According to The Corner.

In a heretofore unseen two flashing gumball light announcement, Drudge adds, "SADDAM: THE END... Saddam Hussein executed by hanging, according to Iraqi media reports. More soon...."

As Mona Charen wrote when Saddam was captured by the US three years ago:

Adolf Hitler deprived the Allies of the satisfaction of executing him. Josef Stalin died in his bed. Pol Pot died of natural causes. But Saddam Hussein, that vicious, depraved worm of a man, was plucked from his rathole. Ah the great warrior. The author of the Mother of All Battles. The man who claimed he would drive the "invaders" from Iraq. The man who forced thousands of Iraqis to sacrifice their lives so he could continue his squalid and luxurious spree in his many palaces.
This modern-day Saladin (another of his conceits) didn't even have the courage to kill himself in the end, but submitted meekly, with an offer to "negotiate."

I'd say negotiations have successfully been concluded.

Ed Morrissey adds:

Three Arabic news stations and MS-NBC are broadcasting the report that Saddam Hussein has been executed this evening, right around 10 pm ET.

Right now, without any text reports, MS-NBC is telling viewers that a delegation of seven witnesses saw Saddam hung a few minutes ago. The witnesses included members of the tribunal that convicted and sentenced him as well as a doctor to declare him dead. They also report that the Iraqi government recorded the event, and that the images and/or video will eventually be released to demonstrate that the former dictator and genocidal monster has truly died.

For a brief overview of Saddam's blood-soaked curriculum vitae, click here and here.

Not surprisingly, Pajamas HQ has an extensive round-up of links.

Tim Blair notes that "Saddam’s half-brother Barzan Hassan and former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court Awad Bandar were also executed", and links to a quip by Mark Steyn:

“Just in time for Eid, the Iraqis decided Saddam Hussein was one old acquaintance who really should be forgot.”

But not by former Iraqis now living in Dearborn, Michigan, who are thrilled that their former tormentor is currently receiving his final judgment. As are Iraqis much closer to the situation, according to Ed Morrissey:

MSNBC, which I'm forced to watch in my hotel room, now reports that the Iraqi witnesses to the execution were cheering and dancing around the body of Saddam Hussein.

Can't say I blame them.

Michelle Malkin includes a screen-capture of the handsome send-off CNN is giving Saddam on their homepage, and writes:

Lots of readers are peeved by CNN's memorial tribute to Saddam. Reader Roger writes, "Did Gerald Ford get this much respect on CNN's home page?"

No, of course not. But Jerry just didn't have that radical chic joie de vivre that Hussein had amongst CNN and its own totalitarian-admiring founder, Ted Turner. As for the other American television networks and Saddam, for a flashback as to how ABC and NBC breathlessly covered Saddam's "elections" (in which he routinely received 99.9 percent of the vote), click here. As for CBS, who could forget Dan Rather's infamously cozy early 2003 interview with Saddam, only one month before Saddam was finally, mercifully driven out of power and into his spider hole, by the US.

Compare Michelle's screen capture of CNN's homepage with the graphic that populist champion Fox News is currently using on theirs. Meanwhile, Confederate Yankee explores "What Passes For Intellectual From--where else?--the Huffington Post".

Jules Crittenden, city editor at the Boston Herald, is that seemingly rare commodity these days--a newspaperman who gets it:

CNN reports a witness described "fear on his face." Good. We already knew he was a coward, and we know how many deaths a coward dies.

I've filled my shot brass and raised it. Don't be shy about raising a glass yourself. The world is a better place rid of this filthy murderer.

Indeed.

Hot Air dubs this "your quote of the year":

Witnesses to the execution told NBC News’ Richard Engel that they were cheering around the body of Saddam after the execution.

NBC could hear cheers and celebrations in the background while talking to an official in the prime minister’s office.

“This son of a bitch is lying under my feet...I can’t talk now because of all the cheers!" a witness said.

But, gosh, only four years ago, NBC and ABC told me Saddam was beloved by his people.

Heh--Hugh Hewitt adds that Saddam should have filed his appeal in the Ninth Circuit. Why didn't Ramsey "Jesus was a terrorist" Clark think of that?!

Last Update: "‘I Saw Fear, He Was Afraid’--In a NEWSWEEK exclusive, the man hired to videotape Saddam Hussein’s execution recalls the brutal dictator’s humble final moments", one of which is currently shown at the top of The Drudge Report.

Tammy Bruce writes that the networks are "wringing their [hands] over whether or not to show any part of the Saddam execution video. I find this sudden concern, on CNN and Viacom's part especially, about showing an execution to be slightly disingenuous":

Astounding, isn't it? Here's CNN, which had absolutely no problem airing terrorist propaganda featuring their murder of our troops, and yet they struggle with airing a hooded mass murderer being hung. Why is that? Because it will be an image which reminds Americans that progress has been made, and is an undeniable reminder that justice for Saddam's million-plus victims was made possible by the USA. Today's leftist media, CNN in particular, are loathe to resent it. It has nothing to do with decency, They've already exposed their inherent indecency when they worked with terrorists and aired our loved ones being murdered. This is about their deliberate agenda and how images of a dispatched Saddam does not help them.

Oh, I wonder if CNN struggled with it's Watch-the-Iraqi-Sniper-Kill-An-American on demand video. I'm guessing, probably not.

It's not the first time that they've demonstrated such a double-standard, (UPDATE: and here's a very similar double-standard by CBS in action) and it's a reminder of how politicized the news industry has come since the days of Ben Hecht's The Front Page, with a plot that hinged on reporters doing their damnedest to smuggle out a death-row interview of a soon-to-be executed convicted murderer.

The original "if it bleeds it leads" school of tabloid journalism that inspired Hecht's play (and its innumerable movie versions through the years) was at least far more honest with its objectives--selling newspapers, any way possible--than today's journalists. Or as James Lileks once wrote:

The first question in any J-school application ought to be “do you want to change the world?” And anyone who answers yes gets kindly turned away. Your job is to describe the way the world changes. Not pretend you’re there to nudge it along towards utopia.

Or to oppose change when you didn't vote for the man causing it.

Update: More on CNN and Saddam's execution in the next post.

It's apparently on for 10:00 PM EST tonight; Hot Air has the details as they emerge.

Elsewhere, Dean Barnett writes that the New York Times--surprise!--question its timing:

What’s especially odd about the Times’ editorial is that it doesn’t take issue with Saddam getting the death penalty. The Grey Lady’s only beef is the alleged haste with which the penalty is being meted out.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO BELIEVE that the Times’ editorialists are this obtuse. I’m sorry – while I have an appropriate and indeed awed respect for their determined imbecility, I can’t believe that they really think that this is all happening too fast. After all, there had to be a day of decision and a day of action. By any reasonable accounting, the appropriate moment for both such days is long overdue.

The Timesmen make their agenda clear in the editorial’s final paragraph:

Toppling Saddam Hussein did not automatically create a new and better Iraq. Executing him won’t either.

So true. Executing Saddam also won’t “automatically create” a solvent Social Security System or a perpetual motion machine. So why bother?

The truth is this: If anything might create the appearance that the Bush administration actually accomplished something, the Times opposes it. Regardless of whether it’s just, right or fair.

How pathetic. And how sadly unsurprising.

As I said earlier today, Hypocrophobia strikes deep in the Victorian Gentleman.

While late-1960s milestones such as Walter Cronkite's calling the Tet Offensive an American loss, and Hollywood's shift towards nihilistic movies such as Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy were considered the early signs of a culture war between what was then called "the new left" and mainstream America, a significant moment also occurred on April 17th, 1976, when Ron Nessen, President Ford's press secretary, hosted an episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live, during the show's first season, to attempt to show that the Ford Administration had a sense of humor about itself, and the ribbing that SNL's Chevy Chase gave Ford about his occasional stumbles.

Nessen's appearance, along with a videotaped cameo of Ford saying, "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night", marked perhaps the last time that most Republicans in office would ever fully trust the mainstream media. And even then, Nessen was concerned about being set-up by the show. What he didn't know was that the SNL production team had conceived a strategy of feinting left and running right, to paraphrase one of the show's then-writers, so that the sketches that Nessen appeared in were relatively tame. It was the rest of the show that was deliberately raunchy and over the top, even for SNL. Because, as Rosie Shuster, another of the show's writers, remarked, "The President's watching. Let's make him cringe and squirm."

As Glenn Reynolds wrote earlier this week, "Personally, I think that Chevy Chase cost Ford the 1976 election. Well, part of it, anyway". But to understand exactly how badly SNL head-faked Nessen and Ford, here's the section devoted to Nessen's appearance of Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad's 1985 book on the early history of Saturday Night. (There's a lot of material below, which I scanned from my copy of Hill and Weingrad's book. I'm eschewing the usual block-texting so that it wouldn't all be in blue italics. And apologies in advance for any typos or missing words created by the OCR process.)

Read More »

Mary Katharine Ham takes a video tour of Things That Did Not Happen on the Duke Campus:

More thoughts from MKH on the Duke Lacrosse case, here.

What happens when the Victorian Gentleman gets a severe case of hypocrophobia? Diana West looks back at 2006:

Taking a whack at prognostication at the end of 2005, it wasn't hard to imagine, as I did, that 2006 would be a rotten year for freedom of speech. Both inside the Islamic world and, more alarmingly, outside the Islamic world, Shariah laws prohibiting criticism of Islam were already working smoothly. When in 2005 we watched the death-penalty-seeking prosecution of editor Ali Mohaqeq Nasab for "blasphemy" in U.S.-liberated Afghanistan, we could see we were dealing with a Shariah state. When in 2005 we watched the early stages of what later became known as "Cartoon Rage" in Denmark, we could see we were dealing with a Shariah state of mind. It wasn't exactly going out on a limb to predict things would only get worse.

And, of course, in 2006, they did.

Read the whole thing.

Stanley Kubrick bloopers, via Ann Althouse:

Libertas wonders why Mel Gibson's Apocalypto was singled out by Variety for its lack of box office "legs", when other, much more expensive productions aren't performing any better:

There are many disappointing box office stories to tell. Why this film (which exceeded expectations)? Why not the obvious ones? Variety can defend it’s choice by saying the article’s true. But that’s the last defense of the biased. Bias is more often found in what is and what is not covered. I’m no Gibson defender. I’m a bias hater. The real story this year is the poor box office results and audience rejection of left-leaning message films not disguised by animation.

I guess cocktail party invites are more important to Hollywood journalists than a real story.

Not to mention Hollywood entertainers versus actually producing entertaining movies.

This week, Austin Bay has an extended, one-on-one interview with Claudia Rosett on Kofi Anan, the Oil For Food Scandal, and the UN in general. It's great stuff, and very much worth a listen, particularly if you're not up to speed with incredible spadework that Claudia has performed to bring sunlight to the trainwreck that is the United Nations.

As this editorial in Opinion Journal notes, Gerald Ford arguably did as a good a job as possible, given the astonishingly weak hand he was dealt in the mid-1970s. As the Journal notes, the 1970s was the decade of "America's Suicide Attempt", as historian Paul Johnson dubbed it:

It is true that Ford was something of an accidental President, the only one in U.S. history never elected as either President or Vice President. Before Nixon picked him to replace the disgraced Spiro Agnew as his Vice President, Ford had been contemplating retirement from his Grand Rapids, Michigan, House seat. But like another unlikely President from the Midwest, Harry Truman, he had reserves of honesty and fortitude that served him well.

He made a particular contribution in pardoning Nixon, though he knew Nixon's enemies would accuse him of a quid pro quo. The decision cost him dearly in the polls and may have cost him the election in 1976, but it also spared the country from years of division over a criminal trial that special prosecutor Leon Jaworski seemed determined to pursue.

Congress had trampled over a weakened Nixon, and another Ford contribution was restoring some measure of executive authority. Far more than Nixon, he used his veto pen (66 times in 895 days), blunting liberal excesses after Democrats picked up 46 House seats in 1974. He also deserves credit for resisting the isolationism that was rampant as the Vietnam War wound down. It was a rare period in postwar U.S. history when the public favored spending less on defense.

Democrats exploited the mood in early 1975 to block Ford's funding request for our allies in South Vietnam, as the North began its offensive. Ford pleaded with Congress that "American unwillingness to provide adequate assistance to allies fighting for their lives could seriously affect our credibility throughout the world as an ally," but to no avail. Saigon fell by April, and the boat people and massacres in Southeast Asia soon followed. Thus one irony of this week's praise for Ford as a unifying President: At the time, he was mocked as clumsy and dull, and he was vilified for blocking Congressional priorities. Any of this sound familiar?

Yes--with the exception of villifying Richard Nixon (whose paranoia helped furnish his own noose), the playbook of the left for attacking Republican presidents has changed little since the days of Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s, and certainly since Ike in the 1950s.

And incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is living up to it; apparently he'd rather be exploring Inca ruins in South America than attending a former president's funeral. And Jules Crittenden writes:

Last night we saw that Wonkette couldn't wait for the funeral to start bashing Gerald Ford.

Here comes Bob Woodward, who can't wait until Ford is cold to start using him to bash Bush.

Not entirely surprisingly, Thomas DeFrank of The NY Daily News has a different take on Ford's opinions of Bush and Iraq than "the boring fabulist", as Peggy Noonan recently dubbed Woodward.

Update: On the other hand, "Even if [Reid's absence during Ford's funeral] is deliberate, look at it this way — it gives Republicans cover to skip Dhimmi Jimmy’s canonization when that day finally rolls around".

More: And speaking of the seventies and suicide!

Meanwhile, it's probably time to call Ghostbusters--or at least Maceo Parker--as another seventies icon also disapproves of the Iraq War immediately after his death this week.

Hugh Hewitt writes:

My question is whether there is even one MSMer currently reporting from Iraq who was an Iraq or Afghan War veteran? Even one?

And why aren't there a hundred such veterans-turned-reporters?

And have the journalism schools bothered to track down the accomplished and returned warriors and ask them to lecture the journalists-in-the-making on how to cover the war?

One guest suggested MSM will not hire veterans because such a skills set will not produce the sorts of stories that advance the MSM's agenda, which is an anti-Administration, anti-war agenda. Perhaps he is correct.

But it is undeniably true that there are ways to cover the war well --to "flood the (war) zone"-- and to avoid the trap that that General Mattis describes the MSM as having fallen into.

There does not, however, seem to be the inclination. For in depth reporting on Iraq --and the war's many other fronts-- we will have to continue to rely on new media.

Absolutely. Only a stasist would say that information diversification is a bad thing.

He hits the beach--literally--in India!

Students join sand sculpture artists to create a 30-meter-long (100-foot-long) Santa Claus sculpture on the Puri golden beach, in the Indian state of Orissa on the eve of Christmas, Sunday, Dec. 24, 2006. Though Hindus and Muslims comprise the majority of the population in India, Christmas is celebrated with much fanfare.

