Bob Hope once introduced comedian Mort Sahl (the thinking man's Woody Allen!) at the Academy Awards by saying "Here he is folks, the favorite of nuclear physicists everywhere!"
Similarly, based on his choice of footwear, Ron Paul--the thinking man's Pat Paulsen--definitely has the all-important American gym teacher vote all sewn-up.
Rather than a pair of black sneakers, Ron might have better odds in a slightly more upscale pair of kicks such as these. However, despite his shabby shodding, the Ron Paul boomlet could be catching--I actually saw a car parked at the Marie Callender's restaurant just outside of San Jose with not one, but two Ron Paul bumperstickers in its rear window.
No word yet on which phys. ed. class its owner teaches.
According to Rolling Stone, CD sales are in rough shape this year:
Overall CD sales have plummeted sixteen percent for the year so far — and that’s after seven years of near-constant erosion. In the face of widespread piracy, consumers’ growing preference for low-profit-margin digital singles over albums, and other woes, the record business has plunged into a historic decline.Libertas's "Dirty Harry" surveys the wreckage and wonders why Rolling Stone is willing to blame everything but the low overall quality of major label music itself.
And speaking of which, England's Telegraph spots a genre of the music industry whose sales have plumetted at double the rate of the overall CD market:
In 2006, rap sold 59.1 million albums, down 21 per cent from 2005. Not one rap album made the American top 10 sellers of the year - a list headed by the saccharine tunes of the soundtrack to Disney's made-for-television High School Musical. The bad boys of rap are now trailing the cowboys of country and the headbangers of heavy metal.If the mid-to-late 20th century is any guide, popular music in general, and black music in particular seems to undergo major self-immolations every few decades on a regular basis. In the 1940s, Miles, Dizzy, Bird and Charlie Christian used their Manhattan nightclubs as a laboratory to invent bebop, eventually killing the swing orchestras dead in their tracks. While bebop and its offshoots produced some brilliant music, by and large, it wasn't a genre you could easily dance to. Which is why, as Mark Gauvreau Judge wrote in 2000's If It Ain't Got That Swing, the teenagers of the 1950s found an alternative: rock and roll. A few years later, Berry Gordy's Motown borrowed from the assembly lines--not Detroit's, but Hollywood's--and adapted Tinseltown's studio system approach to music, and produced hit after hit.Since rap's apotheosis five years ago, when Eminem's album The Eminem Show topped the American charts with 7.6 million sales, no rapper has come close to emulating his success.
Rap has been deserted by many white fans and middle-class blacks, apparently tiring of the "gangsta" attitude to women, racism, violence and bling - the gold rings and medallions that have made hip-hop a byword for -vulgarity.
"The public has made a choice. They're saying, 'We do not want the nonsense that we see and hear on radio, and we are not putting our money there'," said KRS-One, a rap legend from the Bronx. "Rap music is being boycotted by the American public because of the images that we are putting forward."
One of the reasons why both bebop and rock succeeded was that it required less musicians than the large swing orchestras. And somewhat similar to the demise of swing jazz, the singers, producers, tunesmiths and studio musicians of 1960s Motown and its '70s offshoots such as Philadelphia’s soul studios--and of course, disco--were replaced by rap's turntables, drum machines and sampling.
But rap took off over 25 years ago (with a sneak preview provided in 1970 by the Last Poets' cameo on the soundtrack of 1970's Performance), and that genre has also played itself out. I don't know what comes next, but I'd like to see a move back to quality songwriting, melodies and musicianship--and infinitely less misogyny. Of course, like the film industry and network TV, it may just be that popular music as a commercial force is another holdover from the era of mass media, and going forward will face increasing difficulties competing in the era of the Long Tail.
In any case, with rap, rock and pop all deep in the doldrums, I'm quite happy to roll my own, as it were.
