glenn noted, the Democrats' demands for Karl Rove's resignation "just provide an excuse for Republicans to repeat every single stupid or unpatriotic thing that every Democratic politician ever said. And there are a lot of those", as the examples in his links illustrate.

And the next time someone on the left does another Durbin--and they will--the White House or any one of a zillion conservative bloggers and talk radio commentators can say simply remind them of how spot-on Rove was.

What's really curious is the escape valve that he gave them, when said:

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers

How hard would it have been for Dean or Hillary or Kerry to have said to the press, "Hey, Karl was talking about liberals. Both parties have their extremists both in office and on the Internet and on talk radio. But we Democrats in the vital center have been as patriotic as we possibly could be on this vital issue, while occasionally disagreeing with specific elements of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."

Instead, in their rush to tar Rove, Democrats self-identified as liberals for perhaps the first time since before Michael Dukakis ran for the White House. As Rich Lowry noted last July, Democrats have shunned the L-word for decades:

It must be particularly galling to committed liberals that some time in the past 30 years the natural word to describe them -- "liberal" -- became a political embarrassment, so much so that Republicans gleefully hurl it as an epithet, Democrats avoid it if they can, and it is sometimes known only as "the L-word." Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham shed light on this phenomenon a few Sundays ago when he challenged "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos to call him a conservative, begged to be called a conservative, and noted the Democratic ticket would never be so happy to be called liberal.

In a mirror image of Graham's appearance, great liberal hope Barack Obama, the young black Senate candidate from Illinois, refused to say he was a liberal on a recent Sunday show. When liberal dinosaur Ted Kennedy was recently asked if John Kerry -- who has consciously modeled his liberalism on the Kennedy family's -- is a liberal, he said he doesn't find labels useful. This will be news to all the "reactionary right-wingers" denounced by Kennedy throughout the years.

As GayPatriot wrote about Rove's comments:

They were in my view is a brilliant chess-move by Karl Rove to refocus the country on the matters of national security and the War on Terror (Worldwide Theatres). There is no doubt in my mind that Republicans do see this as a war, while on the whole, Democrats/Liberals see this as a "police action"....in the words of John Kerry.

Karl Rove was spot on... and the Dems fell for the bait: Hook, Line & Sinker...

Like I said, it wasn't the first time.

Update: Related thoughts on the L-Word from Jonathan Last:

Here's where the Rove trap is sprung: Democrats as a whole, did not behave like the far-left establishment in the aftermath of September 11. Democrats acted like pretty much everyone else in America.

It was the far left--the group which has hijacked American liberalism--that reacted with such sourness. But in the intervening years, the far left has somehow convinced us that they and the Democratic party are one in the same--all numerical and electoral evidence to the contrary.

To be sure, Republicans have tried to help sell this notion, but now it seems that the Democratic party itself confused as to who it really is. Rove has just goaded them into self-identifying with a bunch of nuts who really don't represent the party's mainstream.

I mean, do Democrats want to keep losing elections?

Another Update: Mark Steyn compares the reaction to Governor Schwarzenegger's "Girlie Men" speech, and reprints his essay from last summer about that speech's ensuing controversy.

One more: Roger L. Simon writes about "how deeply reactionary the Democratic Party has become":

Liberalism as we knew it no longer exists. What we have now are holographs of liberalism in the form of spectres like Chris Dodd and Joseph Biden. Nothing is really there.

Sadly, I agree.

James Lileks once dubbed Hollywood's output post-9/11 as "the Golden Era of beating around the bush" for its fear of actually tacking the Big Story of Our Times head-on. And of course, it's also the golden era of beating around the bush about beating up on Bush, and often in the same picture.

For the latest in a never-ending stream of examples, check out this quote from David Koepp, the writer of the upcoming Cruise/Spielberg version of The War of the Worlds (which started filming just after the November presidential election, incidentally):

“And now, as we see American adventure abroad’ he (David Koepp} continues ‘in my mind it’s certainly back to it’s original meaning, which is that the Martians in our movie represent American military forces invading the Iraqis, and the futility of the occupation of a faraway land is again the subtext”

(Found via PoliPundit.)

