TCS Daily looks at "Who Killed the Electric Car?"

In a related article, TCS compares a broadband-speed Internet with a dial-up-rated Interstate Highway System.

Sweetness & Light reminds us of the New York Times' shifting position on fighting terrorism by routing out its finances with an op-ed written immediately after 9/11 that concludes, "If America is going to wage a new kind of war against terrorism, it must act on all fronts, including the financial one".

That's 180-degrees opposite from their current worldview, but then I guess if you flip-flop enough times, you become immune to the effects of whiplash. Meanwhile, Ranting Professors explains to Howard Kurtz why the Times has earned conservatives' wrath on this issue:

People are angriest at the Times because the Times went first. They broke the story. At that point the decision was out of the hands of the other papers -- it's just that simple. In fact, as Patterico points out (indeed as the Kurtz story mentions) once the Times posted their story, there really was no decision to be made by the other papers.

A few years ago, Bernie Goldberg documented in Arrogance how much the rest of the legacy media takes its lead from the Times--and has for several decades. Nice to see that even in an age of demassified media, some things never change amongst the walking Jurassic.

Update: In a new City Journal essay, Nicole Gelinas writes:

One of the New York Times’s justifications for exposing the Bush administration’s post-9/11 scrutiny of international banking transactions via access to Swift, the Belgium-based international banking-information system, is that the American people never gave the feds permission to snoop into banking records—even those of suspected Islamist terrorists. Thus, the Times must save the day by alerting us all. But there’s a flaw in this justification. When the Bush administration did ask the American people for permission to scrutinize banking records for terrorist activity, Congress practically shouted yes, without public objection.

Certainly not the Times', but hey, that was then, and this now.

Clive Davis links to Norm Geras, who writes:

As the old political saying has it, the Right looks for converts, the Left looks for traitors....

Clive notes that "This saying was new to Norm. And to me too".

And me three--the "old saying" I've heard was slightly different--well, it's about four years old, as the first time I heard it was in an August 2002 Instapundit post, where Glenn Reynolds wrote:

I disagree with the Christian bloggers on most of their core issues; probably the only thing we're in full agreement on is that the Catholic Church's behavior in covering up its sex scandal has been shameful. We're at odds on cloning, on abortion, and often on birth control and evolution, though the Christian bloggers aren't as unified on those last two issues. But they're always polite.

On the Left, though, we find all these pseudonymous name-calling bloggers whose specialty seems to be abuse aimed at those deviating from the party line. De Long isn't one of those, of course, but this line from his post bespeaks a certain tribalism: "There's still time for Kaus to return to his neoliberal roots."

As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they're looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don't. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.

The use of the word "heretics" sounds less charged to me than "traitors"--it least doesn't imply that if you don't follow orders, you risk being shot.

And certainly, much of the Kossites-versus-the-world/MSM-versus-Kos battles of the past couple of months have been all about exposing and expelling heretics--with both sides claiming ideological purity, even as the general public at large couldn't care less about the players or their issues.

Update: Somewhat related thoughts, here.

Pajamas has an extensive round-up of links.

On CNN/Money's Website, media analyst Paul R. La Monica suggests that it wedding bells may be in order for the Gray Lady, if she wants to survive:

Some day, hopefully sooner rather than later for New York Times investors, the controlling shareholders will figure out that it would be better off swallowing family pride and selling out.

And karmic justice and I know who the appropriate suitor would be!

(Yes, he already owns one New York City newspaper. If he added the Times to his Gotham stable, which paper would he chose to fold? Now that would be a fun decision to have to make. But either way, it's a win for New York!)

Update: Hey, a Wonkette-lanchette! For those of you clicking through, I hope you're not as satirically challenged as the writer of this post seems to have been.

Incidentally, here's someone else who's proposing a suitor for the Times. There's a very, very slight chance he's kidding as well.

I'll believe it when it finally happens, but according to a local Denver news channel's Website, "The University of Colorado announced Monday that it will dismiss controversial professor Ward Churchill".

Of course, to paraphrase (and use in an entirely different context) a line from M*A*S*H, Chutch is merely a symptom. The disease continues to run rampant throughout academia.

Update: Occidentality has a round-up of additional links.

Zaha Hadid is an Iraqi-born and British-based architect whose ideas are some of the most exciting I've seen in a long time. Blending modernism and expressionism, her works at least look like what the future I always imagined as a kid should resemble, unlike most bland postmodern designs.

According to this blog, she has an exhibit running through October in the Guggenheim, which incorporates her design for the kitchen of the future:

It's not quite Joan [sic] Jetson's kitchen, with the ability to relieve you from all the mundane kitchen chores like cooking or washing dishes, but I'd trade my kitchen in for one like this any day.

All it lacks is a replicator in which to say, "Tea, Earl Grey, hot".

(Via Technorati.)

A call for the Times to lose its White House access:

The president should match this morning’s tough talk with concrete action. Publications such as the Times, which act irresponsibly when given access to secrets on which national security depends, should have their access to government reduced. Their press credentials should be withdrawn. Reporting is surely a right, but press credentials are a privilege. This kind of conduct ought not be rewarded with privileged access.

It'll never happen, but by God, it would be fun to watch the meltdown in the house that Pinch built, if it ever did.