As TigerHawk writes, "The photograph and official wire service caption below are additional evidence that India is the 'natural' ally of the United States in the war against radical Islam. Also, it's really cool".

Surf's up, Santa, Dude!

As always, Mark Steyn is spot-on:

So much of what ails us dates from the Seventies: It was the decade when the Continent fully embraced the social-democratic cosseting that's enfeebled its citizenry and the mass immigration necessary to keep it affordable, the decade when the petro-dictatorships of the Middle East realized the west would do anything to keep the oil flowing, and the decade which gave us the twin templates through which the media, the academy and the other American elites fit all major events, domestic and foreign - Watergate and Vietnam. Though it was a war he inherited from his three predecessors, it fell to Gerald Ford to preside over the final retreat from Vietnam and to bequeath to history the great emblematic image of American weakness and failure: the scrambling choppers over the US embassy in Saigon. As was plain then and is plainer now, the left saw American defeat as its own great victory. They enjoyed the pain the "long national nightmare" inflicted on national self-confidence, which is one reason they love to revive it at every opportunity. (See Pinch Sulzberger's pathetic self-regarding commencement address from last year.) Understanding the enduring damage Vietnam and Watergate would do to the body politic, Ford attempted to lance the boils. He failed, but it was an honorable effort by an honorable man. Rest in peace.

Update: Tammy Bruce looks at Ford through a gimlet eye: "yes, I know he died, and I'm sorry for him, and his family. But there will be no Love Letter here". Read the rest--while I do think Ford was a good man, he was an exceptionally weak president, and as Tammy writes, Ford's ineffectiveness led directly to Jimmy Carter's dire four years malaise.

Over 300,000 defy England's hunting ban; as Glenn Reynolds writes:

If that many British Muslims turned out to protest interference with their customs, the Blair government would be bending over backward to please them.

Heh, indeed.^TM Read the whole thing.

(Via Maggie's Farm.

Update: And speaking of Tony Blair....

If you haven't seen it already, don't miss this photo of Senator Kerry in Iraq (aka "Jon Carry N Irak"), an image you would have never seen if Rago's MSM was still at its full, 1972-era power.

I'm in the Admiral's Club at D-FW waiting for my flight back to San Jose, California; watch for regular blogging to resume tomorrow. In the meantime, Betsy Newmark and Pajamas have lots of thoughts and links regarding President Ford's death at age 93, and Hugh Hewitt has a devastating Socratic evisceration of the Wall Street Journal's anti-Blogosphere Joseph Rago, who fits Virginia Postrel's definition of a Stasist to a T.

Blogger "One Angry Christian" links to an AP photo with a caption that reads:

An Iranian student holds an anti-president placard, reading: 'Fascist President, Polytechnich is not your place', as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, unseen, speaks at the Amir Kabir Technical University, in Tehran, Iran, Monday, Dec. 11, 2006. Iranian students staged a rare demonstration against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday, lighting a firecracker and burning his photograph in the audience as he delivered a speech at their university, the state news agency said.

Unlike America's "peace" (read: anti-Bush) protestors, there are real stakes involved for this fellow, as One Angry Christian writes:

This guy, hands down, gets my "Man of the Year" award. There isn't a person who is closer to the evil that is destroying western civilization who is risking more than this guy.

Apparently, about now there are some "vigilantes" looking for him. I'd be willing to bet my next check they're government agents. This is a far cry from the imagined "persecution" that so-called "peace protestors" get here in America. In Iran people who protest are actually hunted down and murdered along with members of their family.

But of course, this Iranian would never be considered by Time--he's protesting a leader that the magazine recently dubbed a beneficient "global Everyman" and "Champion of the disposessed".

(Via Hugh Hewitt.)

England's Independent receives a letter from a reader:

Sir:

Your environment editor, Geoffrey Lean, recently informed us that the Indian island of Lohachara had been washed off the face of the earth by global warming. According to Mr. Lean, Lohachara’s vanishing “marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.”

When did this event occur, exactly? And why wasn’t that date included in Mr. Lean’s article?

Yours,

Tim Blair

Tim writes, "Any response will be published in full"; though I suspect that his letter will probably run about the same time that Cliff May's letter appears in the Washington Post.

It's not just for stockbrokers anymore! The all-seeing Allah catches an AFP (Agence France-Presse) reporter recycling her three-week old story, titled "Iraq Quagmire Erodes Bush Confidence And Power", right down the exact same headline, and with only minor phrasing changes in the body copy. As Allah writes, "They’ve been recycling this metaphor for 40 years, why not recycle stories about it too?"

Glenn Reynolds notes, "One might almost suspect that this story was timed for when it would get the least possible attention: Nonprofit Connects Murtha, Lobbyists". As Glenn writes, "Sounds like he needs to be spotlighted. And not just on Christmas Day", when the Washington Post ran their story.

In The Charleston Gazette, Don Surber writes, "Earth to Bush: We are winning".

John Hawkins' round-up is here.

Meanwhile, with plenty of material to choose from, Times Watch selects "The Worst Quotes of the Year from The New York Times".

Update: Speaking of worst quotes of the year, get a load of this AP piece from August:

When outsiders think of Cuba, it’s often the lack of political freedoms and economic power that comes to mind. Cubans who have chosen to stay on the island, however, are quick to point out the positives: safe streets, a rich and accessible cultural life, a leisurely lifestyle to enjoy with family and friends....For all its flaws, life in Castro’s Cuba has its comforts, and unknown alternatives are not automatically more attractive....Many foreigners consider it propaganda when Castro’s government enumerates its accomplishments, but many Cubans take pride in their free education system, high literacy rates and top-notch doctors. Ardent Castro supporters say life in the United States, in contrast, seems selfish, superficial, and — despite its riches — ultimately unsatisfying.

— Associated Press writer Vanessa Arrington in an August 4 dispatch, "Some Cubans enjoy comforts of communism.""

More 2006 MSM idiotarianism, here.

The Media Research Center has a pretty good scorecard for who stands where this year in the War For Christmas.

Michelle Malkin writes that 2006 was "The Year of Perpetual Outrage"; via Tim Blair, Gerard Henderson of The Sydney Morning Herald dubs it "the year of hyperbole".

I'd say they're both right.

Tammy Bruce writes, "On this Christmas day, send your prayers to the Christians of Ethiopia who are now alone in the Horn of Africa fighting the enemy of all civilization".

Related: "Yet Another Bethlehem Story".

While I was shopping for Christmas gifts on Amazon, I gave myself a James Brown greatest hits CD--Foundations Of Funk: A Brand New Bag: 1964-1969, which documented Brown's revolution in R&B, creating a stripped down modal sound, much the same as Miles Davis had created in the jazz world just a few years prior. (MIles in turn would be inspired by Brown's funk on 1969's Bitches Brew.)

I was actually listening to James Brown on my iRiver MP3 player on Satuday, driving around Texas. So I was doubly astonished to read that he passed away today at age 73.

Posting will no doubt be a bit sparse on Christmas day. In the meantime, let me take this opportunity to wish everyone:

A Very Merry Christmas!

Update:

Welcome, and Merry Christmas, to Hugh Hewitt and his listeners!

Meanwhile, Neo-Neocon looks back on "'The Blogger's Night Before Christmas".

More: Merry Insta-Christmas!

Out hunting today--photo here. That's me on the left, along with my guide and our prey.

Back in March, at the height of Yale's Taliban man debacle, blogger Penraker wrote:

We now have the first generation of college students who have learned NOT to think; they don't even allow certain thoughts in their heads.

Welcome to the class of '06, the first generation educated to become drones.

Don't believe him? Then listen to Mark Taylor, religion and humanities professor at Williams College, and "Gagdad Bob", who runs roughshod over his zen-like thought of no-thought:

The purpose of an elite university education is no longer to become educated -- to acquire a well-furnished mind and familiarize oneself with the best things that have been thought and said -- but to become stupid by elevating a means to an end. Thus, upon contact with his luckless students, Professor Taylor tells them “that if they are not more confused and uncertain at the end of the course than they were at the beginning, I will have failed.” In short, the goal of education is to make students as lost and confused as Professor Taylor, through the deification of man’s capacity to doubt anything.

Via "Bird Dog" of Maggie's Farm, who asks:

America's first colleges: King's College (Columbia now), Harvard, Yale, the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) - were all begun as places to mainly educate clergy, and/or religiously-interested lay people. Have they simply been co-opted by a new religion? Are colleges still doctrinal seminaries, with new doctrines?

Yes.

Richard Miniter asks, "aren’t you tired of the whole 'you’re-a-fascist' line?"

The Fascists and the Nazis are only on the right if you yourself are communist—and therefore, they are barely to the right of you on the political spectrum. To the rest of us, Fascists, Nazis and communists are different sub-species of the same murderous monster, a blood-drenched beast that believes in the power of the state and seeks to dismember or murder every individual and every group in society that refuses to bend to its will.

Those of us who believe in free speech and, its economic equivalent, free trade, limited government, tolerance, the equal freedom of the artist and the entrepreneur, the separation of church and state, and so on, are the enemies of fascists and, their ill-clothed counterparts, communists. Indeed, capitalism is the opposite of fascism, which favors government control of the every economic decision. Calling us (liberals and conservatives) “fascists” simply reveals the Left’s nostaglia for truly evil enemies (like Nazis) and its current reluctance to engage in a battle of ideas.

Spot-on--don't miss the rest.

"A photo of a shop you wouldn’t have expected to find in Esfahan, Iran".

David Irving, the man who in many ways, created the modern public conception of the Dresden bombing, is pretty darn copacetic with the language of both Mel Gibson--and Michael Richards.

Surprisingly, having a Polaris Hawkeye four-wheel ATV land on you when you crash doesn't hurt all that much, provided (a) you land in soft dirt and (b) you're wearing a helmet.

Floyd Brown reminds us that the left's assault on Christmas isn't a new development.

Update: Via The Anchoress, here's the newest low in the War On Christmas, courtesy of, not surprisingly, CBS. Compare and contrast with CBS's mid-1960s Christmas fair.

The L.A. Times writes:

President Bush quietly appointed television sitcom producer Warren Bell to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting this week, overriding opposition from public-broadcasting advocates who fear the outspoken conservative will politicize the post.

As opposed to its current state.

Pajamas Media has made public the Inspector General's Official Report regarding Sandy Berger and his theft and destruction of classified national security documents.

Last year at Thangsgiving, I posted some thoughts on Rough Creek Lodge, an upscale hunting lodge and resort on 11,000 acres in Glen Rose, Texas, about 90 minutes outside of Dallas.

As I was just telling Tammy Bruce and her radio listeners, my wife and I thought it would be a fun place to spend Christmas, and it certainly is--but blogging may be at a reduced pace over the weekend.

The two breaking stories today are this truck crash, made more suspicious because of its cargo, and the Duke lacrosse case, with the D.A. dropping the main charge of rape. As I mentioned to Tammy, the timing of it--on a Friday afternoon, the weekend before Christmas--seems to imply that his office was attempting to minimize the damage to Mike Nifong's reputation as much as they possibly could.

Will the remaining two charges against the Duke players be dropped during another quiet period in the news cycle--say, the weekend before New Years? Or will Nifong continue to try to string this out as long as possible?

Tough to argue with Pajamas HQ's assessment of this video captioned by Scrappleface's Scott Ott:

Flopping Aces writes that AP is touching up its articles referencing the world's most famous Iraqi police captain.

Pamela of Atlas Shrugs spots the perfect gift for the hip, young wannabe terrorist whose Che or hammer and sickle T-shirt is looking particularly ratty--for sale at the Las Vegas Urban Outfitters.

Meanwhile, Mary Katharine Ham has some very much related gift suggestions.

I almost always enjoy French cooking. But I have my doubts about this Parisian chef's recipes.

Opinion Journal, which, of course, publishes a superb blog-style daily update written by James Taranto, has a screedy, ill-tempered attack on blogs up today written by Joseph Rago, an assistant editorial features editor at Opinion Journal's parent publication, The Wall Street Journal:

Blogs are very important these days. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has one. The invention of the Web log, we are told, is as transformative as Gutenberg's press, and has shoved journalism into a reformation, perhaps a revolution.

The ascendancy of Internet technology did bring with it innovations. Information is more conveniently disseminated, and there's more of it, because anybody can chip in. There's more "choice"--and in a sense, more democracy. Folks on the WWW, conservatives especially, boast about how the alternative media corrodes the "MSM," for mainstream media, a term redolent with unfairness and elitism.

The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.

More success is met in purveying opinion and comment. Some critics reproach the blogs for the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life. Blogs, they say, tend to disinhibit. Maybe so. But politics weren't much rarefied when Andrew Jackson was president, either. The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.

Yes, there's no escaping Sturgeon's Law, is there?

What I don't understand is the attack on the format itself. A Blog simply refers to a Web-based format that allows for instantaneous and automatic uploading of new post; its contents are as varied as can be imagined, from superbly logical 10,000 word essays from Steven Den Beste in the mid-naughts, to the video-oriented content of sites such as Hot Air. (All the way to the day-in-the-life fair that originally inspired the name "Weblog", of course.)

Surprisingly, Rago is a man who sees bloggers as being virtually identical clones, despite working for a publication such as the Wall Street Journal, which published op-eds from early pioneer Glenn Reynolds during the 2004 election season. Ironically, though, Rago's piece is little indistinguishable from the the themes that tie together seven years worth of hit pieces on Internet-based journalists that I assembled last year.

Update: Further thoughts on Rago's piece, media bias in general, and a reminder that diversification isn't just for mutual funds anymore, from Ed Morrissey.

Of Time magazine, Scott Hinderaker of Power Line writes: "No offense, but my man of the year is not You. My man of the year is John Bolton -- a model public servant, a stand-up man who deeply understands the nature of the war in which we are engaged."

I think Steve Hayward has a great take as well:

Watching the long, slow decay of Henry Luce’s once-great Time magazine has been painful. The beginning of the end might be dated to the ridiculous 1967 cover story, “Is God Dead?,” which was followed up with a 1989 cover, “Is Government Dead?” that was essentially the same story, only Time didn’t know it (government being the secular liberal substitute for God). Now Time has lost its faith in its own editorial judgment entirely. The selection of “You” as their laureate for 2006 represents the apotheosis of the modernist view that impersonal forces and mass processes drive history more than individuals, combined with a politically correct fear of naming an odious person like Iran’s Ahmaninejad as it did the past with Hitler and Ayatollah Khomeini.