Because, clearly, that epithet is reserved for only one man on the world scene. But as Noel Sheppard writes:
I’m not sure what derangement syndrome Bill Moyers is currently suffering from [I'd call it this--Ed], but on Friday’s “Bill Moyers Journal” broadcast on PBS, the outspoken host went into an invective-filled tirade about media tycoon Rupert Murdoch that frankly was one of the most disgraceful exhibitions of liberal bias so far this year.How can you? Real life always trumps satire for its sheer absurdity.In his closing monologue, Moyers compared Murdoch to the Marquis de Sade, Imelda Marcos, and Satan himself.
I kid you not.
Speaking of which, apparently AP stands for Ad-Hominem Press these days.
Surprisingly found in the L.A. Times, there's a good column by Meghan Daum titled "Who killed Antioch? Womyn":
Bard College President Leon Botstein (who in the 1970s was president of the seriously far-out and short-lived Franconia College) came down hard on what he sees as a failure of liberals to support their institutions.Last year, Mark Steyn wrote, "unless they change, the academy will risk becoming a kook fringe unsupported by either party, increasingly abandoned by parents, and less and less able to justify their huge public subsidies"."One of the tragedies of the progressive liberal movement," Botstein said, "is that unlike at a conservative institution — such as Princeton or Dartmouth, where the alumni are deeply loyal and give it support and money — for liberals, higher education is not a strong enough cause. Their causes are social causes, and higher education is left for the conservatives to fund."
Whether or not contemporary Princeton or Dartmouth can fairly be characterized as conservative (though, admittedly, you have to declare a major at these places, and it can't be in roach-clip design), Botstein makes a good point. He also conjectured that Antioch, which he called "the founding college of the American progressive movement," had been "killed" by, among other things, its own liberalism.
Botstein's not totally wrong, but as members of his baby boom generation are apt to do, he equates "liberalism" and liberals with the demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s, including a six-week campus strike in 1973 during which students firebombed buildings to protest racial inequality at the school. But it was the next iteration of liberal excess that really did the place in. To later generations, Antioch is famous for one thing: its Sexual Offense Prevention Policy.
In 1993, it suddenly became national news that Antioch required anyone engaging in sexual activity on campus to ask for and grant permission throughout every step of the encounter. Conceived by a group called Womyn of Antioch, the policy stipulated that consent could not be granted through body movements, nonverbal responses or silence. Furthermore, it stated that "consent is required each and every time there is sexual activity" and that "each new level of sexual activity requires consent." Translation: dorm room make-out sessions were being punctuated by steamy questions like, "May I kiss you now?", "May I remove your (Che Guevara) T-shirt now?" and "May I … " (you get the idea).
Admittedly, this was the early '90s, a time when many liberal arts campuses were so awash in the hysteria of political correctness that it seemed entirely possible a lamppost could commit date rape. But the attention to the Antioch policy, which got as far as a "Saturday Night Live" sketch, not only came to symbolize the infantilizing dogma of the new left, it turned an already obscure college into a laughingstock.
Leftwing ideology becomes more and more oppressive as its policies moves away from the center, needless to say. America's Blue States have their own PC issues--in their case, punitive taxation, anti-family and anti-business policies--have had net population declines. And so too have the "liberals in a hurry" at Antioch demonstrated once again, that when it comes to the socialist eschaton, if you build it, they will leave.
Once someone shines a light on it, campus PC insanity is self-satirizing, of course. It would be perfect material for a documentary, we're an ambitious film maker so inclined...
Charles Johnson has photos, and Hot Air has an ongoing round-up. As Tim Blair would say, at least initially, it sounds like yet another example of Presbyterian terrorism.
Update: Video here.
10,000 geeks will look at this video clip and think: "Man, I'm glad we Windows / Star Wars / Star Trek / furgasm fans aren't as crazed as these guys":
Online Videos by Veoh.com
(Triumph could have had a field day in this line, incidentally.)
Austin Bay interviews Thom Shanker, Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times in this week's Blog Week In Review podcast, over at the Pajamas Media mothership.
"Now, I’m saying to myself, wait a minute, you call into a program that no one watches, alright...I’m giving you a forum where ten million people on radio and TV are going to see it and you say no."