Mona Charen is now blogging; update bookmarks accordingly.

Well, actually, probably not, because the New York Times' Bill Keller is too cocooned to notice. But this post by Glenn Reynolds eviscerates both Keller's moronic defense of the Times' exposure of classified wartime programs...

Some of the incoming mail quotes the angry words of conservative bloggers and TV or radio pundits who say that drawing attention to the government's anti-terror measures is unpatriotic and dangerous. (I could ask, if that's the case, why they are drawing so much attention to the story themselves by yelling about it on the airwaves and the Internet.)

...And he explains the origins of America's press freedoms to boot. Or to paraphrase a man who surely must be one of Keller's heroes, these pixels were made for you and me.

Update: Boy, if you thought Keller's argument above sounds specious, wait'll you see the first draft! (Man, and I thought my first drafts were pretty sketchy...)

Jonah Goldberg writes"Enough with the TR worship!":

There's some good stuff in Karl Rove's piece on TR, but this strikes me as good a moment as any to just say it: Enough with the TR worship! TR was a great man, an amazing man, an inspirational man. But he was no conservative in the sense conservatives should emulate today. As Rove notes, TR said "I like big things." Well one of them was big government. He adored Bismarck's Prussia (as did Wilson). He subscribed to modern Darwinian racism (as did Wilson). He was a Progressive in every sense of the word and his politics are of a piece of the Progressive era, an era — contra many in today's Republican Party — conservatives should be loath to mimic. TR worship is a switchback tactic to glorify the intellectual and political heritage of the pre-Goldwater GOP. There is honor there, to be sure. But better to cherry pick the nice patriotic bits and leave the rest of the pile in the dustbin of history. The Weekly Standard was wrong — and flagrantly so in retrospect — to put TR (and "National Greatness") back on the conservative mantle. In the 1990s post-Cold War conservatives were wrong to speak glowingly of the Progressive era. And they are all wrong today when they try to find an escape clause from conservative skepticism toward big government by slapping the pseudo-intellectual feel-good label "progressive" to whatever it is they're looking to do.

That's something that Jonah explored further in his syndicated column.

Waaay back during the early days of this blog, in September of 2002, I spotted a Monty Python-like moment between UN weapons inspectors and Saddam Hussein's lackeys:

Charles Johnson writes that "Iraq officially says their declaration to the UN will claim they possess no banned weapons...[but] an anonymous Iraqi official threatens to use these non-existent weapons".

I think the Iraqis just unwittingly parodied a Monty Python sketch: "There is no cannibalism in the British Navy. Absolutely none, and when I say none, I mean there is a certain amount."

Power Line spots a similar moment occurring within Iran's efforts to acquire its own WMDs:

Over at Power Line Video, check out Mohsen Rezai, Secretary of the Iranian Expediency Council, as he discusses Iran's situation vis-a-vis the United States on Iranian television. He says that "Iran has achieved a great thing" by stalling off the United Nations, and offers an analysis of American power that includes the hoary "paper tiger" theme.

Most interesting is his discussion of Iran's nuclear program. He says that if the U.S. should invade Iran, the program could be moved to the desert where it might never be found. Should the U.S. bomb Iran, the nuclear program could be moved underground:

If Iran goes underground with its nuclear activities, the entire world will curse America and say, "What have you done? You have made the region unsafe, and achieved nothing."

But wait! If Iran's nuclear program is strictly for peaceful purposes, as its government claims, then why would taking it underground "make the region unsafe"?

There is no attempt to build nuclear weapons in Iran, absolutely none, and when I say that there is none, I do mean that there is a certain amount.

(But cannibalism is right out. Check out North Korea--on its own quest to launch nuclear weapons--for that. Seriously.)

Update: If the Pythons were still active, this would have made a great sketch as well.

Just saw on Drudge that Aaron Spelling died, at age 83. As his (no doubt largely pre-written) CNN obituary notes, Spelling produced a superfluity of fluffy hour-long series, hitting his peak in the 1970s, when he had an exclusive deal with ABC:

Spelling's other hit series included "Love Boat," "Fantasy Island," "Burke's Law," "The Mod Squad," "Starsky and Hutch," "T.J. Hooker," "Matt Houston," "Hart to Hart" and "Hotel." He kept his hand in 21st-century TV with series including "7th Heaven" and "Summerland."
He also produced more than 140 television movies. Among the most notable: "Death Sentence" (1974), Nick Nolte's first starring role; "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble" (1976), John Travolta's first dramatic role; and "The Best Little Girl in the World" (1981), which starred Jennifer Jason Leigh.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Spelling provided series and movies exclusively for ABC and is credited for the network's rise to major status. Jokesters referred to it as "The Aaron Broadcasting Company."

Success was not without its thorns. TV critics denounced Spelling for fostering fluff and nighttime soap operas. He called his shows "mind candy"; critics referred to them as "mindless candy."

As Todd Gitlin astutely observed in his 1983 book, Inside Prime Time, beginning with The Mod Squad, Spelling hit upon his primary formula: a group of young, photogenic leads, and somewhere in the background, a father figure who both provided the older generation with a reason to watch the show, and comforted them that the leads wouldn’t go too far off the beaten bath of societal norms. (Remember, we’re talking 1970s network television here, which was rather tame when compared to your average HBO series of today).