This has been a long time (so to speak) in coming. In 1999 Time explained that it did not name Winston Churchill its “Person of the Century” (he had been Time’s “Man of the Half-Century” in 1950) because “the passage of time can alter our perspective. . . . Churchill turned out to be a romantic refugee from a previous era who ended up on the wrong side of history.” Then, two years later, Time noted Rudy Giuliani’s affinity for Churchill when it selected him Person of the Year, noting “a bright magic at work when one great leader reaches into the past and finds another waiting to guide him,” which was practically an admission that it had shortchanged Churchill before.

If Time magazine had a shred of intellectual rigor left, they would now abolish their “Person of the Year” designation.

Jonah Goldberg expands on his thoughts from a couple of years ago, and further places Time's disastrous non-choice into perspective:

Time's Man of the Year award was originally conceived as something other than the Mother of All Puff Pieces. Time founder Henry Luce swam against the stream of Marxist determinism which held that history unfolded according to cold, impersonal forces. He believed individuals - i.e. great men and women - matter. He said the original award should go to the person "who most affected the news or our lives, for good or ill, this year." That was the point of picking Charles Lindbergh as the first Man of the Year - because he, and he alone, seemed to be ushering in a New Age. Hitler was MOY in 1938 because he might have been ushering in a Dark Age. You are Person of the Year because the editors of Time want to live in a Feel-Good Age where everyone is empowered (hence Time's rationalizations about the people-power of the Internet).

Of course, Time has punted many times before. For example, in 1988, beating the fierce competition, Earth was named "Planet of the Year." No doubt that choice sounded very clever in the editorial board meeting.

Time's 2001 decision, naming Rudy Giuliani person of the year, was even more telling. This was a true profile-in-cowardice moment. There was no intellectually defensible standard for suggesting that the able mayor affected the news or our lives more than Osama bin Laden, who at the time seemed at least to be the Gavrilo Princip of the 21st century. (Princip was the fellow who launched World War I, which in turn launched World War II and the Cold War.)

The only reason not to give bin Laden the title Person of the Year - other than a purely commercial concern about newsstand sales - is that being Person of the Year has become a compliment. Sure, I suppose groups like the Shriners or the Knights of Columbus have always had their Persons of the Year, and they always meant it in a good way. Nonetheless, readers in 1938 and 1979 understood that Hitler and Khomeini weren't being honored as humanitarians.

What's changed is that these days celebrity is always a boon. There was a time when infamy mattered, when disrepute had teeth. But infamy has been purged from the lexicon. Now, any publicity is good publicity. Just ask Paris Hilton. Time's sister publication, People magazine, didn't start the trend, but it did accelerate it wildly. And it seems that People's values have seeped into the water supply over at Time, so much so that Time would rather name everyone, and therefore no one, the Person of the Year.

Betsy Newmark adds:

The one thing Time has going for it is that they've united all of us people of the year in derision at their magazine.

Which is no small accomplishment: It's been a long, long time since a news magazine united as many of its readers as Time has done this year.

Glenn Reynolds writes, "Another cheesy yet iconic '60S TV show is out on DVD -- now it's The Time Tunnel. Though they've brought it out in two parts".

That sounds like fun--I also tripped over this yesterday in Amazon, which I suspect the sci-fi geek in your life would appreciate even more: the deluxe edition of the new remastered DVD of Forbidden Planet, in an embossed metal case, complete with the second (infinitely cheesier) movie that Robby the Robot starred in immediately afterwards, scads of other bonus features, and a die-cast miniature of Robby himself.

Robert Bidinotto spots "the latest Objectivist purge" from the Randians' inner circle.

Pat Conroy, the author of A Prince Of Tides, visits one of his classmates from the 1960s:

When I visited my old teammate Al Kroboth's house in New Jersey, I spent the first hours quizzing him about his memories of games and practices and the screams of coaches that had echoed in field houses more than 30 years before. Al had been a splendid forward-center for the Citadel; at 6 feet 5 inches and carrying 220 pounds, he played with indefatigable energy and enthusiasm. For most of his senior year, he led the nation in field-goal percentage, with UCLA center Lew Alcindor hot on his trail. Al was a battler and a brawler and a scrapper from the day he first stepped in as a Green Weenie as a sophomore to the day he graduated. After we talked basketball, we came to a subject I dreaded to bring up with Al, but which lay between us and would not lie still.

"Al, you know I was a draft dodger and antiwar demonstrator."

"That's what I heard, Conroy," Al said. "I have nothing against what you did, but I did what I thought was right."

"Tell me about Vietnam, big Al. Tell me what happened to you," I said.

He did.

Don't miss the rest, which foreshadows similar essays to be written in the coming decades about our current conflicts.

From the Daily Kos to the Cato Institute's Brink Lindsey, Jonah Goldberg explores the growing romance between liberals (actually leftists, but that doesn't have the same easy flowing alliteration) and libertarians:

What makes Lindsey’s overture significant is that he comes from the branch of libertarianism that actually matters: economics. Economic libertarians, under the leadership of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, have been so successful in the conservative movement — and the conservative movement has been so successful because of them — that “economic conservative” and “libertarian” have long been synonyms. But here’s Lindsey, an economic libertarian par excellence, trying to convince liberals that free markets are “progressive.” He wants liberals to accept the fact that libertarian means achieve liberal cultural ends. Rich societies become more tolerant of sexual freedom and civil rights, and invest more in education and the environment — and societies become rich by following the advice of the Friedmans and Hayeks. Lindsey proposes finding common ground with liberals on issues from agriculture subsidies (which are bad for the environment) to tax reform. His policy proposals would warm the cockles of any NR editor’s heart, and we should wish him luck.

Nonetheless, the tension between conservatives and libertarians is not as one-sided as he and others would have us believe. Libertarianism was once primarily concerned with negative liberty — i.e. delineating a zone free of government intrusion. Meyer’s libertarianism was primarily concerned with the ability of the individual to find the virtuous path within “an objective moral order based on ontological foundations” best expressed in Western civilization. As such, fusionism was less a coalitional doctrine than a metaphysical imperative. But these days, phrases like “objective moral order” will get you knocked off Cato’s Kwanzaa-card list. Liberty’s virtue is no longer that it supports the virtuous. Rather, according to today’s leading libertarians, economic freedom’s virtue lies in its ability to provide everybody the custom-made lifestyle of his choice.

Virginia Postrel, the former editor of Reason, wrote an engaging ode to consumerism in The Substance of Style. In The Future and Its Enemies, she made a compelling case for change and cultural evolution without heed to tradition. Her successor at Reason, Nick Gillespie, has moved the magazine even more sharply toward cultural libertarianism. There’s still reverence for the free market, but mostly for its creative destruction of tradition. My close friend (and Reason’s science correspondent) Ronald Bailey has thrown his eggs into the basket of biotechnology, celebrating its potential for individualized eugenic betterment as “liberation biology.” Cato’s Will Wilkinson seeks to graft liberal philosopher John Rawls onto Hayek to form something called “Rawlsekianism.” And Lindsey’s next book certainly doesn’t sound like it shares Meyer’s preoccupation with philosophical imperatives. It’s called The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture.

Read the whole thing.

America's Mayor has an exploratory committee for his White House run: Join Rudy 2008.

Did publisher Judith Regan pull a Mel Gibson last week?

Junk Yard Blog goes on the beat with the world's most famous cop (imaginary or otherwise), and writes, "Captain Jamil Hussein: he's everywhere!"

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds asks, "Has Marc Danziger found Jamil Hussein?":

Possibly. Upside for AP: This would mean he exists. Downside for AP: A blogger operating from California finds a source in Iraq that AP itself couldn't produce.

I guess Capt. Hussein emerged on the scene too late to be Time magazine's Man of the Year. Of course, in a sense, he is, anyhow!

Speaking Of Time, I guess the magazine thinks the average "global Everyman" is a holocaust-denying madman seeking to arm himself with nuclear weaponry and wipe Israel off the map; get a load of their original caption for a photo of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a "Person of the Year" nominee.

(And yes, picking him would have demonstrated far more chutzpah than their final decision--or lack thereof.)

And so are you! Talk about a cop-out; it's tough to argue with this assessment from Libertas's "Dirty Harry":

Now, I’d prefer to be named Man of the Year, but we live in particular times.

Yes, I… I am Person of the Year. Me. Little old me. Me, who sits in his underwear eating cookies sniping at Hollywood from behind a pseudonym. I don’t feel worthy, but smarter people than me know better. Obviously, I’m just insecure. Why should it feel wrong being honored in such a way? So what if I’m not risking my life to build a school or stop terrorists from killing people I don’t even share a language with?

So, thank you Time Magazine. Thank you for a little perspective regarding my own importance. I feel so much better now knowing the world could not survive without me, and the porn addicts, the fantasy gamers, the chat roomers, the emailers, the gamblers, anyone over thirty still living with his parents, and all the lousy short filmmakers…

Elsewhere, Michelle Malkin expresses her disgust with Time's annual wimp-out in video form. Paraphrasing a quote oft-attributed to G.K. Chesterton, Rush Limbaugh adds, "When you believe in nothing, you will believe anything":

And they farmed out the decision-making process! They had consulting groups made up of various kinds of people. It's almost like TIME Magazine was acting like Congress. Got a tough decision to make? Farm it out! Get some "blue-ribbon panel" in here of people that don't know what they're doing to make suggestions and then go with that rather than make the decision yourself. It's not that I care about the Person of the Year that much, but I'm a marketing guy. They have destroyed and made a joke out of what once was a very, very high honor: to be named Person of the Year. It's something people sought out. They just rendered it a meaningless joke. We're all winners! This is typical: We're all equal. They didn't have the ability to pick one person because that would signal everybody else out is a bunch of losers, or as un-worthies or what have you.

A couple of years ago, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

Time has no credibility. None. I don't care who they pick. That doesn't mean they won't get it right but that hardly means we should care much if they do. The magazine which had the guts to pick dictators and tyrants when they deserved it has, in recent years, gone the rout of People magazine. Even when they go in a controversial direction, it's invariably controversial in way designed to be not-too-controversial. "Now, Twice the Controversy But Half the Calories!" What was it a few years ago? Whistleblower women? And in 2001 when it deserved to be Osama Bin Laden, they went with Rudy Giulliani. How nice! I don't bash corporations much, but this seems to be one of those conventions that gets approved by a committee of suits before it goes anywhere.

This year's "choice" makes it official: the shark has been jumped, the concept should be retired. It's pablum.

Update: Mickey Kaus asks, is William Beutler "eerily prescient" or is Time "just preternaturally predictable"?

You've heard us discuss many of these items over the years in various posts, and/or Blogcritics reviews. If you're looking for some gift ideas for Christmas, look no further...

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Donald Rumsfeld:

Churchill’s phrase about the gathering storm - there was a storm gathering, but there were people in Europe who didn’t believe it and who didn’t take the periodic storm clouds and the squalls as a real threat. They thought they were transitory and, of course, paid an enormous penalty in treasure and life for their failure to understand the nature of that threat. I worry we are in a gathering storm and we do not, as a society, accept it. Many of the elites of our society, the key opinion leaders, are unwilling or unable to accept what an awful lot of people believe to be the case. The penalty for being wrong can be enormous.

Last year, Jonathan Last explored just how similar "the elites of our society, the key opinion leaders" are to those of Britian in the 1930s.

Fernando Tesón, guest-blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy has an interesting post on political art as "a noteworthy case of discourse failure":

Thanks to the emotional power of beauty, art can, at least sometimes, help noble ideals reach the general public. Many of these works have great artistic value (Picasso's Guernica, for example), and some of them have surely contributed to worthy causes.

However, political art is a special form of discourse failure. Art is a type of concrete imagery, and as such it evokes a “fact” that may activate default theories in the audience. Those willing to challenge the political stances represented by the artifact have to overcome the suggestive power of beauty. Political paintings (say, Diego Rivera’s murals) often suggest causal connections that, for the reasons I indicated in my previous posts, permeate theories that people hold by default. Political art’s appeal to emotion usurps reasoned political argument. If you think big oil is responsible for the evils in the world, make an argument. The movie Syriana will not do. (A related puzzle: why is all political art of the left? We have answers to this too.)

Read on for Tesón's thoughts; while he’s being largely slammed in the Volokh’s comments section for his dreaded use of “all”, this seems like a reaonable post to posit something I noticed when visiting the newly revamped and much-expanded Museum of Modern Art in New York this summer. There seemed to be much more anti-American political art on public display than when I visited there seemingly every other week in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Back then, the more propagandistic pieces were largely confined to less public areas, such as the small reference library that was then located on MoMA's third or fourth floor:

Their library requires permission to use, and its material isn't allowed out of the room, and it isn't open to the general public. MoMA maintains a cool, professional face in its public spaces. But the walls of its reference library were festooned (at least at the time) with all sorts of anti-American and anti-Reagan (yes, I know--I was there around 1993 or '94, but this stuff was still proudly displayed) posters.

Curiously, despite having plowed millions and millions of dollars into renovating the museum, and, presumably eager to get some return on their expenditures by keeping visitors happy and coming back, MoMA seems much more willing to let this type of stuff hang out there in the public these days.

Or, maybe this is what visitors to MoMA expect to see these days, and they are keeping them happy. But it was certainly a noticeable shift in the new digs.

This week's HamNation is up:

Details here; no word yet if England's Guardian will be sending their crack staff to report on another Olive Garden in the States, as they did so memorably in 2003.

"Nativity Scene Stolen by Abortion Clinic Worker Returned by Police" (!)

(Via The Brothers Judd.)

This week's Blog Week In Review podcast is now online:

This week’s program is a Blog Week special, with John Hinderaker and Scott W. Johnson of Power Line. They talk about how and why they created their successful blog; the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report and its historical perspective as compared with Pearl Harbor, whose 65th anniversary was commemorated last week, and they predict next week’s events. As usual, Austin Bay hosts and moderates; Ed Driscoll produces.

Click here to listen!

Before the crack-up (to coin a phrase), F. Scott Fitzgerald was a writer of towering abilities. But one of the most foolish things he ever wrote was that "there are no second acts in American lives". Certainly that's not the case for ex-CNN executive Eason Jordan. After having admitted that CNN allowed itself to be censored by Saddam Hussein, and then resigning from CNN less than two years later after getting caught claiming, on foreign soil, that the US military in Iraq was deliberately targeting reporters for execution, Jordan is on his third or fourth act with his latest scheme, "IraqSlogger". Or as Jules Crittenden writes:

The great thing about this business is, you always get a second chance. To smack around a world-class moron.

Bobbing to the surface again is CNN's ex-president Eason Jordan, who resigned in disgrace in 2005 after telling lies about U.S. war crimes, suddenly interested in the truth from Iraq.