Greg Gutfeld writes that today's foiled London bombing attempt is very much a teachable moment.
Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg explores "Dogs That Don't Bark"--and needless to say, he doesn't mean his faithful sidekick Cosmo.
Police defused an explosive device found in a parked car in central London on Friday, and the new government called an emergency meeting of senior security chiefs to investigate what many feared could have been a planned terror attack.(H/T: CWA-NJ)Police said the car—parked near busy Piccadilly Circus—contained a "potentially viable explosive device" but would not give further details.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who took office on Wednesday, said the incident was a reminder that Britain faces "a serious and continuous threat" and the "need to be alert."
"I will stress to the Cabinet that the vigilance must be maintained over the next few days," Brown said.
The incident comes a week before the second anniversary of the July 7 London bombings, when four British Muslim suicide bombers killed themselves and 52 bus and subway passengers.
"CNN Contributor on Ann Coulter: ‘At Some Point, You Have to Punch the Bully in the Mouth’"
Of course, there are several bullies CNN have always been happy to buddy up with.
Cost:
DV tape cassette: $4.95
12 pack of Diet Coke: $3.95
Confusing the hell out of the WSJ? Priceless.
As I wrote a couple of hours ago:
Speaking of Big Media, oh to be a fly on the wall in this newspaper's editorial boardroom.Today, the Journal writes, "Just who sponsors Hot Air’s ad, and other similar ads popping up across the Internet, is unclear".
Allah highlights their multimillion dollar production values; Mickey Kaus could not be reached for comment.
Update: "Maybe it will help the WSJ to be owned by Murdoch". Heh--but don't tell these guys that.
Just got off the phone with Andrew Breitbart, Liz Stephans and Scott Baker on the nuts and bolts of Breitbart.TV and video hosting in general for an upcoming article. They also alerted me to their 18 minute video interview with Drew Curtis of Fark.com on his new book, It’s Not News, It’s Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News. And lord knows there's plenty of that.
Here's Jim Geraghty on May 18th:
Two words for anybody who thinks this immigration bill is a done deal, and there's no way enough opposition builds:As Glenn Reynolds writes, "Score One For Alt-Media: Immigration bill fails".Harriet Miers.
Mark Krikorian looks at all of the forces that Alt Media was up against:
Today's defeat of the Senate amnesty bill was more than a run-of-the-mill legislative victory, representing as it did a self-organizing public's defeat of combined force of Big Business, (some of) Big Labor, Big Media, Big Religion, Big Philanthropy, Big Academia, and Big Government.Speaking of Big Media, oh to be a fly on the wall in this newspaper's editorial boardroom.
Update: Welcome Jim Geraghty's Kerry, Hillary Campaign Spot readers! Please look around; there's sure to be a few other things here you'll also enjoy.
"With virtually no warning, the Islamic Regime declared gas rationing in oil-rich Iran, sparking furious protests across the country — and Pajamas Media has video of the angry crowds setting gas stations on fire".
CBS runs to daylight and makes victims out of aging former NFL gladiators. As an Opinion Journal piece back in February noted, look for more of these stories; "Noticeably absent from this debate is any discussion about the personal responsibility these players bear for their post-career conditions".
But if the networks truly cared, shouldn't they simply drop all NFL coverage? Sure, it would accelerate the speed of TV's ongoing ratings collapse a hundred-fold. But the money created by television advertising is what inspires NFL players to punish their bodies during what they hope will be long, multimillion dollar careers. Aren't the networks enablers themselves, if they continue to air their abusers’ video?
And if television doesn't put a stop to this voluntarily, then all I can say is: C’mon Congress: your next ban on free speech awaits!
(And yes, I'm taking absurdity to its natural conclusion; like a lot of guys, pro football is one of the few remaining network shows I still regularly tune into.)
Fresh off their article titled, "Hollywood's Hope For Record Summer Fades", Reuters brings yet more news of fresh disaster in the legacy media world: "Networks hit new lows in grim weekly ratings".