Spelling took that formula to its absolute peak with Charlie’s Angels, which built on The Mod Squad's trio of hip young leads, but replaced the sixties-era psychedelic drop-outs with three drop-dead gorgeous women fighting crime not in bell-bottoms and headbands, but very 1970s-style Nolan Miller-designed outfits. The Angels actually had two father figures to keep them out of trouble--the eunuch-like David Doyle on-camera, and above him on the crime fighting food chain, the perfect boss, voiced by the suave John Forsythe, but literally just off-screen. Thus, as Gitlin noted, every man watching the show could pretend that he was Charlie, and “the girls” worked for him.

As a television formula, it worked absolutely brilliantly, and the show was a huge ratings smash. It’s no coincidence that the peaks of both Johnny Carson and Spelling’s careers were in the same era; As Jeff Jarvis wrote when Carson passed away:

Carson also represented the golden age of America's shared experience in media. That era lasted about three decades, from the late '50s to the late '80s, when the three networks turned most cities into one-newspaper towns and we all watched the same thing. I don't regret that era dying; it means we now have more choice and choice equals control. But it was a unique time in our culture, when popular culture became a common platform, a common touchstone for Americans. We all got Johnny's jokes.

And, for better or worse, we all watched Aaron’s shows.

Thanks to Nick At Nite and its TV Land spin-off, insomniacs at least, are doomed to watch those shows into eternity. And if there's a God, He's forcing Spelling to as well, in Sisyphean penance.

The irony is that Spelling's probably enjoying them.

Update: Aaron Spelling: Straussian Neo-Con!

Last year, as Ward Churchill's antics helped to reveal how out of control much of the modern academy seems, Roger Kimball of The New Criterion wrote a powerful essay titled, "Retaking the university: a battle plan". As Kimball writes:

Many parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children going off to college one year and coming back the next having jettisoned every moral, religious, social, and political scruple that they had been brought up to believe. Why should parents fund the moral de-civilization of their children at the hands of tenured antinomians? Why should alumni generously support an alma mater whose political and educational principles nourish a world view that is not simply different from but diametrically opposed to the one they endorse? Why should trustees preside over an institution whose faculty systematically repudiates the pedagogical mission they, as trustees, have committed themselves to uphold? These are questions that should be asked early and asked often.

In that effort, Power Line notes that Kimball is adopting his essay into a book, to be released in November. In the meatime, here's a sample of the piece it will build upon:

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In the Washington Post, Richard Moran has a column portentously titled, "Jon Stewart, Enemy of Democracy?". It begins:

This is not funny: Jon Stewart and his hit Comedy Central cable show may be poisoning democracy.

Two political scientists found that young people who watch Stewart's faux news program, "The Daily Show," develop cynical views about politics and politicians that could lead them to just say no to voting.

According to Wikipedia (and yes, take it for what it's worth), The Daily Show averages 1.5 million viewers nightly. If that's a million and a half young, underinformed cynics of college age (but I repeat myself in triplicate) who consider The Daily Show to actually be news and then decide not to vote, Stewart has done the nation a great service. We salute him.

(And besides, every once in a blue state moon, he's capable of broaching a topic avoided by real reporters who no longer care to do their jobs.)

Update: Allah agrees: "Making jaded hipsters less inclined to vote is really more of a feature than a bug, isn’t it?" Exactly.

Another Update: Ed Morrissey adds, "Poking fun continuously without ever taking responsibility to advance some rational agenda as an alternative amounts to a form of political cowardice". Exactly.

Ben Wattenberg, who served on the LBJ White House staff before becoming a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute compares and contrasts LBJ's war with President Bush's:

The central similarity is that both wars were defensive efforts against a global foe. We were right to fear the expansion of totalitarian Communism. We lost that battle — actually the South Vietnamese Army lost it two and a half years after we disengaged — but we won the war. Wars, after all, are won by the party that triumphs in the final showdown: The Soviet Union has disappeared, and its satellites deorbited. In Iraq, our foe is jihadism, which likewise seeks global domination. To think that they can’t achieve this against a technologically superior West is simply a failure of imagination: One terrorist with a smallpox virus might be able to wipe out half a population. Another similarity has to do with our domestic politics. President Lyndon B. Johnson lost no opportunity to explain why we were in Vietnam: from major speeches to arrival and departure statements for important visitors. I was on his staff from mid-1966 to the end, and at parties and dinners in Washington I would repeat the president’s rationale with gusto. Many times, people would respond, “Gee, I wish LBJ would explain it that way.” Sound familiar? President George W. Bush always talks about Iraq — yet we keep hearing the same line: “Why doesn’t he explain the war?” With the exception of one paragraph (on the “ownership society”) Bush’s Second Inaugural was entirely devoted to the rationale for the war. It’s worth reading: a magnificent speech, right in the American grain, one that will be remembered for as long as liberty is an issue on this planet. And the rationale has not changed.

Like Vietnam before it, the Iraq war is often blamed on “neoconservative” ideologues (or their counterparts then) which is to say, people who think the game of purveying liberty is worth the candle of commitment.

In both wars, critics asked: “What’s the plan? What’s the exit strategy?” And in both cases, the appropriate answer was: Dunno; we’ll have to play it by ear and see what develops in the fog of war.