Kudos to Michelle Malkin for calling his bluff though--Jordan wrote:

If Michelle Malkin wants to join the search [for Jamil Hussein] in Baghdad, IraqSlogger will pay for her trip, and I'd even be willing to accompany her. Stay tuned

Michelle wrote back on her blog:

I e-mailed my acceptance of Jordan's invitation this morning. No way should we just take the word of the guy who admitted covering up for Saddam Hussein and who resigned from CNN after baselessly slandering the U.S. military (maybe we'll find the Davos tape while we're on the search). Plus, it'll be an incredible opportunity to see Iraq and our troops firsthand. I have many friends, heroes, and contacts there I'd like to meet in person.

I also e-mailed to ask Mr. Jordan whether he would pay for Curt from Flopping Aces, the blogger who first broke open the story and is leading the charge for an answer (see, Jordan got his facts wrong already), to come on the search as well if he is able to do so.

So, indeed, stay tuned.

Whille Glenn Reynolds writes that it's a no-lose scenario for her and Jordan ("Either they'll find him -- which is more than AP has managed to do -- or they won't, which will constitute calling AP's bluff."), The Anchoress reminds Michelle to look ahead a few moves:

Should be interesting, but my antennae are up on this. Seems to me Jordan would not invite Malkin to Iraq to “look for” Hussein any more than a smart lawyer would ask a witness a question to which he does not already know the answer.

I think that's exactly right. Jordan has demonstrated--twice--that wasn't to be trusted at CNN. I certainly wouldn't trust him in his latest venture.

A few years ago, David Frum wrote a book titled How We Got Here, which explored how many of today's societal trends had their roots in the 1970s. Today, Daniel Henninger writes:

Chief Justice Warren Burger's long-forgotten dissent is relevant to a society today that vulgarizes simple conversation while euphemizing or banning its darker thoughts. Justice Burger defended the right of students to criticize their school or government "in vigorous, or even harsh, terms." But he called the student publication "obscene and infantile." A university, he suggested, is " an institution where individuals learn to express themselves in acceptable, civil terms. We provide that environment to the end that students may learn the self-restraint necessary to the functioning of a civilized society and understand the need for those external restraints to which we must all submit if group existence is to be tolerable."

"Tolerable." That's an interesting, old-fashioned word. It's not quite the same as "tolerant," is it? As t-words go, I think I prefer "tolerable" to the current alternatives.

Meanwhile, Betsy Newmark writes:

Roger Kimball has a column today about how some universities are turning down grants of money because the faculty doesn't want to have any sort of curriculum that might break away from the leftist ideology so prevalent on American campuses. They'd rather turn down grants of millions of dollars than chance having some program that doesn't denigrate western culture and history. His prime example is Hamilton College, a school that has had no problem inviting former prostitutes, a leder of the Weather Underground, or Ward Churchill to come talk or teach on campus. But try to found a center based on the contributions associated with the man whom the college is named after and the faculty balks.

Does anyone still think of colleges, or at least their non-science, non-engineering departments as "institution[s] where individuals learn to express themselves in acceptable, civil terms"?

Senator Kerry's legendary bonnet has nothing on the chapeau that this young lass is proudly undulating under!

(Hat tip, so to speak, to the Professor.)

Update: Far, far weirder YouTube weirdness observed here.

When Senator Johnson's (D-SC) stroke was announced yesterday, I thought to myself, who's going to be the first to posit that this is a BushCheneyRoveCo inside job? And here's the winner! (Or if not the first, at least the most visible.)

Update: Related thoughts from Tammy Bruce.

During his daily briefing for the legacy media, Tony Snow addressed David Gregory:

TONY SNOW: OK, before I get to that, I want to address something else. Because you and I had a conversation last week that got a whole lot of play in a lot of places, where I used the term "partisan" in describing one of your questions.

And I've thought a lot about that, and that I was wrong. So I want to apologize and tell you I'm sorry for it.

DAVID GREGORY: Thank you.

TONY SNOW: And the reason I do that is not only because it's the right thing, but because I want people in this room and also people who watch these to understand that the relations in this room are professional and collegial.

Demonstrating his personification of both traits, here's a transcript of Gregory badgering Snow's predecessor after it was announced that Vice President Cheney accidentally winged his hunting partner back in February:

Why was the White House relying on a Texas rancher to get the word of Cheney's hunting accident out over the weekend, asked Gregory, accusing McClellan of "ducking and weaving.''

"David, hold on… the cameras aren't on right now,'' McClellan replied. "You can do this later.''

"Don't accuse me of trying to pose to the cameras,'' the newsman said, his voice rising somewhat. "Don’t be a jerk to me personally when I’m asking you a serious question.''

"You don't have to yell,'' McClellan said.

"I will yell,'' said Gregory, pointing a finger at McClellan at his dais. "If you want to use that podium to try to take shots at me personally, which I don’t appreciate, then I will raise my voice, because that’s wrong."

"Calm down, Dave, calm down,'' said McClellan, remaining calm throughout the exchange.

"I'll calm down when I feel like calming down,'' Gregory said. "You answer the question.'

"I have answered the question,'' said McClellan, who had maintained that the vice president's office was in charge of getting the information out and worked with the ranch owner to do that. "I'm sorry you're getting all riled up about.''

"I am riled up,'' Gregory said, "because you’re not answering the question,''

McClellan insisted he understood that reporters deserve an answer.

"I think you have legitimate questions to ask,'' the press secretary said. "The vice president’s office was the one that took the lead to get this information out… I don’t know what else to tell you... That's my answer.''

Technorati is currently tracking 62.5 million blogs, and since 9/11, there have been a host of other non-blog news-oriented Websites and opinion forums that have launched. When the last remnants of the mass media have fully atomized, how will history record their elites' behavior at the tail end of their monarchal reign as information gatekeepers?

Update: Hugh Hewitt adds:

NBC was the network of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. Now they have Gregory and Keith Olbermann --the empty and the angry. Tony Snow's abilities so tower above those of Gregory that it is perhaps not fair for Snow to engage Gregory as other than a teacher would a somewhat slow and thus belligerent student. With that in mind, I understand the apology, as well as the way in which it was cloaked.

Exactly.

Mark Steyn appeared on Hugh Hewitt's show this afternoon:

I think one of the horrible and contemptible aspects of our generation is that we're posers. You know, after 1945, everybody said never again. It's chiseled on the markers in front of concentration camps all over Europe. Never again. Never again. And we thought those words meant something. And in fact, the never again event turns up all the time. It turns up in Rwanda. It turns up in Darfur. it turns up when we sit by and listen to people like Ahmadinejad pledging to wipe Israel off the face of the map. And we think that that is just like a kind of rhetorical ploy in the opening of negotiations. We don't understand that he does mean it, that he wants a world, and certainly a Middle East, but preferably a world, without Jews. And I think we are morals posers, and these are perhaps the most hollow words of our time, those words, never again.

HH: And as is, I think, increasingly hollow, the support that we had for the Cedar Revolution, as Hezbollah becomes more and more belligerent, and less and less inclined to do anything other than bring down the government of Lebanon.

MS: Yes, and I think there is a...Hezbollah is really a kind of model for the future, that you will have these institutions that prey on weak states, and take over sections of weak states, and yet have all the advantages of not being a state entity with the responsibility that imposes. One of the most disgusting things about this settlement of the Israeli-Hezbollah war, as it was, is that you had the U.N., and you have European nations, and other nations effectively treating Hezbollah as a quasi-state entity. And who's fault is that? I mean, the U.N. gave the PLO, a terrorist organization, a seat at the United Nations. In a sense, we have made this rod for our own back.

Read, or, once the clips are up, listen, to the rest.

Despite the endless dumbing down of the education process over the last 20 years or so, it's awfully reassuring to see that the same methods used to grade exams when I went to school are still being employed today.

Mark Steyn once dubbed Mickey Kaus "the thinking conservative's thinking liberal"; but talk about old school--I had no idea until watching this week's episode of BloggingHeads TV how much of an an LBJ fan he is!

I enjoyed, with reservations, the latest James Bond movie, Casino Royale--it was definitely a notch above Bond's previous outing in Die Another Day, but that's not exactly setting the bar very high, of course. But this critic from the Times of London has a much more negative take:

Craig actually looks like Gollum’s younger brother, and he charges around like the Terminator. The film aims to be a character-driven study of how 007 was changed by this mission and meeting Vesper. But as far as I can tell, it’s the story of how a sadistic psycho who hated women became a better-dressed and more professional sadistic psycho who hates women.

Clive Davis reports having a similar reaction. While Ian Fleming apparently didn't think highly of 1950s America, Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, one half of the partnership who bought the film rights to his novels, was a Yank himself, and produced a product designed from the start to have broad appeal on this side of the pond. But perhaps the pendulum has swung so far that Bond has thoroughly alienated audiences in his own country. Or at least its film critics.

I can't say that this is very surprising:

In a new Business & Media Institute analysis, “Good Morning America” was the least likely of the network morning shows to refer to Christmas, mentioning it only about 31 percent of the time.

While retailers were taken to task for celebrating a generic holiday last year and are instead marketing a very Merry Christmas this year, journalists have not joined the Christmas party.

After pressure last year from religious groups many retailers made changes this year to welcome the Christmas spirit. Wal-Mart, Kohl’s, Sears, Macy’s and Target are among the businesses recognizing Christmas this year, according to a November 30 article in the National Catholic Register.

But those in the media business are being much more Scroogelike. They preferred to use “holiday” or “season” when talking about Christmastime by a 3-1 margin between November 22-29, around the time the traditional Christmas shopping season began.

A breakdown of ABC’s “Good Morning America,” NBC’s “Today” show, and CBS’s “Early Show” resulted in nearly 300 references to the Christmas season during the week of November 22-29. Only 75 of them included the word “Christmas.” (The tally included only the comments made by reporters and anchors. Not included in the count were onscreen graphics or formal names.)

CBS’s “Early Show” mentioned “Christmas” the most often with 37.7 percent of the references being holiday-specific. NBC’s “Today” fell between ABC and CBS, saying “Christmas” 35.4 percent of the time.

Breaking the spirit of Leftivus in the overculture is still an uphill struggle.

They're there for the taking for smart presidential candidates on the left and the right.

AP reports:

The Bush administration warned Wednesday against threats by terrorist groups and other nations against U.S. commercial and military satellites, and discounted the need for a treaty aimed at preventing an arms race in space.

Considering how much of the world's communication is carried via satellite, it's far from an idle concern. Heck, when I interviewed Alvin Toffler immediately after 9/11, he was discussing the threat back then.

Ed Driscoll.com: Five years into the future! Err, sometimes, at least.

Update: More here.

In the Middle East, Betsy Newmark writes, it's that "other Arabs really give two jots about the Palestinians"; she links to thoughts from Time magazine's Lisa Beyer, and for the psychological explanation, the Blogosphere's own Dr. Sanity.

Back in February, Glenn Reynolds wrote, "With a nod to the movie Spinal Tap, I would say the media treatment of Bush administration scandals 'goes to 11'".

Of course, that's far from its only excess, as Peter Kann, the chairman of Dow Jones writes:

The media's short attention span. As the press hops from Baghdad to Beirut, Natalee Holloway to Valerie Plame, Super Bowls to Super Tuesdays, it justifiably can blame some combination of the nature of the news and the short attention span of the public. The public, meanwhile, bombarded and bewildered can blame a fickle and shallow press. There are too many instant celebrities. Too many two-day crises. Too many "defining moments" from people in search of instant history. In a world where everything is considered critical, nothing needs to be taken very seriously.

The matter of power. The press is at least partially responsible for greater public skepticism toward traditional institutions in America. But the truth, not lost on our public, is that the press is a large and powerful institution, too: "60 Minutes" is more powerful than almost all of the subjects it exposes. This newspaper, arguably, has more influence on national economic policy than do most corporations. Networks are owned by giant industrial corporations, magazines by entertainment conglomerates, and most newspapers by national chains. Given these realities, we cannot plausibly pretend to be a David out there smiting Goliaths and expect the public to believe it.

Read the whole thing, as they say in the New, New Journalism.

Update: Meanwhile, Bryan Preston has some thoughts on how the media operates in the Middle East:

To point out that Reuters’ Parisa Hafezi has published, on Reuters’ byline, the closest thing to the Iranian government’s point of view that won’t show up on Mahmoud’s letterhead. A Google search on “Parisa Hafezi” turns up a mine of stories couched from that perspective, more or less. This is how Parisa Hafezi can continue to operate within the tyranny that is the Islamic Republic of Iran, and this is the product that Reuters puts out to its thousands of outlets around the world. Hafezi is useful to Iran, by publishing its perspective (though it’s often tin-eared and cluess, as in calling David Duke a “US academic”) as hard news.

Would Reuters publish a news story written from a more or less American government perspective, like it does routinely with the work of Parisa Hafezi?

Don’t make me laugh. Again.

The good news is that, as Kann wrote above, fortunately, a reasonable percentage of the American public understands that. The bad news is that a large percentage of the population of the Middle East doesn’t, and tends to view AP and Reuters as quasi-governmental agencies themselves. Given the intertwining of the media and government in their own nations, why wouldn't they?

More: Dean Barnett adds, "I’ve wondered if I would prefer newspapers that considered it their core mission to be sticking their collective thumb into the collective eye of domestic political forces that I don’t like. And you know what? I’d take a pass":

Don’t get me wrong. I love journalistic endeavors with an agenda like The Weekly Standard and National Review. I’m even thrilled to contribute to them when they give me the opportunity to do so. But they’re not newspapers. They don’t pretend to gather “all the news that’s fit to print.” They print analyses of whatever strikes their fancies in any given issue.

But for news, I just want the raw data. Frankly, I wouldn’t want a newspaper to consider its core mission over the next two years to serve as an adversarial force to Nancy Pelosi. And I certainly wouldn’t buy such a rag.

"That baby born in the manger prevails. He must know someone pretty high up", Tammy Bruce writes.

Has he finally kicked the bucket? The rumors circulate once again.

Ed Morrissey has some thoughts on California's attorney general-elect--Jerry Brown, who's now on his third or fourth E-ticket ride on the California political merry-go-round:

Note that of all the priorities for law-enforcement facing California, Brown selects global warming as the most pressing. I guess issues like gang warfare, insurance fraud, and other crimes that cost Californians their lives and millions of dollars each year come in a distant second to ecopolicy. Californians might have gained the false impression that they elected an Attorney General instead of an environmental lobbyist.

Actually, it looks like they elected two Attorneys General. It's not often that the new boss introduces himself in his first official communication to the staff by essentially informing him that his spouse will be checking on them. Brown certainly can choose his own staff, and Anne sounds qualified for the job -- but it's never a good idea to have the boss' wife in the chain of command, at least not for the working environment of the staff.

All in all, it looks like an auspicious start of Brown's tenure, at least for pundits, if not Californians. Instead of Governor Moonbeam, my native state elected Attorney General Sunbeam.

Of course, the outgoing A.G. is no picnic, either. The fascinating thing about California politics is how it positions Governor Schwarzenegger as the sane, rational, moderate, thoughtful member of the bunch--despite having some of the same obsessions as the incoming A.G.