Here's are two reasons why: one is technological. The other is sociological. Combine them, and it's perfect storm for TV.
Rick Moran links to John Leo's City Journal essay regarding Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam's study on immigration and multiculturalism. Leo's article, and others on Putnam's findings have been making the rounds in the Blogosphere, but Moran concentrates on the professor's fear that he may have commited one seriously doubleplusungood thoughtcrime:
Rather than look at the study, I am more intrigued with the Professor’s hand wringing over the fact that his work tends to knock the chocks from underneath a pillar of leftist thinking; that by pigeonholing Americans and recent arrivals into their own special group while encouraging a separateness based on culture and language, tolerance and acceptance will automatically follow in the country at large. This has been an article of faith on left for 30 years. It has affected school curricula for children as young as pre-schoolers on up through the speech codes and diversity mandates found in the finest institutions of higher learning in the land.As they say in Eurasia (or is it Eastasia?), read the whole thing.And rather than accomplish anything, it has made things worse.
Dean Barnett writes:
I don’t claim to be an aficionado of arcane Hardball facts, but until yesterday I was not aware it was a call-in show. If I knew it was, I would have called in many times in the past to offer Chris Matthews some constructive criticism, e.g. limit yourself to 20 Red Bulls a day.Meanwhile, Tammy Bruce notes another example of Edwards' use of his wife to deflect attention away from his stance on what could be a particularly thorny issue for his putative campaign.How did Elizabeth Edwards have a call in number handy when to the rest of the viewing public’s knowledge no such number existed? A cynical individual might conclude that there was nothing spontaneous about Ms. Edwards’ outrage whatsoever, and that the whole incident was a big set-up co-hatched by the creative minds at Hardball and the Edwards Campaign.
Elsewhere, Chris Matthews displays his overt conservative bias by comparing Republicans to Burt Reynolds in his classic leading man heyday....
Byron York has a great post on how the Web has helped to shine a light on the shady backroom machinations to get the amnesty immigration bill passed:
Here’s something new. The first true Internet-Age presidential campaign was in 2004. The first major Internet-Age Supreme Court nomination was Harriet Miers, in 2005. Now, in 2007, we’ve got what is arguably the first truly major down-and-dirty Roberts-rules-of-disorder parliamentary battle fought under the searchlight of the blogs."Masters of the Universe" tend to have a fairly short-lived stay on Mount Olympus. Certainly, nobody's used that title to describe bond traders in a long, long time.The Internet was critical to the immigration bill’s first failure. If not for the blogs, the bill’s deceits and flaws would not have been so well or quickly exposed, and "comprehensive reform" would probably otherwise have passed within a couple of days. Now we’re at yet another new level. The public is being exposed to a basket of legislative tricks–of a sort that are rare in any case, and surely of a kind that have never been subjected to mass and rapid-fire public exposure. The undemocratic character of all that is happening here is being conveyed to the public in short order and with clarity–often through the medium of Senate aides themselves.
Do the Senators now called "Masters of the Universe" understand this? Presumably, senate aides, who certainly read the blogs, have communicated to their senators how dangerous it is to be exposed in this fashion. But maybe some senators still don’t get it. They seem to think they can get away with backroom maneuvers in an era when blogs are serving as virtual fly-on-the-wall cloakroom cameras.
Earlier today, in "Off the Table," I argued that passing this bill is not going to make the immigration issue go away. On the contrary, the blogs-eye-view we’re getting of all this sausage making is going to be frozen in the public memory for a very long time. It’s going to inspire new campaigns, and it’s going to haunt the Masters of the Universe–and the Amnesty 8, too. I still don’t think they quite realize this. In fact, the Masters’ false belief that quickly passing this bill is going to somehow get this issue off of their backs is the method behind this their deceptive madness. They don’t seem to realize that they’ve already been caught with their pants down.
Update: "I have only my intuition to go on. My intuition tells me that it is impossible to be cynical enough about what is transpiring here".