Hey I agree--invasions are futile; let's get the troops out of foreign lands ASAP. Mind if we start in Germany, where Koepp probably feels our troops have been futilely stationed for 60 years after we won what Spielberg once essentially dubbed the futile battle known as World War II?

Then there's that whole Red Planet thing. Boy, after the November election, the wag who said that the newspapers should send some foreign correspondents to report on the Red States didn't know the half of it! Red states as a foreign country? Heck, they're a whole other planet as far as Hollywood is concerned!

And as Frank Rich hinted at in his latest op-ed, there's also the F For Fake Invasion Orson Welles radio broadcast subtext.

It's curious how time (and a different president) changes both Hollywood's perspective, and its critics. When Starship Troopers was released in 1997, Paul Verhoeven was roundly criticized for making a seemingly pro-fascist movie. ("Doogie Himmler!" was the reaction of a film critic on Comedy Central's Daily Show when Neil Patrick Harris showed up at the end of the film in a leather trenchcoat.) Had Verhoeven released his film in 2004, rather than receiving brickbats, he would have gotten many of the same accolades from the critics that Michael Moore received for producing a trenchant satire of the modern US military and the propagandistic nature of the conservatively biased media.

I wouldn't have as much of a problem with any of the post-9/11 films, if there was some balance. Nobody begrudged Hollywood producing anti-war films like Paths of Glory or All Quiet On The Western Front (both superb pictures of course, especially the former), as long as we were also getting Casablanca and 30 Seconds Over Tokyo. Even as late as the 1980s, Hollywood could gave its audiences both Platoon and Cruise's own Top Gun.

A while back, Mark Steyn noted that the leftwing fetish for multiculturalism has had the perverse effect of making Hollywood movies less ethnocentric than ever before.

And just as with newspapers, an industry that obsesses over cultural diversity is writing more and more of its stories from the exact same homogenized cookie-cutter template, even as they wonder why they keep losing audience share.

Michelle Malkin and Billy Yates introduce a new word into the vocabulary: "Durbinize".

Michelle also has a sneak preview of tomorrow's Day By Day cartoon, with the magic word: Ritalin!

Update: Somewhat related to Durbinizing, this pretzel logic debating trick has, not coincidentally, popped up a few times over the last week.

(Via Conservative Grapevine.)

Well, Lincoln Chafee that is. Alexander K. McClure of PoliPundit notes that President Bush is apparently supporting Senator Lincoln Chafee in the upcoming Republican primary in Rhode Island:

Of course, Republicans will be infuriated by this decision, but if Chafee is challenged by a conservative, the President’s support will be all the Senator has to save him from a primary defeat.

Conservatives who are jumping up and down at the notion of a Chafee primary defeat should recognize that if Chafee loses, this seat goes Democratic. Chafee may not vote with the GOP all the time, but he certainly votes with the majority a lot more than the senior Senator from Rhode Island does.

Moreover, it is rather interesting that President Bush is supporting a man who openly opposed his re-election. What an intolerant ideologue he is!!

Yeah right--next thing you'll do is tell me that he'd leave a Clinton appointee in charge of PBS for four years.

Err--wait a second...

Mark Steyn uses the catch phrase from the new Batman movie, "It’s not what you feel inside that counts, it’s what you do that defines you", as a springboard to write on the "vast ongoing Tsunami Tshakedown":

A couple of days [after seeing Batman Begins] I read that Oxfam had paid the best part of a million bucks to Sri Lankan customs officials for the privilege of having 25 four-wheel-drive vehicles allowed into the country to get aid out to remote villages on washed-out roads hit by the Boxing Day tsunami. The Indian-made Mahindras stood idle on the dock in Colombo for a month as Oxfam’s representatives were buried under a tsunami of paperwork. Aside from the ‘tax’, they were charged £2,750 ‘demurrage’ for every day the vehicles sat in port.