These guys do often run columnists whom I've enjoyed reading (but can usually find elsewhere), and they get bonus points for being an alternative media source on the Web several years before the Blogosphere came into existence.

But then they run articles with headlines like this. (And no, it's not a parody. At least I think it isn't. But who can tell these days?)

(Via Hot Air. "P.S.: Soy sauce is fine"! Jesus.)

Update: Ed Morrissey adds:

WND reminds me of the National Enquirer. It sometimes gets stories right, and most of the time has at least some elements of truth. More often than they should, WND relies on hyperbole and outrageous exaggeration to draw attention to its political agenda. Readers who know this can pick their way through the chaff -- but those readers know better than to waste their time at WND.

Exactly.

Hey, Congressman! Yeah, you in the navy blue flannel Brooks Brothers suit! Big test coming up? Say, an interview with Jeff Stein of The New York Times? Or simply taking over the House Intelligence Committee? Then this is the crib sheet for you. Pass it on when you're done.

Betsy Newmark and John Podhoretz have some thoughts on Barack Obama:

Podhoretz calls him a "Rorschach Candidate." People can paint him as representing all they ever wanted in a politician. He can give Kennedyesque candidate calling us to move beyond partisanship towards some sort of new politics. It's all cotton candy right now, but it sure is sweet.

The Rorschach Candidate is the one who provokes enthusiasm not because of the positions he takes but because of who he is. He doesn't seem like a politician; he seems to be better than a politician - fresh, new, different.

The Rorschach Candidate is especially exciting because under normal circumstances he couldn't possibly take the nomination, and his race for president would seem like a revolutionary and transformative act in itself.

He reminds us of similar waves of excitement for Republicans Jeane Kirkpatrick or Colin Powell. The Democrats had Wesley Clark for a brief moment before he actually opened his mouth. And then there was Ross Perot.

There's lots of truth there, and a reminder that voters from both parties have had their Rorschach Candidates. And as Podhoretz writes, one of the appeals of Obama to a number of voters over Hillary is that he's an unknown entity, where as Hillary has decades of baggage dredged up in the 1990s and still very much known by the public.

Looking back to the last presidential election, perhaps one of the reasons why the Elite Media were (and are!) so furious at the Swift Boat Vets is that they grafted reality onto one of the great Rorschach Candidates of all time.

James Lileks writes, 'John Bolton is out as U.N. ambassador, and many folks are singing hurrah: Our long international nightmare is over!"

Bolton didn't realize the rules of the game, it seems. The object of the U.N. is not to advance U.S. interests. The object is assure a steady flow of money and excuses to various illiberal regimes, to issue gravely worded statements of concern when a member nation starts slaughtering its citizens in numbers that require two commas, and to condemn Israel.

The last point is particularly important. Israel's mulish refusal to remove itself from the map is a particular affront to the finely tuned sensibilities of the diplomats, and requires weekly condemnatory resolutions, if only to keep the moral faculties limber. Russia could annex the Baltic states and it wouldn't evoke the same ire produced by a civilian casualty in a Gaza raid.

To paraphrase Stalin: One death is a tragedy; a million will be referred to the permanent subcommittee on statistics.

No, the U.S. ambassador must realize that the U.S. is the problem. It was the goody-two-shoes U.S. that didn't play along with Oil-for-Food. It was the U.S. that cruelly tricked the U.N. into putting sanctions on Iraq; it was Bolton who attempted to build international consensus opposing Iran's Atoms-for-Peace program, which was undertaken solely to heat dove nurseries. The man was a pain, and the international community is glad he's gone.

So who would they like to see in his stead? Let's consider the candidates.

Read on. And don't miss Ed Morrissey's thoughts on Kofi Annan's farewell address to one his most important constituent groups, the editors of the Washington Post.

Rosie O'Donnell, class all the way; as of the time of this post this comment and Rosie's reply are still up on her blog:

JP writes:

Hey Roside, why aren’t you getting your head out your butt and be more sensitive to Asian-Americans.Don’t post this message and see how you are hiding your true facade.You suck and need to get off tv.

go f*** urself jp

(And no, the asterisks don't appear in the original.)

Watch this receive absolutely zero traction in the MSM. On the other hand, how long will ABC allow her to post on her blog without running it past an editor first?

Newsbusters explores "Dictatorships and Double Standards in the NY Times".

But it's not like this is a new development, of course.

Mickey Kaus writes:

I am so not excited about Windows Vista! ... And I was excited about Windows XP, because I thought its sturdier code would stop it from crashing. I was wrong, at least for the early version of XP that I bought. Now I can't see a thing Vista's going to do for me that seems worth braving the inevitable Microsoft early teething problems. [It says you can "spend more time surfing the web"!--ed No I can't.] ... P.S.: Needless to say, if everyone has this attitude Vista (and the need to buy new computers powerful enough to run Vista, etc.) won't provide much of a boost to the economy.

I do think 64-bit computing (on Windows or otherwise) has some real possibilities, but it may be a while before it filters down deep into the Army of Davids/serious consumer level.

It's promotion time at the AP:

Kim Gamel, who issued stories using [Jamil] Hussein as a source on June 1, June 5 and twice on June 6, has now been promoted to the newly-created position of Baghdad News Editor.

Patrick Quinn, who wrote a story using Hussein as a source on May 30, has been promoted to the newly-created position of Assistant Chief of Middle East News.

Meanwhile, AP says it will be going with anonymous sources from now on. So I guess it's so long to Capt. Tuttle, err Capt. Hussein.

Neither of these are approaches that seem likely to build credibility when reporting the news from Middle East war zones, but I guess, whether it's AP or Reuters, for the harried postmodern wire service, it's a case of whatever works.

National Review's Peter Suderman explores the mindset of the man behind Apocalypto:

But Apocalypto is more than a high-velocity Hollywood adrenalin rush. It’s also, arguably, the ultimate reactionary movie, a savage rebellion against modernity that holds up technology and urbanity as poisonous to society. After warming his audience to the good-natured rural villagers, Gibson reverses this trick and paints their urban counterparts as ghoulish and decadent, almost inhuman. The captives’ journey into the city is filled with nightmarish sights — slave markets, sickly children, chalk covered laborers in a stone quarry looking like hollow-eyed ghosts — and capped off with a terrifying scene of ritual human sacrifice. Gibson films it all like an ancient macabre freak show, implicating the sin-filled city, with its suffering masses, devious leaders and enslaving inventions, in the desecration of the simple agrarian life he presents at the beginning.

The film sees modernity as an affront not only to man, but to nature, and it too has its revenge. In the second half of the film, the forest comes alive, and its beasts lash out against the urban invaders (though never against the protagonist). Like the villagers, these creatures are defending their homes and lives against marauding outsiders — and, of course, adding to the gory spectacle. This is a movie that fights bloody tooth by bloody nail for peaceful, traditionalist values. It’s like a Crunchy Con-produced splatter film.

Wow, a Hollywood figure who's anti-modernity. Such a rare occasion that is!

"The wide collar, fat tie, and three-piece suit–please say the seventies aren’t coming back…"

The seventies took a brief vacation from 1981 to about 1989--or to 2002 if you're really feeling charitable. Other than that, when did they ever leave?

"What could cause one of the greatest civilizations in history to disappear?"

Saturday Night Live has some fun recaptioning Mel Gibson's new movie.

Update: Number one at the box office this weekend, astoundingly enough.

In 1990, Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote:

I believe that it is terribly important that the same principles that concern limitations of arbitrary power apply to the media and in the domain of culture. It is very important to realize that the electronic media, which provide mass audiences, have made our culture much more manipulable than it ever was in the past. Typically, historically, cultures have been slow to change. Ideas about what's real, what's important, and what causes what, change very slowly in history. They are grounded in the experience of peoples, and respond only to additional, cumulative experiences of peoples.

With the rise of electronic media, the possibility of deliberate manipulation of culture has been magnified ten zillion fold.

Read the whole thing.

"How does Jimmy Carter know when he's outstayed his welcome on the international stage? When even Jane Hall, the genial liberal of Fox News Watch, suggests it's time to turn him out to pasture."

The Iraq Study Group Report is now in the hands of Mark Steyn, who commences careful study of said document before skewering the daylights out of it:

Well, the ISG -- the Illustrious Seniors' Group -- has released its 79-point plan. How unprecedented is it? Well, it seems Iraq is to come under something called the "Iraq International Support Group." If only Neville Chamberlain had thought to propose a "support group" for Czechoslovakia, he might still be in office. Or guest-hosting for Oprah.

* * *

So there you have it: an Iraq "Support Group" that brings together the Arab League, the European Union, Iran, Russia, China and the U.N. And with support like that who needs lack of support? It worked in Darfur, where the international community reached unanimous agreement on the urgent need to rent a zeppelin to fly over the beleaguered region trailing a big banner emblazoned "YOU'RE SCREWED." For Dar4.1, they can just divert it to Baghdad.

You know what to do next.

(And then check out the amazingly unflattering photo of Hillary reading the report that Time magazine bizarrely chose to run this week. Does this mean that even she doesn't appreciate its diagnosis, as well?)

...In Seattle and England.

They're a delicate lot, these new puritans.

Ann Althouse explores the crossroads between aesthetics and Puritanism:

I simply do not believe that the so-called health side is really composed of people who are solicitous about everyone else's health. I can't prove it, but my intuition is that all the strength on the "health" side of this war comes not from people who really care whether other people are healthy, but from people who don't like having to see fat people. They are concerned about their own aesthetic pleasures, and they think fat is ugly.

They wouldn't be the first to confuse aesthetics for religion.

Update: Puritanism spreads to Australia! "Eat Your Vegatables" screams the front page of the Sydney Sun-Herald, in a headline that would make the previous generation of hard drinking, raw meat devouring newsmen around the world weep.

Or break out in gales and gales of laughter.

I'm willing to say that he may be jumping the gun, but Alabama Liberation Front is declaring Jamil Hussein a fake. He compares him to George Spelvin; given Hussein's paramilitary background, I'd personally say that if he is indeed a fake, he's closer to the intrepid Korean War vet, Captain Jonathan S. Tuttle.

Update: According to our Movable Type interface, this is our 10,001st post. (But hey, I can quit whenever I want. I just blog to be social...) Thanks for being around for the ride!

Marathon Pundit has excerpts from the federal affidavit on Rockford terror suspect Talib Abu Salam Ibn Shareef, apparently yet another victim of Sudden Jihad Syndrome.

Orrin Judd finds a revealing quote from Jeanne Kirkpatrick:

Reflecting at a 2002 conference on her early career as a socialist, she said it had been "relatively short." As she read the works of various socialists, she said, "I came to the conclusion that almost all of them, including my grandfather, were engaged in an effort to change human nature. The more I thought about it, the more I thought this was not likely to be a successful effort."

Eschaton-building seldom works.

Daniel Henninger writes, "Baker-Hamilton won't stop Beltway bloodshed":

Before this Sunday's talk shows use the Baker-Hamilton bulldozer to bury alive the Bush Doctrine and the "neoconservatives," let us suggest there is an alternative version of the Iraq narrative--one that is less a collapse of doctrine than simply the result of bad, possibly fatal, decisions the administration made in 2003.

The years 2003-05 don't exist in the ISG study, which is almost wholly about the horrors of the past year. But in the war's immediate aftermath, from May 2003 onward, Baghdad was rebuilding, notwithstanding continued violence. Retail commerce came to life. A strong real-estate market emerged. New cars filled the streets, and Iraq's universities reopened. But it was also in May that someone in the Bush administration made the worst decision of the war, as described on this page in June by Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari in an interview with our Robert Pollock.

"The biggest mistake, honestly, if you go back," said Mr. Zebari, "was not entrusting the Iraqis as partners, to empower them, to see them do their part, to fill the vacuum, to have a national unity government."

It sounds like Richard Perle would agree with that assessment.

More Top Ten mania, but sadly, no video, or MTV, MKH or Martha Quinn references here: "The Media’s Top 10 Economic Myths of 2006".

Allah has some thoughts on AP executive editor Kathleen Carroll's latest defensiveness concerning Iraqi mystery man Jamil Hussein:

Here’s an idea: instead of issuing these snide Friday broadsides, produce Jamil Hussein. Snap a few photos and put them on the wire. Or, if that would endanger him, arrange a meeting between him and someone from MOI. Or, if that would endanger him, between him and the Centcom press director. If Hussein feels safe enough to have himself identified by name, rank, and precinct in AP news reports, he should be willing to chat with an American officer for 20 minutes. It’s exceedingly strange and suspect that the AP has available to it hard evidence that would explode its critics charges, yet so far as we know it’s made no attempt to produce that evidence. Not once have they offered to supply anyone with concrete proof of Hussein’s existence. Why not?

As he concludes, "to say it’s out of bounds to question the stringers is absurd. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire."

Even reporters at newspapers that use AP as their primary wire service are beginning to notice.

Update: In the New York Post, Robert Bateman writes:

THE most powerful media institution in all of human history is the Associated Press. Its news feed is ubiquitous - used, directly or indirectly, by every U.S. newspaper and TV news program and a vast number of foreign ones, too. AP maintains the largest world-wide coverage, and its reader base is nearly immeasurable. Unfortunately, and repeatedly of late, this behemoth has not only been getting it wrong - but increasingly refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing.

Instead, acting more like a politician or the mega-corporation that it is, the AP crew spins, obfuscates and attacks. Now they're at it again in Iraq.

Bateman has direct experience of what happens when the AP swings into action against someone who questions their stories.

Mary Katharine "Martha Quinn" Ham shares her Top Ten Rockin'-est John Bolton Moments:

Bill Bennett recalls an earlier US ambassador to the UN with a similar viewpoint:

It was early in the Reagan administration—a lot of the older-GOP guard was still a little distrustful of this neoconservative group, wasn't sure what to make of us, or even to trust us. Some of us were still Democrats after all (including Jeane and myself).

Members of the administration used to give talks to the larger administration, I think they were in Constitution Hall. Jeane's turn came and I remember feeling a chill in the room...until she took to the podium. She took her glasses off in that wonderful professorial way she had, cleared her throat, and said, "The U.S. has been getting kicked around a lot lately at the UN, and I just want you to know President Reagan and I think that's wrong. And as long as I'm here, we're not going to be kicked around anymore!" The place went crazy. All doubts left the room right there and then.

But what is this MTV that MKH speaks of...?

"When the San Francisco Democrats treat foreign affairs as an afterthought, as they did, they behaved less like a dove or a hawk than like an ostrich - convinced it would shut out the world by hiding its head in the sand."

--Jeane Kirkpatrick at the 1984 Republican National Convention.