In City Journal, Nicole Gelinas reviews Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, by Benjamin R. Barber:
Somewhere in Consumed, Benjamin Barber, a civil-society professor at the University of Maryland and the author of the 1995 book Jihad vs. McWorld, has a serious point to make: many Americans have opted out of a common civic culture based on shared values and have turned inward instead, to a relentless, infantile narcissism that free markets only encourage. But Barber can never quite grasp this point in his own book, or make practical suggestions on how to deal with the problem. Instead, he wildly overreaches and couches everything he writes in apocalyptic terms.For the flipside of Barber's argument, one that has been made frequently by a surprisingly puritanical left probably even before Peter Seeger and Malvina Reynolds' ticky-tacky-screedy "Little Boxes" singalong, it's worth rereading Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style.
Reuters reports:
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - April's rosy forecast that Hollywood would reap a record $4 billion at the box office this summer has been replaced by hopes of merely keeping pace with 2006 as Friday's midpoint of the season nears.And subtract the first, eagerly awaited Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, 2006 wouldn't have been any great shakes either, of course.
"It's an Odd World", Kathryn Jean Lopez writes, "where the Village Voice goes after you (Rudy) for not being Catholic enough ('he's on the outs with God') while you get a standing ovation at a Christan college".
I think Bob Parks is safe if the left succeeds in reviving the "Fairness Doctrine"--cross-cutting Al Gore's words on Iraq from today and the 1990s certainly has all sides of the issue covered:
(Via Tim Blair.)
Found via Libertas, Gay Patriot spots a blatant example of a so-called "objective" MSM shifting from reporting to cheerleading:
For those of who want to speak out on politics, movies and whatever, it’s sad to see the success of someone who has based his entire career on distorting the facts, pulling quotes out of context and otherwise misrepresenting his adversaries. But, then again, what he does is little different from what many left-wing bloggers (and even some on the right) do every day. Indeed, we see it frequently in the comments section of this blog, coming from both sides, but more often from our critics than our supporters.And note that by and large, Moore's critics aren't the people who actually are film critics--as they too, at least since Pauline Kael's gone off to the great matinee in the sky, function much like a high school pep squad whenever a new Moore film is released.If the MSM were truly devoted to portraying things as they are, instead of heralding Michael Moore, they would treat him as they do right-wing propagandists. They would note his many deceptions and wonder at his success.
It’s a sad sign for our country that such a hateful and dishonest man has achieved such prominence. But, then again, his success gives his critics the opportunity to take issue with his lies and address the real issues at hand.
Meanwhile, Brent Bozell spots an even more brazen example of MSM cheerleading:
You could add together all the contributions to liberals uncovered in this MSNBC report and still they pale in size compared to the donation about to be made to the political left by MSNBC’s parent, NBC Universal.Especially because, in addition to the money that reporters routinely donate to politicians on the left, their employers throw even larger sums at environmental causes.On July 7, Dedman’s employers at NBC Universal are launching a massive extravaganza, 75 hours devoted to coverage of Al Gore’s Live Earth "climate crisis" concerts on all seven continents (including some British scientists jamming in Antarctica, presumably going for that ever-elusive Penguin Vote).
In addition to devoting the entirety of NBC’s Saturday prime-time hours to this Gorestock, hosted by Ann Curry of NBC News, there will be seven hours on CNBC, 18 hours on Bravo, 22 hours on both the Sundance Channel and the Universal HD channel, and three hours combined on Telemundo and Telemundo 2. On top of that, NBC’s press release added that "MSNBC will broadcast special coverage of this global concert event throughout the day with live reports from the concerts in New York and London."
It’s an enormous in-kind campaign contribution. Can you imagine how many millions of dollars this 75 hours of air time would cost a billionaire politico like Ross Perot if he tried to buy it? But NBC is just giving it away to Al Gore, even as liberals press him to run for president in 2008. "NBC Universal is proud to be the exclusive U.S. broadcaster of this historic television event," said Jeff Gaspin, the president of NBC Universal’s cable and digital content. This concert’s "historic" status is certainly multiplied up by all the hours and hours of free publicity.