This was merely the latest instalment in what’s becoming a vast ongoing Tsunami Tshakedown Of The Day retrospective — you can usually find it at the foot of page 37 in your daily paper, if at all. Fourteen Unicef ambulances sent to Indonesia spent two months sitting on the dock of the bay wasting time, as the late Otis Redding so shrewdly anticipated. Eight 20ft containers of Diageo drinking water shipped via the Red Cross arrived at the Indonesian port of Medan in January and are still there, because the Indonesian Red Cross lost the paperwork. Five hundred containers, representing one quarter of all aid sent to Sri Lanka since the tsunami hit on 26 December, are still sitting in port in Colombo, unclaimed or unprocessed. At Medan 1,500 containers of aid are still sitting on the dock.

The tsunami may have been unprecedented, but what followed was business as usual — the sloth and corruption of government, the feebleness of the brand-name NGOs, the compassion-exhibitionism of the transnational jet set. If we lived in a world where ‘it’s what you do that defines you’, we’d be heaping praise on the US and Australian militaries who in the immediate hours after the tsunami struck dispatched their forces to save lives, distribute food, restore water and power and communications.

Instead, a fellow Quebecker of my acquaintance sneered, ‘Can you believe those Americans? A humanitarian disaster strikes and they send an aircraft carrier!’ Er, well, yes. Because for large-scale humanitarian operations it helps to have a big boat handy. It seemed unlikely to me that even your average European politician would utter anything so fatuous in public, but Clare Short came close. The sight of Washington co-ordinating its disaster relief efforts with Australia, India and Japan outside the approved transnational structures was too much for her. ‘This initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to co-ordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN,’ she told the BBC. ‘Only really the UN can do that job. It is the only body that has the moral authority.’

Whether or not it has ‘moral’ authority, the UN certainly can’t do the job. It becomes clearer every week that Western telly viewers threw far more money at tsunami relief than was required and that much of it has been siphoned off by wily customs inspectors and their ilk. If you really wanted to make an effective donation to a humanitarian organisation, you’d send your cheque to the Pentagon or the Royal Australian Navy.

Read the rest.

Over at The Corner, Tim Graham writes:

Forgive me for noticing so late in the week, but why does Time look like a pathetic communist poster this week? (Mao is not the subject inside.) Is this any way to show the world your fervor for the people and their human rights? Presenting like a sun god a man who slaughtered millions?

70 million to be precise, according to what sounds like a scrupulously researched book due out this fall written by Jung Chang, Chinese expatriate author of the bestselling Wild Swans and her husband, Jon Halliday, a British historian.

Earlier this month, we linked to an Australian article about Chang and Halliday which had this classic radical chic rebuttal from Philip Short, a British author and journalist who published his own book on Mao in 1999:

"Mao was ruthless and tyrannical enough in real life that there's no need to reduce him to a cardboard cut-out of Satan. Do we really gain in understanding by denying his complexity, his perversity, his genius and reducing him to a one-dimensional caricature?

"Mao was a tyrant, but [also] much more than that. He was the reverse of a one-dimensional man. He was a great poet, a visionary and, I would argue, a military strategist of genius. He had great skills and enormous failings. Let's not oversimplify and pretend he was just a monster.

Fine. But the reverse should be equally true: let's not oversimplify as Time does on their cover this week and imply that he was just a beneficent leader and kindly father-figure, either.

Update: Pamela, a.k.a., "Atlas Shrugged" has some related thoughts.

Want a PC in your home theater? Or an all-in-one home theater PC? That's the subject of my new article over at ConnectedGuide.com.

The Brothers Judd link to a New York Times article titled, "Democrats Call for Firing of Broadcast Chairman":

Sixteen Democratic senators called on President Bush to remove Kenneth Y. Tomlinson as head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting because of their concerns that he is injecting partisan politics into public radio and television.

"We urge you to immediately replace Mr. Tomlinson with an executive who takes his or her responsibility to the public television system seriously, not one who so seriously undermines the credibility and mission of public television," wrote the senators.

They included Charles E. Schumer of New York, Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, Jon Corzine and Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey, Bill Nelson of Florida, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California.

As the Times article and a Judd commenter both note--wait for it--Tomlinson is a holdover from the Clinton administration.

Meaning that Dubya could take placate the left...and then put his own man in.