In both wars, much of the media coverage was crazed. My Lai involved a few hundred people, Abu Ghraib fewer than that. But these events dominated news coverage, which tended to ignore the larger meaning of what was going on.

In both wars, we were told our actions would hurt us in the eyes of the world. And so they did. Unfortunate. But we ended up as the exceptional nation, Number One, more influential than any nation in history, the City on a Hill, hearing anti-American language which boiled down to “Yankee go home and take me with you.”

The basic truth about our mission in Iraq is the same as that about Vietnam: We’re doing something important and positive in the world.

Be proud.

Indeed.

The must be my day for podcasting: earlier today, an article I wrote on podcasting for the July issue of CE Pro, the home theater professionals' trade publication went live (subscription may be required). And while I'm in the middle of mixing and editing Pajamas' Blog Week In Review podcast (which should go live tomorrow, once I finish it and upload it to Pajamas HQ), over at TCS Daily, the first part of my two-part podcast interview with Michael Yon and Chris Muir went live. Click on over!

During his press conference today, Donald Rumsfeld fielded this exchange:

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, there has been a lot made on Capitol Hill about these chemical weapons that were found and may be quite old. But do you a real concern of these weapons from Saddam's past perhaps having an impact on U.S. troops who are on the ground in Iraq right now?

RUMSFELD : Certainly. What has been announced is accurate, that there have been hundreds of canisters or weapons of various types found that either currently have sarin in them or had sarin in them, and sarin is dangerous. And it's dangerous to our forces, and it's a concern.

So obviously, to the extent we can locate these and destroy them, it is important that we do so. And they are dangerous. Anyone -- I'm sure General Casey or anyone else in that country would be concerned if
they got in the wrong hands.

They are weapons of mass destruction. They are harmful to human beings. And they have been found. And that had not been by Saddam Hussein, as he inaccurately alleged that he had reported all of his
weapons . And they are still being found and discovered.

It's amusing to watch the pushback from the left after Santorum's press conference yesterday. Beginning in mid-2003, the mantra began that Saddam had no WMDs--zip, zero, nadda. Or as Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said as recently as last week, "There are two things that don't exist in Iraq: cutting and running, and weapons of mass destruction."

Now the latest version being fielded is that, well, Saddam had them, but they were old, outdated. pay them no mind.

Of Senator Kerry's time in Vietnam, James Lileks once wrote, "The past was more malleable than you had ever expected." But if anything, that's even more true when it comes to Iraq than the Winter Soldier's salad days. Just look at Al Gore in 1993, and today.

Update: Evangelical Outpost notes correctly:

Opposition to the war has nothing to do with the lack of WMDs. It never did. We could find a nuclear bomb in Uday Hussein’s old apartment and John Kerry would still be gearing up for Winter Soldier II. Unless you dropped your moral compass off the side of a swift boat in Cambodia, it’s easy to see that the world is safer because we secured the one WMD that truly mattered: Saddam Hussein.

More important than the weapons that were found (or that have yet to be found) are the ones that will never be created by Saddam’s regime. Many Americans, however, still suffer from the delusion that the only way that Saddam could have been a significant threat was for him to have possessed stockpiles of WMDs.

Meanwhile, Shannon Love ressurects Hitchcock's McGuffin device to explain why Saddam's WMDs were ignorned or spun by the left.

Update: Ian Schwartz has a round-up of cable and Blogosphere opinion.

When Hollywood Reporter quotes Mike Wallace as saying that Dan Rather's depature from CBS was a "sad, bloody story," they had no idea how much metaphoric blood was on Dan's hands, according to The New York Observer:

Peter Boyer, the New Yorker writer and author of the 1989 book Who Killed CBS?, said, “Dan Rather is a creature of a strange, unrealistic, almost surreal arrangement that is so long past, and such an anachronism—which is to say three networks with a captive nationwide audience—that you wonder how he might psychically adapt to being part of the tiniest fraction of the most fragmented form of communication that exists. I don’t know. I guess that’ll be up to Dan and his shrinks in the future.”

Several long-term associates of Mr. Rather searched for the most appropriate analogy. “Is he Burt Lancaster to Tom Brokaw’s Jimmy Stewart?” asked one.

He is William Holden from The Wild Bunch, said another. Or Gary Cooper from High Noon.

“Dan is the lone gunfighter who squints into the sun, sets his horse into the wind and rides off to the next challenge,” said a third. “He’s had all these gun battles in the past, there’s a trail of bodies, but he knows he’s got it in him to rescue the townspeople. It’s just—well, he’s so f***ing alone.”

There’s a trail of bodies--and Dan, "the lone gunfighter" has plugged 'em full of lead during "all these gunbattles"? No wonder "he’s so f***ing alone"--look at his body count!

Geez. I thought violence on television was restricted to prime time--when did anchormen go from being overhyped newsreaders to trigger-happy gunslingers? Given the gunslinging image of the man in the oval office (who also made his mark in Texas before going national), and given what the Azlan/MEChA men think of the 19th century American expansion into the west, is this an anology the left really wants to use to describe one of its favorite television sons?