Kirkpatrick death at age 80 was announced today; Commentary has reprinted her landmark "Dictatorships & Double Standards" essay that brought her to the attention of Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s. and would eventually lead to her appointment by President Reagan as United States ambassador to the United Nations.

The latest Blog Week In Review podcast is now online:

Panelists Tammy Bruce and Glenn Reynolds discuss—what else—the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. Neither finds the report encouraging.

Also discussed is whether America remains the most optimal place to do business.

Finally, the panelists, along with regular host and moderator Austin Bay, predict the upcoming week’s top stories.

Ed Driscoll produces.

Click here to listen.

Jim Geraghty writes that with the $500 million that he's prepared to spend on a third party run, New York City's Mike Bloomberg "can afford to have all of his speeches dubbed by James Earl Jones":

The 2004 presidential campaign lacked something that the 2000, 1996, and 1992 campaigns featured: a significant showing by a third party candidate. Neither Ralph Nader nor H. Ross Perot came close to winning in those earlier cycles, but both garnered enough support to leave the ultimate winner with less than 50 percent of the vote – leaving the political world to debate whether a two-man race would have had a different winner. (Probably not, but you never really know...)

And nobody is 100 percent sure which party Bloomberg would hurt more. On paper he's a Republican, and has close ties to the business world, but he's advocated nanny-state policies like banning smoking in public places and a war on trans-fats. He's a staunch liberal on most social issues, and is perhaps the highest-profile advocate of gun control in the country today.

Jim doubts that Bloomberg will sell outside of Manhattan, but a campaign with a $500 million war chest "is not likely to be amateurish".

Hopefully this won't be the model for his campaign ads, though.

Jim Hamlen, a frequent commenter on The Brothers Judd blog delivers a grim, but accurate sounding description of where we're at in the GWOT. Wake me when the president takes his finger off the pause button:

The problem with the administration is that it was "out of gas" the day after the 2004 election. Other than Roberts and (belatedly) Alito & Bolton, everything since has been reactive. The President has given very good speeches, but nothing has happened. The political capital Bush talked about immediately after the election almost as immediately turned into a deflated balloon.

Is it because Andrew Card left? Is it because Frist and Hastert proved to be formless lumps of dough? Is it because Condi has rapidly become an empty suit, as bloodless (and feckless) as her bureaucracy? Is it because the media really is getting their 15% bonus? Is it because Rumsfeld didn't kick enough inertial butt in the Pentagon? Is it because the President failed to clearly follow through on the doctrine that bore his name?

All of the above, to one degree or another. Throw in the immigration issue, tinged with GOP foolishness and media/Democratic exploitation (and the President's unwillingness to confront Vicente Fox), and the corruption (spending)problems (along with Foley and Hastert's screeching over the Jefferson search), and you have the present state of the GOP.

It is discouraging to watch the solid (though admittedly slender) victory in 2004 go down the drain in less than 2 years. That is why Bruno is despondent and others are disgusted.

However, I still marvel that people like Bill Quick and Stephen Green have a perverse joy in Bush's misfortunes now, just because they predicted them if their advice wasn't followed. Last time I checked, neither of them is in Congress, and neither of them is particularly happy with Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid.

But here is the real downer - 2 years ago, I laughed when people tried to compare the present time to the 1930s. To me, that meant believing that the 'enemies' were as active and evil as Hitler, Stalin, and Tojo; and it meant that our side was as blind, vain, and cowardly as Stanley Baldwin, Leon Blum, and even Alger Hiss.

But after watching virtually the entire Democratic party for the past 2 years, I am not so sure. And there are plenty of Republicans who are up there, too (from Hagel to the sob sisters to Voinovich to Shays to the Bakers, Powells, etc.). One thing is for sure - if the President absorbs the ISG report and goes Potomac for the next 2 years, it really will be 1938. And for some parts of the world, that means only months until Sept. 1, 1939. The US may get a few more years, but perhaps not. And by then, our only response will be to nuke Mecca, because we will have zero influence or ability to do anything else.

I think Hamlen is being facetious in that last sentence--but the second half is dead-on: just as our failure to close the deal in Vietnam led to the Iranian Hostage Crisis, if the War On Terror grinds to halt in Iraq rather than moving forward, America's credibility in the world--certainly the Middle East--will be nil for a long time to come.

One of Mark Steyn's readers (no, not this fellow) makes a point in a letter to Steyn that occurred to me recently as well:

Remember when everyone was so shocked at Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam and the crocodile shame that rippled throughout?

Here we are now, with the prospects of doing the very same thing--and more--with Syria and Iran, both nations who have religiously avowed to kill us. And they are unrepentant about it--even smug at this point as we parade into diplomatic chambers again, a big smile on our face to match the time of day.

Nothing changes. When faced with new problems that demand new solutions, we dumbly fall back on decades of what didn't work before.

It's also worth noting the contrast symbolized by today's anniversary

The Doolittle Raid occured in April of 1942. That meant that five months after Pearl Harbor, we had dusted ourselves off sufficiently not just from the attack, but from decades of isolationist slumber caused by a deadly combination of Wilsonian elitism and American First isolationism, to begin to assemble the most powerful arsenal of freedom ever assembled, so that an event like Pearl Harbor wouldn't occur again.

On this week's Pajamas Blog Week In Review podcast (which I'm mixing down even as I type this), Tammy Bruce mentioned the timing of the ISG report. 65 years after Pearl Harbor, large portions of the American government (apparently not President Bush himself though, at least based on what he has said recently), want to resume America's isolationism--at least until another 9/11 occurs, and even then, they'll get back to us on whether or not we should take action--not just by neutering the American military, but more subtly, via its economy as well.

Like the Maginot Line, the notion of Fortress America was exposed as a fallacy on December 7th (and even more so five years ago), but as Steyn's reader writes, "When faced with new problems that demand new solutions, we dumbly fall back on decades of what didn't work before".

Update: Speaking of Steyn, he was on O'Reilly tonight, discussing the ISG along with AP and Bilal Hussein.

I don't know what to make of this:

Stratfor's morning letter($) is cloak-and-dagger even by their standards:

The Iraq Study Group (ISG), headed by former Secretary of State James Baker, formally released its findings on Wednesday. Outlining a whopping 79 recommendations -- including resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict and persuading Israel to return the Golan Heights to Syria -- the report's recommendations are far-reaching. It essentially suggests resolving every U.S. foreign policy blunder in the region, all the compounded consequences of these mistakes and the centuries-old dispute over the holy land.

This, suffice to say, is underwhelming.

The report was rife with political compromises intended for domestic consumption. It provided a comprehensive list of the failures of the Iraq war -- failures that are both profound and well-known. This panel of elder statesmen known for back-channel dealings and solving intractable geopolitical problems is capable of much more than that. What the group set out to do -- and what Washington desperately needs it to do -- was to devise a cogent, attainable solution and make specific strategic recommendations. We therefore suspect that a separate, classified report -- the real report -- was placed on the president's desk some time ago.

Amen, and please, Lord, may the last point be true.

Not sure how much I believe that there's a second report, but anything's got to be better than what was delivered for public consumption.

"The country may have the rock n’ roll pneumonia and the boogie-woogie flu, but it definitely is in the throes of a Kucinich fever".

Boy howdy!

Clive Davis asks, "A question for religiously-minded film fans: why is the new movie, The Nativity Story doing so badly when Mel Gibson’s version of The Passion did so well?"

Maybe because it didn't arrive with such incredible controversy, and with a media superstar associated with it. (Remember the early, strange stories that began emerging from the set that Mel was spending his own money to shoot a movie entirely in Aramaic? And then the firestorm the week of The Passion's release?)

All of that made The Passion go from being just another religious film to a cause celebre that everyone, pro or con, wanted to see to decide for themselves what the fuss was all about. And it sounds like Gibson is doing his damndest to recreate that same controversy with Apocalypto--even if the hype has little to do with the film itself, according to Michael Medved:

Perhaps Gibson is so eager to transcend the humiliation of his drunk driving incident, and to bury the lingering suspicions that “The Passion” (despite its huge commercial success) was a right-wing, hate-filled screed, that he’s saying stupid things that he believes will endear him to the “progressive” Hollywood establishment.

Clearly, the film (with dialogue in the ancient Yucatec language, with subtitles) represents a major risk and he needs great reviews to get the attention required for decent box office performance. By cooking up some preposterous lefty interpretation of Mayan collapse (is the big chieftain with the body scarring and the elaborate tattoos and the distended ears and the carved piece of jade in place of his nose supposed to represent George W. Bush?) Gibson may be trying to position his adrenalin-soaked, breathlessly paced chase picture as an “important, daring” message movie that indicts the U.S.

Even if there’s no basis whatever in the substance of the film for Mel’s alarmist, we’re-all-guilty-and-doomed commentary about US society, the attempt to fabricate a political subtext for a visceral, straight-ahead action-adventure may prove an effective strategy. The positioning of a relentlessly fast-moving thriller set in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula more than five hundred years ago as some searing, timely indictment of “over consumption” and “political corruption” in Bush-era USA, may force some high brow critics to take “Apocalypto” more seriously than they would without the pretentious preaching surround it’s release. There’s another advantage concerning the movie’s distribution overseas: Gibson’s comments will help to produce the warm reception in France that’s all-but-guaranteed for any work plausibly classified as anti-American.

Anti-American and anti-Semitic? Mel will really be bathed in the French Ego Juice!

Update: Thoughts on the film itself, here.

No, me neither. But Mickey Kaus spots Brian Williams asking the particularly hard-hitting questions "during his newscast's unctuous Iraq Study Group celebration":

"Are we at our best when our best and brightest get together and hammer out a problem like this?"

Kaus asks, "When did NBC Nightly News become such CW sludge?"

When wasn't it? But hey, maybe Brian was just aggressively misunderstood! At least didn't try to compare the US to terrorists again. (Maybe because we appear so eager to negotiate with them.)

Below that post, Kaus spots Jonathan Klein, the man who put us all into pajamas not exactly enjoying a ratings smash these days at CNN and Headline News. Mickey asks, "Whatever happened to storytelling?":

Checking in with ... visionary CNN leader Jonathan Klein! Who knew, when Klein declared he agreed "wholeheartedly" with Jon Stewart's attack on what Klein called "head-butting debate shows,"--and when he pledged to "report the news" and not "talk about the news"--that what he really meant to give us was Glenn Beck and Nancy Grace! ... Ah, but that's CNN Headline News, you say, not Regular Pure Hard News Opinion-Free CNN itself. They're totally separate!** For the moment that's true. But thanks to Klein's visionary leadership, Regular Pure CNN has gone from being the second place cable network to being the third ... wait, make that occasionally fourth place cable network, behind a surging (opinionated) MSNBC and Head-Buttin' Headline News itself! ... If the "brash" head-butt format keeps delivering, how long before it infiltrates Regular Pure CNN? Sub-question: How much more expensive is it to produce Regular CNN than Headline News? Three times as much? Ten times? ... Bonus question: Whatever happened to storytelling?

Apparently, that was last year's strategy. This year it's headbuttin' time!

(I guess how the news is reported on TV changes faster than hemlines in Paris.)

James Lileks writes:

The Bush doctrine has been dead for some time, but this was the funeral oration. I don’t believe in “rope-a-dope,” and I don’t believe in the miraculous Israeli strike, and I don’t think the momentum can be reversed. It’s as if we invaded France and spent three years getting their government back on their feet before proceeding to Berlin. Given this, the debate over the ISG’s recommendations is rather superfluous, but the report does tell you where some people’s heads have become permanently socketed.

Lileks signs off, "Happy infamy day, by the way"; Victor Davis Hanson looks back on that seminal day, and then towards the future:

And in those days, peace and reconstruction followed rather than preceded victory. In tough-minded fashion, we offered ample aid to, and imposed democracy on, war-torn nations only after the enemy was utterly defeated and humiliated. Today, to avoid such carnage, we try to help and reform countries before our enemies have been vanquished —putting the cart of aid before the horse of victory.

Our efforts today are further complicated by conflicting Internet fatwas, terrorist militias and shifting tribal alliances; in short, we are not always sure who the enemy cadre really is — or will be.

So paradoxes follow:

A stronger, far more affluent United States believes it can use less of its power against the terrorists than a much poorer America did against the formidable Japanese and Germans.

World War II, which saw more than 400,000 Americans killed, was not nearly as controversial or frustrating as one that has so far taken less than one-hundredth of that terrible toll.

And after Pearl Harbor, Americans believed they had no margin of error in an elemental war for survival. Today, we are apparently convinced that we can lose ground, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, and still not lose either the war or our civilization.

Of course, by 1945, Americans no longer feared another Pearl Harbor. Yet, we, in a far stronger and larger United States, are still not sure we won’t see another Sept. 11.

Read the rest.

Red State and James Taranto both link to a blog post by Philadelphia Daily News reporter Will Bunch, who writes:

Even if the report [was] wrong, and I'm not convinced that it is, it was in the context of horrific--and demonstrably true--escalating violence in Baghdad. . . .

In fact, it's almost not worth swatting at these gnats from the 101st Fighting Keyboard Commandos. I'd rather just concede, and let them have as their main talking points on the Middle East: The fact that smoke was added to a picture of a real Israeli bombing of Lebanon, that the AP printed an incorrect story about one of the hundreds of deadly acts of sectarian violence in Iraq, and even the allegation--totally unproven and not resulting in any actual charges--that one Iraqi photographer who has worked with the AP has ties to the insurgents.

For our main talking points that the Iraq war is immoral and that U.S. involvement needs to end, we'll take the lies about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's ties to al-Qaeda that didn't exist, and the unrelentingly sad fact that more than 2,900 Americans and tens upon tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have now died in an unnnecessary [sic] civil war, all for this mistake.

Note the media groupthink implied by "our main talking points". In a post titled, "When Media Bias Slaps You In The Face", Red State's "Adam C" writes:

And people wonder why most of the public does not trust journalists to be impartial. When reporters have "talking points" and liberals are overrepresented by large margins, it doesn't take a genius to realize that there is a credibility problem. Hopefully new media will help level the playing field, but until then we should be putting pressure on news rooms to stick to the facts and leave talking points to the activists and politicians.

I'm not sure if bias is really the issue here. Given that Philadelphia is a fairly liberal city, it's possible that Bunch is simply telling the majority of his readers what they want to hear--and there's nothing at all wrong with that, as the New York Times' then-ombudsman conceded a couple of years ago. And it's safe to assume that were he or she honest, a person in a similar capacity at the Daily News would make an identical admission. (And maybe already has. It's been almost a decade since I left the Philly area.)

But perhaps most significantly, James Taranto highlighted Bunch's concession that Reuters and AP both cooked the books in their Middle Eastern reporting. The Daily News relies heavily on AP for coverage of events outside of Philly; and to a lesser extent on Reuters. It's not every day that one of their reporters writes that both wire services relied on stringers who, to put it charitably, invented reportage, or to put it more plainly--lied.