Want to see the enormous chasm that separates conservative and leftwing viewpoints? It couldn't be more obvious than these two items, currently making their way through the Blogosphere today. The first, via Instapundit, is this piece that's in the current issue of The American Enterprise magazine:

The War is Over, and We Won
By Karl Zinsmeister

Your editor returned to Iraq in April and May of 2005 for another embedded period of reporting. I could immediately see improvements compared to my earlier extended tours during 2003 and 2004. The Iraqi security forces, for example, are vastly more competent, and in some cases quite inspiring. Baghdad is now choked with traffic. Cell phones have spread like wildfire. And satellite TV dishes sprout from even the most humble mud hovels in the countryside.

Many of the soldiers I spent time with during this spring had also been deployed during the initial invasion back in 2003. Almost universally they talked to me about how much change they could see in the country. They noted progress in the attitudes of the people, in the condition of important infrastructure, in security.

I observed many examples of this myself. Take the two very different Baghdad neighborhoods of Haifa Street and Sadr City. The first is an upper-end commercial district in the heart of downtown. The second is one of Baghdad’s worst slums, on the city’s north edge.

I spent lots of time walking both neighborhoods this spring—something that would not have been possible a year earlier, when both were active war zones, where tanks poured shells into buildings on a regular basis. Today, the primary work of our soldiers in each area is rebuilding sewers, paving roads, getting buildings repaired and secured, supplying schools and hospitals, getting trash picked up, managing traffic, and encouraging honest local governance.

What the establishment media covering Iraq have utterly failed to make clear today is this central reality: With the exception of periodic flare-ups in isolated corners, our struggle in Iraq as warfare is over. Egregious acts of terror will continue—in Iraq as in many other parts of the world. But there is now no chance whatever of the U.S. losing this critical guerilla war.

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt quotes from this staggering comment by former Clinton spokesman Paul Begala on CNN's Inside Politics:

This whole thing has been a disaster for the country, for our country, and thee president seems to be disengaged from reality. The debate in Washington, I think, among those who are observing this, with respect, is the president and his team, are they purposefully misleading us, do they understand what a debacle it is but they are lying, or are they so delusional that they think that we are winning this thing. I have no idea which it is. But I'd like to know, but maybe there are two camps, the reality-based people who understand that we are loosing but they are lying to u [sic] and then there's the delusional wing.

(I doubt Begala would have used similar language in 1998, but that's a whole 'nother post or two.)

To tie this in with two of our earlier posts today, those who deploy the chickenhawk slur should, based on its own internal pretzel logic, agree with someone who's actually been to Iraq recently and seen it with his own eyes.

But they won't--and that's merely the begining of the chasm-like disconnect that separates what Ryan Sager dubbed the Hyperbolic Opposition, and the rest of the country.

National Review Online has an interview with Fred Siegel on Rudy Giuliani. Siegel has just written a new book titled The Prince Of The City: Giuliani, New York And The Genius Of American Life. (Full disclosure: his son Harry edits The New Partisan, where I contribute from time to time):

NRO: You refer to Gotham as a once-great city. It's not anymore? Who do we blame?

Siegel: When I refer to once-great, I'm talking about the early 1990s when under Mayor David Dinkins there were six murders a day, Gotham with 3 percent of the country's population had lost 25 percent of the jobs eliminated in the recession, 60 percent of the city population wanted to leave, it seemed the underclass had won, and just asking for a cup of coffee at a luncheonette could get you a fat lip. And if that weren't bad enough when a cop tangled with a drug dealer setting off a riot by drug dealers in Washington Heights, Mayor Dinkins sided with the drug dealer. You can't make this up

NRO: If you had to explain the Rudy crime cleanup to the uninitiated, what would be the basic sum-up?

Siegel: Giuliani's extraordinary success in reducing crime was based on one key insight and one key innovation. The first embodied in "Broken Windows" policing is that if you police the small crime you'll also capture the big criminals. When the city cracked down on people who jumped the subway turnstiles they found that one in seven had an outstanding felony warrant or a weapon. Then what kept the success going was COMPSTAT, the computer mapping of the daily crime reports. In the bad old days, statistics were egghead stuff the police looked at six months after the fact. But now the police used up-to-the minute statistics to map their tactics on a day-to-day basis. That meant that if there were a lot of drug arrests on Avenue B in the East Village on Monday, the police were ready on Tuesday to move on Avenues A and C where the dealers were likely to have moved.