Update: As we discussed this story over lunch, my wife mentioned the binary world of television journalism--when it's going right, the anchorman is a gunslinging crusader (just to keep the analogies rendered anathema by PC correctness going) but if there's a problem? Well, as Walter Cronkite said last year:

Cronkite did not heavily fault Rather for his role in last September's discredited story about President Bush's military service. Rather anchored the "60 Minutes Wednesday" story.

"We all know he made a mistake by now," Cronkite said. "But would we have done much the same? I would not be sure that I wouldn't have followed my producers and accepted what they had to offer."

Hey, he's just a newsreader--it's the producer who writes the copy!

Which is true, as Tom Wolfe noted in 1980:

Read More »

James Lileks writes, "I am not susceptible to disaster scenarios":

I do not believe we have ten years to prevent the inevitable collapse of civilization. As long as I can remember I have been fed end-times scenarios – death by ice, death by fire, death by famine, death by smothering from heaps of clambering humans scrabbling for purchase on an overpopulated world, death by full-scale nuclear exchange, death by unstoppable global AIDS, death by a two-degree rise in temperatures, death by radon, death by alar, death by inadvertent Audi acceleration, death by juju. Doesn’t mean we won’t die of juju. But somehow we survive. The only thing I take away is a vague wistful wonder what it would be like to live in an era when things were generally so bad that the futurists spent their time assuring us it would be better. Say what you will about the past, but at least they had a future. All I’ve ever had, according to the experts, is a grim narrow window of heedless ignorance bliss followed by a dystopian irradiated world characterized by scarcity, mutation, and quite possibly intelligent chimps. You have no future. Oh, and don’t smoke!

Bah.

Oh sure--laugh it up for now. But what happens when the Doomsday Machine arrives?!

One of the most-quoted lines by Charles Krauthammer came from a 2002 column, which began thusly:

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

Peggy Noonan drafts a variation on this theme:

Democratic leaders in Washington are in a worse position than Republican leaders in Washington. Neither likes their base, really, and both think they are smarter. But the Democrats think, deep down, that their base is barking mad. The Republicans don't. They just think their base is a bore.

For some thoughts on the first half of Noonan's equation, click here.

Update: North Carolina seems to be taking Noonan's Law a bit too seriously, it seems...

Rick Santorum issued a press release today which reads as follows:

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, joined Congressman Peter Hoekstra, (R-MI-2), Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, today to make a major announcement regarding the release of newly declassified information that proves the existence of chemical munitions in Iraq since 2003. The information was released by the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, and contained an unclassified summary of analysis conducted by the National Ground Intelligence Center. In March, Senator Santorum began advocating for the release of these documents to the American public.

“The information released today proves that weapons of mass destruction are, in fact, in Iraq,” said Senator Santorum. “It is essential for the American people to understand that these weapons are in Iraq. I will continue to advocate for the complete declassification of this report so we can more fully understand the complete WMD picture inside Iraq.”

The following are the six key points contained in the unclassified overview:

• Since 2003 Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent.

• Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist.

• Pre-Gulf War Iraqi chemical weapons could be sold on the black market. Use of these weapons by terrorists or insurgent groups would have implications for Coalition forces in Iraq. The possibility of use outside Iraq cannot be ruled out.

• The most likely munitions remaining are sarin and mustard-filled projectiles.

• The purity of the agent inside the munitions depends on many factors, including the manufacturing process, potential additives, and environmental storage conditions. While agents degrade over time, chemical warfare agents remain hazardous and potentially lethal.

• It has been reported in open press that insurgents and Iraqi groups desire to acquire and use chemical weapons.

Why, it's like all this knowledge went down the memory hole or something!

Update: Not surprisingly, Ed Morrissey and Allahpundit have more.

Another Update: Santorum was on Hugh Hewitt's show to discuss this topic, follow this link to an eventual transcript. Meanwhile, here's a transcript of a press conference that Santorum and Congressman Peter Hoekstra (R-NY) held today.

Come to Los Angeles! The sun shines bright, the beaches are wide and inviting, and the orange groves stretch as far as the eye can see. There are jobs aplenty, and land is cheap. Every working man can have his own house, and inside every house, a happy, all-American family. You can have all this, and who knows... you could even be discovered, become a movie star... or at least see one.

Off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush, you can also meet a certain very prominent shoe blogger and his posse and spend a marvelous evening trading thoughts on the John Lobb, the New & Lingwood, the Prada, and the Hasselhoff...

Hollywood Reporter writes that Tuesday could be Dan Rather's last day at CBS. But it gets one detail of the debacle known as Ra^therGate exactly backwards:

Rather's position with the network had been strained after a September 2004 report he did for "60 Minutes Wednesday" that questioned President Bush's National Guard service during the Vietnam War. The report, which was prepared by producer Mary Mapes and only involved Rather minimally, was based upon documents that failed to live up to intense scrutiny.

The problem with the documents in question didn't require "intense scrutiny". Quite the contrary--it was immediately apparent to anyone who looked (who wasn't so invested in the story that it had to be--had! to! be!--true) that the documents were fake; intense scrutiny was only needed afterwards to confirm the obvious without a doubt.

Something that should have been applied to these documents before they were chosen to build a story around, not afterwards.

Opinion Journal goes in search of the base truths of modern art:

Once in a while a news story so speaks for itself that it threatens to put commentators out of a job.