Jules Crittenden looks at the Robert Gates confirmation hearings, and writes:

As political matters go, I was more interested to hear a former CIA director still thinks we had to invade Iraq in 2003. That was also a relevant strategic issue, after all. The sanctions regime was falling apart and Saddam with a nuke would have become an even bigger problem than Saddam without a nuke. Every major intelligence agency in the world believed he had nukes, as did Gates himself. Let's hope this, unchallenged yesterday, will finally shut up the revisionist "Bush Lied" Left, though I'm not holding my breath on that.

Didn't the New York Times resolve this issue recently?

Hugh Hewitt weighs in on The Iraq Study Group Report:

It totals 96 pages, not counting its introductory letter from Secretary Baker and Congressman Hamilton, the executive summary, and the many appendices, which includes such helpful information as the fact that the ISG talked to 15 senators (not one of whom was elected for the first time since 9/11, creating a generation bias in the interviews, one which appears replicated in the 10 House members interviewed.,) and that of the 21 foreign officials interviewed, only David Abramovich, the Director General of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was consulted from the state most threatened by the Iranian mullahs and Syrian thugs the ISG demands the US appeal to.

Incredibly, the ISG did not consult with anyone from the democratic government of Lebanon, even as the ISG urges us to reach an understanding with Syria.

Of the 43 "former officials and experts" consulted --including Mark Danner of the New York Review of Books, Thomas Friedman, Leslie Gelb, Sandy Berger, Anthony Lake, Ken Pollack, Thomas Ricks, and George Will-- the ISG did not find it necessary to talk with, say, Victor Davis Hanson, Lawrence Wright, Robert Kaplan, Mark Steyn, Michael Ledeen, Reuel Marc Gerecht, or Christopher Hitchens. The ISG did talk with Bill Kristol. I wonder how long that sit down lasted.

The report combines an almost limitless condescension towards the "Iraqi sovereign government," even going so far as to lay out a timetable for its exact legislative program for the next six months, with a cavalier indifference to the Syrian death squads operating in Lebanon, and the certain nature of the Iranian regime --still, on this very day, hosting the anti-Holocaust conference.

It is a wonder, this bit of appeasement virtuosity, and I think it will gain for its authors all the lasting fame that has attached itself to the name Samuel Hoare, and his brainchild, the Hoare-Laval Agreement.

More thoughts, here, here and here.

Update: Ian Schwartz notes (with the help of an accompanying video) that paranoia strikes deep with the ISG:

During the coverage of today’s Iraq Surrender Study Group press conference, you could hear a member whispering “she’s from Fox” as a reporter stepped up to ask a question. Another member reacts as though working for Fox News is a bad thing.

The big picture here is why did they note she was from Fox? Does it make a difference? As Ms. U notes, why should it matter if she WAS from Fox?

By the way, the reporter’s name is Pam Hess and she works for UPI as a Pentagon correspondent. The ISG got that wrong–what else did they get wrong? Maybe the Iranians can help them get things straight.

Heh, indeed.^TM

On the other hand, the ISG members don't seem too reluctant to talk to conservative bloggers, at least.

More: N.Z. Bear writes:

So here are the keywords defined by the Iraq Study Group for their report:

iraq study group report james baker lee hamilton co chairs middle east congress bipartisan strategies president bush america abroad military withdrawal troops civil war iraqi government sunni shia kurds christian sectarian violence conflict post-conflict

Yes, that's right. If you're looking for "withdrawal", this is the document for you. If you happen to be looking for "victory", however --- you are out of luck.

Hugh Hewitt writes:

John McCain shrewdly and quickly dismissed the ISG Report's recommendations. Any would-be GOP nominee should do the same and very quickly. The "victory option" remains at the center of the GOP, and no raft of Beltway paper will change that fundamental fact.

Hope he's right.

John Podhoretz spots "The Most Pretentious Piece of Writing in All of Recorded History":

You know, at times, people come up to me randomly on the streets of New York and ask me, "Say, JPod, how exactly would you define the word 'pretentious'?" And I have to admit I am usually stumped and unable to sum up exactly the qualities of pseudo-thought that the word represents. That is why I am grateful today for the film critic of the New York Times, Ms. Manohla Dargis. A writer of uncommon self-important idiocy, Dargis has just published what is, I believe, the single most pretentious review, ever written, in any publication, anywhere, of anything. If you are brave, you will emerge from her description of David Lynch's Inland Empire a sadder but wiser person. You will have looked the horror of pretentiousness in the face and you will have survived. Take a deep breath. And begin. Here.

Note: review (not to mention movie) could cause serious side effects. Do not take internally. Consult your physician if you begin running around in a circle screaming inarticulably.

Scrappleface boldly goes where no satirist has gone before.

Charles Krauthammer dubbed the 1990s a "holiday from history"; James Taranto has a blast from the past from nine years ago on this day. (Scroll to mid-page.)

Brent Bozell has some thoughts on the Flying Imams and asks, "How many times, at how many airports, have there been these kinds of incidents that have not made it to the news desks?"

I ask because I’ve been a witness to one such incident, from a distance of perhaps three feet, which never made it on the news.

On October 14, I was in Grand Rapids, having boarded United 5832 to Chicago. It was one of those smaller commuter jets with two seats on either side of the aisle. The flight was perhaps one third full, giving sardined passengers the opportunity to move to the multiple open rows after the boarding process was complete. That’s when I noticed the two men, one a younger Muslim, the second an older black man, make their way from the back to the two seats behind the bulkhead on the right side of the plane, one row in front and across from me. Odd. If they wanted more breathing room, why were they choosing to sit together again in crammed quarters, given all the open rows? Why did they move at all? And if they remained together because they needed to visit, why didn’t they exchange a single word? I watched them as they just sat, staring straight ahead. And the plane also just sat by the gate, for a good fifteen minutes.

And then the hatch flew open and a half-dozen DHS/FBI agents rushed in, surrounded these two men, and flashing badges, ordered them off the plane.

Now stop for a minute. Imagine you were one of these two, and you were innocent. What would be your reaction if suddenly confronted by a small army of heat-packing federal agents demanding your removal? You might literally jump out of your seat belt in surprise. What? Me? Huh?! Why? What’s going on?! What’d I do? What’s the meaning of this? And the like. And that’s when it really got creepy. I watched as the two men stood up, and without a word, without a shred of emotion on their faces, calmly accompanied the agents off the plane. How else to explain this? They were expecting their detention.

The pilot would take to the intercom a few minutes later to explain what he could. Homeland Security had been running background checks on these two, and while nothing had registered on the computers, the flight crew was “just uncomfortable” -- as they had every reason to be.

As Bozell writes, "Something is happening out there. And it’s not good".

Meanwhile, Debra Burlingame (whose husband was a pilot killed by the terrorists on 9/11, who crashed his plane into the Pentagon), has an exceptional essay in Opinion Journal:

Read More »

Fair is fair--this was the exact attitude of every boomer in 1972 as well.

Jonah Goldberg writes:

My hunch is that average Americans on either side of the ideological divide recognize their dilemma. Bipartisanship is overrated, but nobody wants day one of a new presidency to begin at the partisan equivalent of DefCon 1. America is now in the grip of Mutually Assured Demonization. If the GOP throws up another Bush (or, perhaps, a Gingrich), "Blue" America will turn its missile keys. If the Democrats trot out a Gore, a Clinton or a Kerry, Red America will respond in kind. How else to explain the enormous popularity of Barack Obama, whose anagram-like name seems to spell "fresh start" for millions of Americans who know nothing about him?

That's one reason why Florida's Jeb Bush — an outstanding governor — has decided to spare his country, his party and himself another Bush on the ticket. Such selflessness is not the Clinton way. It's too soon to tell what that means for her country, her party or her.

While they're waiting for Hillary, another candidate with an extensive shelf life is feeling the media's love--at least for the moment.

Karma happens: when you diss Mark Steyn's chops--and go anti-Semitic in the process--the writing gods punish you by making you write typos like this.

In 1980, Peter Gabriel somehow managed to combine just about all of the elements that would drive rock and pop music in the MTV era--and this was a couple of years before MTV was even born, of course. African polyrhythms, drum machines, gated drums, the Fairlight CMI synthesizer, sampling--it was all there on Gabriel's third and fourth album.

It was around that time that England's South Bank Show did an episode which documented Gabriel's lengthy efforts to map out and record that fourth album, Security. Since we occasionally discuss home recording here, these YouTube clips are pretty cool stuff, especially when you realize how far technology has advanced since then: the Fairlight that Gabriel demonstrates here (particularly in the second clip) cost something like $30,000 back then; today the PC by your desk has much more computing power, and with the right software and soundcard, can do anything it could. (And can generate all of its preset sounds.)

Read More »

Zombie Speaks! Shortly after witnessing the debacle outside the gates of San Quentin during Tookie Williams' much deserved execution in February, I dusted off Tom Wolfe's meme from The Right Stuff of the press as a hypocritical Victorian Gentleman and wrote:

To easily see the Victorian Gentlemanly style in action, pick up a copy of a paper like the San Francisco Chronicle. (Or scroll through their Website of course, but it's even more obvious "on dead tree".) Read their coverage, of say, the protests outside the gates of San Quentin during Tookie Williams' execution. Then peruse the photos of the same event at Zombietime.

I'm not sure if in the strictest definition, Zombietime is actually a blog, but it's very easy to say that Zombietime is one of the great additions to the Blogosphere. Its proprietor is interviewed here. Needless to say, read the whole thing.

Larry Kudlow writes that at least when it comes to Iraq, John McCain gets it: “This is not Vietnam or Somalia or those places where you can walk away. If we just pull out, we will find ourselves back in short order", McCain said yesterday.

Meanwhile, Michael Barone stresses the importance of character in 2008.

Hey, if the Florsheim fits:

Jon Meacham, editor of "Newsweek," compared journalists to MTV’s teen morons Beavis and Butt-Head for the demands they make on public officials, and portrayed himself as understanding of negative public sentiments of the media:

"One of the things people don’t like about journalists, reasonably, is that we’re kind of like Beavis and Butt-Head. You know, we demand people change, and then when they change, we kick ‘em in the shins and say ‘well, you didn’t change quick enough.'"

Meanwhile, Mark Tapscott looks at a much more serious and immediate problem in the MSM: how does AP begin to get its credibility back in light of Jamil Hussein?

You've probably not read much about it because only a handful of mainstream media outlets have covered it, but the Associated Press - for decades America's largest and most trusted wire news service - is at the center of a credibility crisis largely of its own making.

You probably have heard of the AP story that started it - a horrifying dispatch from Iraq the day after Thanksgiving claiming that six Sunnis had been doused with kerosene as they left their mosque following Friday prayers and burned alive by Shiite-aligned militiamen.

The story, which was quickly picked up by virtually every major news organization in the world, also claimed that "the Shiite-dominated police and Iraqi military" stood by doing nothing as the six people were gruesomely murdered. The story was sourced to "police Captain Jamil Hussein."

The problem is there appears to be no such person as Captain Jamil Hussein, at least not who is employed by the Iraqi police. The U.S. military says Hussein doesn't exist and has demanded that AP issue a correction. The Iraqi government says no such person is on its police payroll.

Things have gotten progressively worse for AP since those initial questions about "Hussein" were raised by U.S. and Iraqi officials. A firestorm of criticism has exploded in the Blogosphere as bloggers have researched the names of more than a dozen Iraqi- named sources of apparently doubtful credibility that have appeared in AP stories.

Tapscott echoes Glenn Reynolds' "habeas corpus" request in the latest Blog Week In Review podcast: AP needs to produce Hussein or risk even further damage to its reputation.

As Glenn mentioned, this story doesn't have the superstar figurehead quality that Ra^therGate had: Dan Rather is a household name; Jamil Hussein simply is not, and probably won't become one, no matter how hard the Blogosphere pushes. But all of these attacks on the media's credibility, including this latest one, have a drip, drip, drip quality to them, and added together, have seriously eroded public confidence in Big Media, as Jon Meacham's quote at the start of this post implies.

Allah explores Iranian science fiction and finds it blandly going where Mel Brooks has gone before. Me? I think this Iranian-born astronaut is far more interesting. As I wrote a couple of months ago:

I wonder if the mullahs back home, and her fellow Iranian women are aware of these images, and the power of their symbolism.

No wonder they'd rather crank out grade-Z sci-fi propaganda instead.

Someone alert Kofi Annan and Jonathan Chait--here's one area where Iraq has undergone a positive transformation since the fall of Saddam: In December of 2002, ESPN ran a remarkable segment on television, "Blood On The Rings". It highlighted the unspeakable cruelty by which Uday Hussein oversaw Iraq's Olympic team. Perhaps surprisingly, its accompanying Webpage is still up. Take a minute to reread it.

And then for a look at how things have changed since, click on Gateway Pundit's look at Iraq's efforts to, umm, expose democracy through sports:

Iraq just happened to be the only Muslim nation out of 16 that entered into the women's volleyball competition at the Asian Games in Doha, Qatar.

...Proof that democracy has perks!

Just imagine how bizarre the words "Iraqi Volleyball Babes" would have been five years ago (probably about as bizarre as this headline).

More team photos, please!

Is North Korea killing its citizens for the insurance money?

I'm sure the L.A. Times will get right on this story.

Michelle Malkin calls for a troop withdrawal.

"Fox News: 'You Report, We Repeat' -- Without Attribution"

Ed Morrissey has some thoughts on the chances in 2008 of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (whose middle name apparently must not be spoken).

Update: Meanwhile, coming in a distant third (or more), Joe Biden sounds like he wants to take up where Howard Dean left off as "the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks", as Dean himself said in one his more spectacular pre-YARRGH!!! gaffes.

Another Update: Flash! Breaking news! This just in! Tom Daschle's decided not to run, in what must have been an agonizing decision for South Dakota's favorite son.

Charles Johnson has a round-up of links for the latest on "Where's Jamil", including a New York Times report which is "a little more fair than I expected", considering all of the wagon-circling that's par for the course in Big Media when a scandal like this breaks out. As Charles writes:

These people really do seem to think they’re a priestly class, immune to criticism, existing on some rarefied plane from which they hand down truth to the ungrateful masses.

And word out of the Vatican is that the latest would-be clerics aren't looking so good, either.

Update: speaking of wagon-circling, Allah writes:

The media wouldn’t have circled the wagons for Fox if they were in the AP’s spot so Fox won’t circle the wagons for them. An attack on one isn’t an attack on all if you’re not regarded as part of the “all.”

Click here for a video clip of a Fox interview with Boston Herald city editor/blogger Jules Crittenden on Jamilgate.

Two words: Bolton Resigns.

Tammy Bruce adds:

Make no mistake--this is not a casualty of the new Dem majority, the loss of Bolton is due to the incompetence and cowardice of the previous Republican majority. And they wonder why they got fired.