NRO: How damaging were scandals like the Abner Louima case to Rudy, the NYPD, the city?

Siegel: In the long run, the scandals didn't have a marked effect. But they did produce an hysteria that led upstanding liberals to insist that they were more afraid of the NYPD than they were of criminals

NRO: Did David Dinkins REALLY dismiss crime reduction by saying, "[T]here was no crime in Nazi Germany?"

Siegel: Yes, Dinkins believed in the "root causes theory of crime." He didn't think that the police could have much effect, so when embarrassed by Giuliani's successes in not only reducing crime but reducing police violence as well, he responded with hyperbole

NRO: What's a "hard-edged moderate"?

Siegel: A "hard-edged moderate" (or immoderate centrist, and angry optimist as I sometimes describe him) is a man of sharply contradictory characteristics. Giuliani, for instance is a self-promoting, self-absorbed man who made his own enormous ego serve the city's well being. He ran his government with a Kennedy-like band-of-brothers assumption that those outside his circle couldn't be trusted. But he placed this tribal ethos in the service of universal ideals that transcended the traditional parochialism of New York's ethnic politics. He was the traditionalist who promoted the virtues of service, duty, and hard work so evident on 9/11, but he was sometimes unable to honor those values in his personal life."

NRO: Could Rudy have made it as a Mets fan?

Siegel: Never, a guy like Giuliani who kept score, pitch by pitch, as if he was managing the Yankees, would have been driven mad by the Mets' sloppy play.

NRO: Why can't I help but call him Rudy?

Siegel: Like great mayors before him, Giuliani was a larger-than-life figure. When he entered a room his fans would shout ROOODEE, ROOODEE, as if he were coming to bat.

Read the rest for Seigel's thoughts on whether or not Rudy will be coming to bat in 2008.

Ryan Sager writes that "For those who have supported the war all along--or at least want to see us win--it's sad not to have a loyal opposition to help keep the administration honest":

There's an important debate to be had in this country about just how far we're willing to go in our interrogations. But it's a difficult debate to even get started when one side thinks that we should be extremely concerned with the possibility that someone, somewhere might have desecrated the Korans of the people responsible for the murders of Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, Fabrizio Quattrocchi, three-thousand Americans and now hundreds upon hundreds of Iraqi civilians.

Read the rest.

USA Today actually seems surprised that Vietnam vets in Iraq aren't making the same shopwarn cliched comparisons to the LBJ era that reporters in Iraq are making:

If there are parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, these graying soldiers and the other Vietnam veterans serving here offer a unique perspective. They say they are more optimistic this time: They see a clearer mission than in Vietnam, a more supportive public back home and an Iraqi population that seems to be growing friendlier toward Americans.

"In Vietnam, I don't think the local population ever understood that we were just there to help them," says Chief Warrant Officer James Miles, 57, of Sioux Falls, S.D., who flew UH-1H Hueys in Vietnam from February 1969 to February 1970. And the Vietcong and North Vietnamese were a tougher, more tenacious enemy, he says. Instead of setting off bombs outside the base, they'd be inside.

"I knew we were going to lose Vietnam the day I walked off the plane," says Miles, who returned home this month after nearly a year in Iraq. Not this time. "There's no doubt in my mind that this was the right thing to do," he says.

Someone alert Tom Harkin!

(Via Tech Central Station, which has this blurb attached to the link: "Those darn Vietnam Vets... why won't they compare Iraq to Vietnam?")

Not surprisingly, given that it's his industry, Roger L. Simon has some thoughts on why Hollywood's box office is down this year. Be sure to read the often extremely interesting comments as well underneath.

When my wife and I saw Batman Begins this past weekend, I was surprised at how awful the trailers looked--especially since, if you can't make the trailers look good, the films that they're promoting are no doubt even more dreadful.

The trailers I recall seeing included:

The Dukes of Hazzard: Yet another bad