In this year's summer show at London's Royal Academy of Arts, "Exhibit 1201" is a large rectangular tablet of slate with a tiny barbell-shaped bit of boxwood on top. Its creator, David Hensel, must be pleased to have been selected from among some 9,000 applicants for the world's largest open-submission exhibit of contemporary art. Nevertheless, he was bemused to discover that in transit his sculpture had gotten separated from its base. Judging the two components as different submissions, the Royal Academy had rejected his artwork proper--a finely wrought laughing head in jesmonite--and selected the plinth. "It says something about the state of visual arts today," said Mr. Hensel. He didn't say what. He didn't need to.

Meanwhile, James Lileks checks in on the state of modern architecture:

As for the building’s interaction with the street, well – it doesn’t have a great deal to say, other than “Damn, I’m blue.”

You'll be too, when you're done. But click anyway.

Back in 2002, when I suggested that the last person watching turn off the lights at MSNBC when she was done watching, I had no idea Connie Chung would take me so literally!

NOTE: The management of Ed Driscoll.com, YouTube, and Pajamas Media are not responsible for the psychic damage that clicking on the above link could cause. Click at your own risk!

(Via Hot Air.)

David Frum links to a New York Sun article that discovers the, err, inconvenient truth hidden in Al Gore's agenda:

For the watchdogs of Israeli influence in Washington, I have an inconvenient truth, indeed. You have a powerful new enemy. Forget the neocons and the regime change in Iraq. Now is the time for the self-appointed guardians of the national interest to look over the horizon and see the next operation the agents of the Jewish state in America are plotting.

Notice Al Gore. Yes, Al Gore: Huffington Post favorite, netroots royalty, the man who opposed the Iraq war before Juan Cole did. That Al Gore. He has flipped. The former vice president may have given a landmark speech in 2002 opposing the second Gulf War. But with his new movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore has just launched a campaign to bankrupt the Saudi royal family and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Now Al Gore, of course, will say that his plan to put the house of Saud and heirs of Khomeini into penury is motivated out of concern for the shrinking polar ice caps and his fervent hope to insure that numerous
cities, many American, remain unflooded. But a clear-eyed observer need only ask whom all this altruism benefits to uncover the former vice president’s real agenda.

No, all of this greenhouse gases and carbon emissions mumbo-jumbo is cover for a Zionist-Likudnik-neocon plot. If the Gore plan catches on and American citizens start demanding engines free of fossil fuel and candidates
dedicated to overtaxing gasoline and forcing car manufacturers to meet European air quality standards, it will be worse than 20 Projects for a New American Century, 50 Weekly Standards, a hundred Charles Krauthammers.

Read the whole thing. And then click on this for the misdirection play that absolutely clinches it!

(And yes, I'm kidding about that last part. Or am I...?)

Slate has an at times fawning profile of Garrison Keillor this weekend:

Keillor's humor has always been a bit of a puzzle: What is its irony/sincerity ratio? Is he mocking Midwesterners or mocking the rest of us via Midwesterners? In 1985, when Time magazine called Keillor the funniest man in America, Bill Cosby reportedly said, "That's true if you're a pilgrim." A decade later, a cartoon version of Keillor forced Homer Simpson to assault his TV and shout, "Be more funny!" But judging Keillor by mainstream standards of comedy (compression, originality, edge) misses the point. He works hard to be unfunny in a very particular way. His humor is polite, understated, and deliberately anachronistic; it never breaks a sweat.

I don't know how much perspiration Keillor was generating when he spoke to a university in November of 2004, but it's certainly not my definition of polite:

“I am a Democrat—it’s no secret. I am a museum-quality Democrat,” Keillor said. “Last night I spent my time crouched in a fetal position, rolling around and moaning in the dark.”

Not one to shy away from speaking his mind, Keillor proposed a solution to what he deemed a fundamental problem with U.S. elections. “I’m trying to organize support for a constitutional amendment to deny voting rights to born-again Christians,” Keillor smirked. “I feel if your citizenship is in Heaven—like a born again Christian’s is—you should give up your citizenship. Sorry, but this is my new cause. If born again Christians are allowed to vote in this country, then why not Canadians?”

And in a 2002 piece for Salon, Keillor wrote of Norm Coleman, Minnesota's then-newly elected Republican senator:

Norm got a free ride from the press. St. Paul is a small town and anybody who hangs around the St. Paul Grill knows about Norm's habits. Everyone knows that his family situation is, shall we say, very interesting, but nobody bothered to ask about it, least of all the religious people in the Republican Party. They made their peace with hypocrisy long ago. So this false knight made his way as an all-purpose feel-good candidate, standing for vaguely Republican values, supporting the president.

In 2004, Keillor wrote the following passage about Coleman's voters:

...hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, see-through fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, hobby cops, misanthropic frat boys, lizardskin cigar monkeys, jerktown romeos, ninja dittoheads, the shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, cheese merchants, cat stranglers, taxi dancers, grab-ass executives, gun fetishists, genteel pornographers, pill pushers, chronic nappers, nihilists in golf pants, backed-up Baptists, Crips and Bloods of the boardroom...