And the sad thing is, by and large, they probably really do.

Television long ago replaced the fireplace as the central gathering place in the American home, which adds to the layers of McLuhanesque irony hidden in the annual Yule Log video. Fortunately, the spotlight shines even brighter on the world's most famous log this year, as The New York Daily News reports:

Generations have sat raptly in front of the television on Christmas Day, mesmerized by a holiday classic: "The Yule Log."

Now, for the first time in the storied log's 40-year history, secrets of the burning timber will be revealed.

WPIX/Ch. 11 presents "The WPIX Yule Log: A Log's Life," Dec. 23 at 7 p.m.

Hopefully they'll put it up on YouTube in time for Christmas. In the meantime, the above clip should help get you in the mood, though you'll have to keep hitting play after its short run, rather than waiting for it to automatically loop.

Over at Pajamas HQ, Ron Rosenbaum buries a new Germany comedy--two words you rarely see combined--about Hitler that attempts to ignore centuries of cultural anti-Semitism by depicting Der Fuhrer as "a bedwetting drug addict who is making the world suffer for his beatings as a child", according to Der Spiegel. (Which sounds like a variation on John Cusack's 2002 Max, which explained away Nazi Germany's collective atrocities by suggesting if only young Hitler had been more appreciated as an artist...)

Rosenbaum makes some perceptive observations about a much older comedy about Hitler, as well:

And speaking of trivializing, there is no more trivializing, over-rated, treatment of Hitler than Chaplin’s dimwitted, laboriously unfunny Great Dictator. Yes Chaplin made some funny movies, but when he tried his hands at politics Chaplin made a movie that did nothing but help Hitler because he made him seem like an unthreatening clown just at a time, 1940, when the world needed to take Hitler’s threat seriously.

Yet Chaplin’s film makes it seem like Hitler was nothing but a harmless fool (like Chaplin, same mustache and all). And he made it at a time, during the Nazi-Soviet pact, when the world most needed to mobilize against Hitler’s threat. And yet Chaplin, to his eternal shame ended the film not with a call to oppose fascism, and its murderous hatred, but rather—because he was following the shameful Hitler-friendly Soviet line at the time—ended his film with a call for all workers in the world to lay down their arms—in other words to refuse to join the fight against fascism and Hitler.

He wasn't the only prominent Hollywood figure to do so during this period, of course.

Update: Blinkered Thinker has some decidedly unblinkered thoughts on The Great Dictator.

There's an article in Wired News by Jason Silverman, which starts with an interesting premise: the scarcity of good science fiction at your local movie theater. The writer correctly notes that because of the huge budgets required to provide the necessary WOW! factor that sci-fi movies require to blow its audiences out of their seats, it's that much more difficult to get a film like 2001 or Blade Runner green-lighted in Hollywood's current challenging environment:

Why has Hollywood stopped making serious sci-fi? According to Gordon Paddison, New Line Cinema's executive vice president of new media and marketing, it is all about risk and money. Paddison described Hollywood financing as formula-driven: Films with the potential to travel well across borders score the highest points.

"Sci-fi is hard to fund -- it's never a slam-dunk," said Paddison, who helped launch campaigns for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He also said the system is geared toward films with huge effects.

"Regrettably, there's a barrier to entry," he said. "You have to put a certain level of budget into these films. You have to swing for the fences, otherwise you just aren't in the game at all."

If sci-fi has always been hit-or-miss with studios, investors these days seem less willing to gamble. Who knows if The Terminator, for example, could have gotten the green light in this environment? It was made in 1984 for $6 million -- the kind of midrange budget that rarely exists any more -- and starred a little-known weight lifter with an unpronounceable name.

Star Wars, a monumental struggle for George Lucas to produce, would likely be a non-starter these days. Blade Runner? Perhaps too dark to get financing. And 2001: A Space Odyssey? With its cast of unknowns, enigmatic ending and (in inflation-adjusted figures) more than $50 million budget, it just wouldn't compute with today's backers.

Unfortunately, Silverman undermines his argument with a sentence that's a combination of both political correctness and an "Everybody Knows" mentality:

As for the audiences? If they'll flock to the theaters for Al Gore's PowerPoint lecture, you'd hope they'd show up for good, smart, science-based fiction.

But they didn't flock to the theater's for Al's PowerPoint lecture: An Inconvenient Truth grossed a paltry $23,808,111 at the box office, which the author could have found in about five seconds by simply by looking up the film in the Internet Movie Database. While that gross is no doubt a nice return on what is probably a tiny documentary budget, it's less than Tom Cruise's salary.

In addition to the leading man's costs, there's the budget for the rest of the cast, Industrial Light & Magic's special effects, building the sets, location shooting, and a thousand other expeneses. Add it all up, and you reach the same conclusion that New Line Cinema's executive vice president makes in the quote above--that Hollywood is pricing itself out of business.

Tthere's another element as well. Earlier this year, Libertas described one of Hollywood's current business models:

Hollywood has recently perfected a formula whereby low-budget, indie-looking films generate good reviews, controversy, and oceans of free publicity (a lot of it coming from the conservative media) due to a film’s left-wing worldview. And all this free buzz gets translated into box office dollars.

The model Hollywood’s following here is that of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Michael Moore’s $6 million film from 2004 that generated $222 million in worldwide boxoffice. “Fahrenheit” opened a lot of eyes in Hollywood - but not about George Bush or Iraq. Those bulging eyeballs were staring at “Fahrenheit”’s grosses.

One company that’s adopted “Fahrenheit”’s model is Participant Productions, founded by eBay’s Jeff Skoll. Participant co-produced “Syriana,” “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “North Country,” and soon will release the Al Gore documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and Richard Linklater’s adaptation of “Fast Food Nation.” None of these films cost very much (”Good Night” cost only $6 million), and are easy films to sell to the sort of people who read The Huffington Post or The Daily Kos. Crazy as this may sound, this business model is increasingly making sense in Hollywood’s competitive marketplace.

So here’s the bad news: Hollywood doesn’t need the Heartland anymore. There’s basically no pressure for Hollywood to change what it’s doing, because there are plenty of Blue State audiences and DVD sales out there to make even something like the gender-bending “Transamerica” a hit, so long as the film doesn’t cost too much.

But that formula also tacitly demonstrates that while films like An Inconvenient Truth may keep the industry alive in some form for the foreseeable future, they make it that much more difficult to repeat, say, the summer of 1982, when Star Trek II, E.T., and Blade Runner all played in shopping mall multiplexes.

Hollywood is alienating its Red State audiences with films like Gore's, which are not only comparatively little seen compared to the average blockbuster, but demonstrate to the moviegoers who don't count themselves amongst the faithful how predictably slanted to the left Hollywood has become.

And in that long run that can't be good for business--or Hollywood wouldn't have had to adopt the Fahrenheit formula to begin with.

He's the mystery man of the hour (well, half-hour, actually) on this week's Blog Week In Review, with Richard Fernandez, Glenn Reynolds, and host Austin Bay.

At the beginning of last August, Ace of Spades brilliantly predicted the scandals involving Jamil Hussein, and his immediate predecessor, Adnan Hajj, Reuters' bumbling would-be fauxtographer:

The American media is setting itself up for a massive scandal. One day, it will in fact come out that they are guilty of willful blindness and a deliberate avoidance of asking their stringers tough questions to maintain their own plausible deniability.

And they'll have to answer some hard questions, such as, "If you're so vigilant against being 'used' by the American government for its 'propaganda,' why are you so blithely nonchalant about being worse-used by America's enemies?"

Many of Steven Glass' colleagues looked back and wondered how they'd been fooled by his fabrications for so long. Apart from the outlandishness of some of his stories, he also had an uncanny knack for getting the Killer Quote that tied together a piece or summed it up in one pithy, bullet-point sentence. We should have known no one gets that lucky so consistently, they said later.

The American media seems to be an employing a possible Army of Steven Glasses, and yet they're more than willing to pretend they don't know what's going on so long as those suspiciously-dramatic front-page pictures keep coming back from the foreign stringers.

Click on this week's podcast to explore the latest development in the MSM's faux journalism from the Middle East.

"Don’t you love Hollywood lecturing us about consumerism?"--Libertas's rather negative review of Blood Diamond, starring legendary child actor Leonardo DiCaprio.

Update: "I love the English lifestyle, it's not as capitalistic as America", Gwenth Paltrow notes--in between dinners in London with Madonna...

(Barely keeping pace with the minimum wage, Paltrow earned a decidedly miniscule $10,000,000 from at least one picture's she's starred in.)

Mickey Kaus notes that Tom Hayden is remarkably simpatico with Jim Baker's pullback plan.

*Why yes, that was a Medium Cool homage...

Update: "You Want Tough on Baker? I'll give you tough on Baker. Complete with Depends jokes": John Podhoretz lowers the boom.

"Corbusier" of Architecture And Morality explores the growing popularity of what he calls "Lifestyle Centers":

Ironically enough, my town is investing lots of its own resources to build a brand new town-center along its waterfront, far from its historic town square. Why do our city leaders think this a good idea? For one thing, the new town center, while looking and feeling like a traditional urban street, is in reality more optimally planned for accomodating major commercial anchors. There is a cineplex at one end of the development and a brand new hotel and conference center at the opposite end, with "blocks" of retail, chain restaurants with views of the lake, and elegant fountains and walkways. There's even a landscaped amphitheatre for open-air concerts, and the new town center has recently proved to be effective in gathering large numbers of people to watch fireworks.

Such "lifestyle centers" are growing in propularity in suburbs across the country. They are basically un-enclosed shopping malls, and their thematic architecture makes little attempt to relate the authentic vernacular of histor areas of the towns near which they are located. Our new instant town center by the lake resembles an Italian fishing village with cardboard cutout detailing, instead of the much more native Texas lakehouse style found in nearby rural area. Still, they manage to restore a sense of place, regardless of how instantaneously they are conceived. Older, and often more tastefully built town centers could apply lessons from the success of lifestyle centers.

I think Santana Row in San Jose would definitely qualify as a lifestyle center; I blogged about it last year--complete with cheesecake poster!

Or something like that--Ed Morrissey reviews The Nativity Story; Govindini Murty explains why it's so controversial in the Second City.

Mary Katharine Ham explores how we arrived at The Holiday That Dare Not Speak its Name:

James Lileks' Bleat from a couple of Christmases (oh no, he said it!) back is also worth reading for its historical perspective, as he rummaged through his newspaper's Christmas (he did it again!) archives over the course of the 20th century.

Update: It sounds like St. Albans, North Carolina has a particularly impressive Leftivus display this time of year.

I was on The Tammy Bruce Show this morning, discussing the Baker Report, the ABC Report, and Danny DeVito's drunken retorts. And I must say that Scott Ott has the best advice on how Jim Baker's recommendations should be implemented by President Bush.

Immediately after viewing The Passion during the week that it opened, I wrote:

Regarding the violence, it is a very violent film. I'm not sure how much of that reflects what Gibson felt audiences have come to expect of movies of all genres (ranging from slasher films, to cop films such as Mel's own Lethal Weapon movies, all the way to war films such as Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down), and how much he equates, as Andrew Sullivan wrote, Jesus' torture with the intensity of His beliefs and the importance of His mission. Sullivan:

[Click over to original post to read long excerpt from Sullivan.]

All that being said, perhaps I've been numbed by the ultraviolence of today's films, or if I had expected far worse from most critics' reviews. The violence is very, very intense and brutal, as is the bloodletting. But it's certainly watchable, given the story that surrounds it.

But The Passion arrived with its story already known by 99.99 percent of its potential audience. That's very different from Apocalypto--who knows what it's about? And in a post titled, "Buckets O' Blood", John Derbyshire writes that it's even bloodier--if that's possible--than its immediate predecessor:

Back when Mel Gibson brought out The Passion of the Christ, I offered the opinion on NRO that Mel is much too interested in scenes of gruesome things happening to human bodies, and I suggested that as an added draw for his future movies, movie theaters might be rigged up with machines to squirt fake blood at the audience at suitable points in the story. (I had not, and still have not, seen Passion; my opinion was based on Mel's pre-Passion work.)

Many NRO readers thrilled at the success of Passion emailed in to scold me for my disrespectful remarks. We-e-ell, here is Roger Friedman reviewing Apocalypto, Mel's new movie, for Fox News:

Apocalypto is the most violent movie Disney has ever released, with so much blood spurting out of orifices that even Martin Scorsese would blush. If you've ever wondered what it would be like to see heads and hearts removed without anesthesia, then this is the movie for you. Grey's Anatomy it is not.

[Derb] Actually, sounds like Gray's Anatomy it **is**.

Well, that gives me yet another reason to absent myself from Apocalypto, no matter how loudly Disney has cranked up the hype machine.

Steven Bainbridge checks in from post-Christian Europe:

A recent report from the UK's Nuffield Council on Bioethics, Critical care decisions in fetal and neonatal medicine: ethical issues, concludes that "there are some circumstances in which imposing or continuing treatments to sustain a newborn baby's life results in a level of irremediable suffering such that there is no ethical obligation to act in order to preserve that life." Accordingly, the Council opines that physicians ethically may withhold or withdraw treatment from such infants. Indeed, while the Council claims not to accept active euthanasia as ethical, it invokes the principle of double effect to justify the use of "potentially life-shortening but pain-relieving treatments."

Given the trends in Western society towards acceptance of abortion and euthanasia, one is no longer surprised when a principally secular ethical body reaches such a conclusion. The attitude of the Church of England came as something of a surprise, however, at least to observers outside the Anglican sphere.

The Daily Mail recently reported that "a bishop representing the national church has now sparked controversy by arguing that there are occasions when it is compassionate to leave a severely disabled child to die. And the Bishop of Southwark, Tom Butler, who is the vice chair of the Church of England's Mission and Public Affairs Council, has also argued that the high financial cost of keeping desperately ill babies alive should be a factor in life or death decisions." (Bishop Butler's full submission to the Nuffield Council has now been released and is available here.)

In suggesting that some children be left "to die," Bishop Butler broke with 2000-plus years of Judeo-Christian ethics.

And that usually works out well in Europe, huh?

Not sure how things are in Darth Vader's neck of the woods, but down here, Pajamas writes that a dueling battle over orbital defense is coming to planet Congress next year: "Democrats to Gut Missile Defense / Bush to Announce 'Orbital Battle Station'".

Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi tabs Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, for the job. As Mary Katharine Ham writes:

Well, it ain't Alcee Hastings, which is kind of a downer when we're talking about entertainment value, but a major plus when we're talking security of the country. I'll take security in that choice.

Indeed^TM. She also has some thoughts on his voting record--and nepotism. As MKH writes, "Funny how we never heard much abou this stuff until after Dems took control".

Go figure.