Near his conclusion, Sam Anderson, the author of the Slate piece writes:

once Keillor's trademark simplicity begins to look complicated and unnatural—the paradoxes start tumbling out like herrings out of the pickle-barrel: His plainness seems pretentious, his anti-bombast bombastic, his anti-snobbery snobbish. This sense of affectation is why some people instinctively dislike such a likable entertainer.

Or maybe--just maybe--they simply dislike being dubbed hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, see-through fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, hobby cops, misanthropic frat boys, lizardskin cigar monkeys, jerktown romeos, ninja dittoheads, the shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, cheese merchants, cat stranglers, taxi dancers, grab-ass executives, gun fetishists, genteel pornographers, pill pushers, chronic nappers, nihilists in golf pants, backed-up Baptists, Crips and Bloods of the boardroom.

But hey, Keillor's humor has always been a bit of a puzzle, as the article notes.

As Tom McGuire writes, the New York Times "delivers a poignant look at Dan Rather's sunset":

The 74-year-old man with the Mets cap pulled far down on his forehead slid into a booth at a diner on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and ordered a glass of milk without so much as turning a head — so quietly, in fact, that it was hard to believe it was Dan Rather.

In place of the swagger that had served him so well throughout his 44-year career at CBS News was an obvious sadness that his tenure at the network was ticking down to an inglorious end. Mr. Rather complained that since stepping down as anchor of the " CBS Evening News" last year, in the aftermath of a reporting scandal, he had been ill used as a correspondent on "60 Minutes" and had been given virtually nothing at all to do for the previous six weeks.

Among the places he had sought solace, he said on a recent afternoon, was in "Good Night, and Good Luck," George Clooney's homage to Edward R. Murrow and the CBS News of old, a film that Mr. Rather said he had seen five times in theaters, most recently alone. [Is this Dan's equivilent of his fbete noire's talking to the paintings during Watergate?--Ed]

Mr. Rather's contract with CBS, and "60 Minutes," is not scheduled to expire until late November. But he said yesterday that he and the network were close to an agreement that would end his tenure early, and that he was seriously mulling a new venture that, at least initially, relatively few viewers would be able to see: he would develop and be the host of a weekly interview program on a high-definition television channel known as HDNet.

The offer, he said, had come directly from Mark Cuban, the unbridled owner of the National Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks, who was a co-founder of HDNet in 2001.

Cuban, as the Times article notes, was also the producer of Good Night And Good Luck, which, as liberal journalist Jack Shafer noted in Slate, is riddled with errors and distortions.

But then of course, so is Rather.

As Betsy Newmark writes, "Maxine Waters reveals a bit of the truth", though rather inadvertently, of course:

In the debate yesterday over the House Resolution on the Iraq War and battle against terrorism, Maxine Waters, always entertaining, revealed the real reason why the Democrats were so upset. (Thanks to Laura Ingraham for posting the audio.) She got up on the House floor and said that many Democrats were going to be "trapped" because they would have to vote on this resolution and they don't want to have to pick a side and vote on it.

"And so, many Democrats are going to get trapped. Because they claim that in their districts they have half of their constituents for it, this war and half against it and they don't know what to do."

So in other words, if you add together to majority of the electorate that voted for President Bush in 2004, and the "half of [the] constituents" in Democrat districts that Waters refers to, the 256 in favor, 153 opposed vote yesterday sounds like, if anything, actually a smaller representation of what the national consensus actually is, despite post-voting waffling by Waters and others on the left.

Speaking of being trapped in a fashionable Mobius loop, Michael Barone explores how the war in Iraq is framed by the left:

Historians may regard it as a curious thing that the left and the press have been so determined to fit current events into templates based on events that occurred 30 to 40 years ago. The people who effectively framed the issues raised by Vietnam and Watergate did something like the opposite; they insisted that Vietnam was not a reprise of World War II or Korea and that Watergate was something different from the operations J. Edgar Hoover conducted for Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy. Journalists in the 1940s, '50s and early '60s tended to believe they had a duty to buttress Americans' faith in their leaders and their government. Journalists since Vietnam and Watergate have tended to believe that they have a duty to undermine such faith, especially when the wrong party is in office.

That belief has its perils for journalism, as the Fitzgerald investigation has shown. The peril that the press may find itself in the hot seat, but even more the peril that it will get the story wrong. The visible slavering over the prospect of a Rove indictment is just another item in the list of reasons why the credibility of the "mainstream media" has been plunging. There's also a peril for the political left. Vietnam and Watergate were arguably triumphs for honest reporting. But they were also defeats for America--and for millions of freedom-loving people in the world. They ushered in an era when the political opposition and much of the press have sought not just to defeat administrations but to delegitimize them. The pursuit of Karl Rove by the left and the press has been just the latest episode in the attempted criminalization of political differences. Is there any hope that it might turn out to be the last?

Err, not in the forseeable future. On the other hand, as Barone notes, trying to shove events into a pre-existing template has its downsides:

It has been a tough 10 days for those who see current events through the prisms of Vietnam and Watergate. First, the Democrats failed to win a breakthrough victory in the California 50th District special election--a breakthrough that would have summoned up memories of Democrats winning Gerald Ford's old congressional district in a special election in 1974. Instead the Democratic nominee got 45% of the vote, just 1% more than John Kerry did in the district in 2004.

Second, U.S. forces with a precision air strike killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, on the same day that Iraqis finished forming a government. Zarqawi will not be available to gloat over American setbacks or our allies' defeat, as the leaders of the Viet Cong and North Vietnam did.

Third, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced that he would not seek an indictment of Karl Rove. The leftward blogosphere had Mr. Rove pegged for the role of Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Theories were spun about plea bargains that would implicate Vice President Dick Cheney. Talk of impeachment was in the air. But it turns out that history doesn't repeat itself. George W. Bush, whether you like it or not, is not a second Richard Nixon.

Add one more to the list, as Jonah Goldberg notes:

I don't think we can over-estimate the significance of the fact that Dan Rather will be leaving CBS. I don't see how you can interpret this as anything less than his firing over Memogate. Undoubtedly, in my mind, CBS felt in 2004 that they couldn't sack him on the spot because of how it would appear. His slow departure and temporary job-shuffling was a face-saving effort for both Rather and CBS. But, the delay doesn't discount the fact that if it weren't for Memogate, Rather would probably still be the esteemed anchor of CBS News. This constitutes a monumental triumph for the rightwing blogosphere and I don't think we should let it be obscured by the kabuki dance CBS put on to downplay their embarrassment.

And another example of Mobius loops coming full circle ad infinitum (sorry, just intertwining as many metaphors as possible), CBS is ejecting Rather to make way for Katie Couric, in much the same way Rather forced the issue for Walter Cronkite two decades ago.

Ian Schwartz asks, "Why Do The Dixie Chicks Hate America?". The answer (or at least the root causes of what is a surprisingly ancient and reactionary fashion now sclerotic, hard and covered with liver spots) is blowing in the wind...

See also this essay; scroll down for the history of another previously apolitical musician gone round the bend.

Update: Tammy Bruce writes:

since [Natalie Maines of the Dixies says] she "doesn't understand" patriotism, I have a short list of a few concepts which epitomize America and illustrate why we goofballs so love this country.

Read the rest.

Libertas reviews Warners' 260 million dollar Superman Returns:

here’s what I think of director Bryan Singer’s $260 million Superman Returns: I think it stinks. I think it’s a complete waste of your time and money. I think it’s a film made by idiots, for idiots - a film made for people whose standards have dropped so far, they don’t even remember what a good film was like.

It's hard to tell, but I'm guessing that's a thumbs down vote.

Superman, incidentally, has been updated a little:

Our new Superman, incidentally, doesn’t even stand for “Truth, Justice & The American Way,” anymore. Playing Daily Planet editor Perry White, Frank Langella tells us that Superman stands for “Truth and Justice …” and leaves it at that. The Superman Returns press materials tell me that Superman now stands for “truth, justice and all that is good.” “All that is good” is apparently the phrase of choice when “The American Way” sounds too - what? Imperialistic? Jingoistic? Symptomatic of Bush-style militarism? I’m not sure, exactly. All I know is this ‘American Way’ stuff is now apparently too edgy and controversial for a Warner Brothers product shipped to Peru, Pakistan and Malaysia. Don’t want to offend anyone!

Except the red states, of course. But they're expendable.

Look for it go online later today at Pajamas HQ, with another special guest sitting in for Glenn Reynolds this week. (I'm sworn to secrecy on this one...)

While you're waiting for it to go online, to other great audio files to pass the time: Mark Steyn's weekly visit to Hugh Hewitt (which is normally required listening for me on Thursdays, except we were taping the podcast at that time yesterday) and...the return of James Lileks' Diner, back after a fresh tank of bandwidth has been deposited in his account.

Update: It's up. Hey, I could have sworn it was Michelle Malkin who was sitting in yesterday. Apparently though, it was actually The Mommas And The Pappas...

Ed Morrissey writes:

If al-Qaeda in Iraq reads Western news sources, and their media-savvy but tactically insane recent communications suggest they do, they may soon decide that their operation has blown its cover completely. After an AQ associate dropped a dime on Zarqawi, they now have a much larger security breach than they knew:

Iraq's national security adviser said Thursday a "huge treasure" of documents and computer records was seized after the raid on terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's hideout, giving the Iraqi government the upper hand in its fight against al-Qaida in Iraq.
National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie also said he believed the security situation in the country would improve enough to allow a large number of U.S.-led forces to leave Iraq by the end of this year, and a majority to depart by the end of next year. "And maybe the last soldier will leave Iraq by mid-2008," he said.

Al-Rubaie said a laptop, flashdrive and other documents were found in the debris after the airstrike that killed the al-Qaida in Iraq leader last week outside Baqouba, and more information has been uncovered in raids of other insurgent hideouts since then.

He called it a "huge treasure ... a huge amount of information."

When asked how he could be sure the information was authentic, al-Rubaie said "there is nothing more authentic than finding a thumbdrive in his pocket."

Ed notes however, that a much more controversial method of obtaining additional information may be tried:

Prime Minister Maliki has a plan for the other native insurgents: amnesty. However, his proposal has a clause to which the US will plainly object, which allows terrorists who have conducted attacks on US forces in the past to walk free if they lay down their arms.

Read the rest.

Jonah Goldberg and Betsy Newmark have some thoughts on Al Gore's language--both in 1992's Earth In The Balance and this year's An Inconvenient Truth comparing global cooli