Have NBC executives convinced themselves, a la Randy Cohen, that Al Gore’s concerts are really "nonpartisan"? If so, they’re not reading the press accounts. In Rolling Stone, Live Earth organizer Kevin Wall is saying the concert will press their demands: "no more f—ing excuses...No more coal-fired energy plants can be built. Three percent a year reduction in carbon emissions in all industrialized nations...We have to mobilize an army, and that’s what we’re about to start doing."
These nostalgic corporate "global citizens" at NBC are not in the news gathering business. Rather, they are looking to make the news by creating the next Woodstock, and the leftist utopia always looming around the corner in their minds. It is impossible to defend as non-ideological an agenda that mobilizes "an army" for Al Gore to put a big government-enforced dent in our energy use.
In and of itself, I have no problem with any of this, as long as it's disclosed to the public, so they understand that what they're seeing is largely political grandstanding. But too many in the MSM who still blindly claim to be objective are instead holding on to talking points born in the 1920s and badly in need of updating for a new century with infinitely more media diversity.
I had a friend from New York email a link to a Columbia Journalism Review article written in full Murdoch Derangement Mode incensed that Rupert Murdoch is defending himself against being smeared by the New York Times (also in full Murdoch Derangement Mode). As I wrote back (and I believe somebody already suggested this in NRO's Corner) I'm fine with Murdoch owning the Wall Street Journal. As long as the Page 3 girls will be illustrated in that familiar wood-carved line drawing style that the Journal has historically used.
Call my priorities woefully misplaced, but this, on the other hand, I'm a little more concerned about. Though not at all surprised; especially after Reuters' Picture Kill trainwreck last year.
Just kidding about that headline. But no one could accuse James Lileks of kidding around when he writes, "Nothing quickens the pulse like a fresh, aromatic" new study--and fortunately he's got one!
According to a new Coors Light survey of Minneapolis men, ages 21-44, more than 75 percent would rather have air conditioning in their homes than win a date with a supermodel . . .No. When it comes to serious babe magnets, there is another.This seems to make no sense, but it’s probably true. The air conditioning unit would stick around and do something, and the supermodel would sit there looking bored smoking cigarettes and texting friends in Monaco while you decided whether to put on the Macy Gray or the Green Day record. On the other hand, it’s easier to get a supermodel in the a window than an air conditioning unit; tell her Karl Lagerfeld is in the parking lot below, and she’ll lean right out.
Sidney Pollack, the director of Havana (and numerous, not to mention, better movies) on Fidel Castro:
Castro lost his mind a long time ago. He's a dictator. He started out like a lot of them with probably genuinely good impulses to create a revolution that was fair and then he got in power and look what he did.Or as fellow Hollywood denizen Peter Mehlman wrote over the weekend:
You could argue that even the world's worst fascist dictators at least meant well. They honestly thought were doing good things for their countries by suppressing blacks/eliminating Jews/eradicating free enterprise/repressing individual thought/killing off rivals/invading neighbors, etc. Only the Saudi royal family is driven by the same motives as Bush, but they were already entrenched. Bush set a new precedent. He came into office with the attitude of "I'm so tired of the public good. What about my good? What about my rich friends' good?"Fortunately, the Daily Gut has a running tally, "For those of you keeping score at home, here's a partial list (in no particular order) of leaders who have meant or mean well":How can anyone not see it? It's not that their policies have been misguided or haven't played out right. They. Don't. Even. Mean. Well.
HitlerMao obviously meant well, especially when he has Hollywood admirers ranging from the Godfather-era Francis Ford Coppola to Shrek's sweetheart, Cameron Diaz.
Stalin
Lenin
Mao
Big Kim and Li'l Kim
Castro
The Khmer Rouge
Ceausescu
The Taliban
Saddam
Ayatollah Khomeini
AhmedinejadI'll take an incompetent leader over one who means well any day!
The thing about Mehlman's column is it lays out the central tenet of lefty thought: All that matters is that you mean well.
In the 1940s and '50s many lefties (including some if not all of the Hollywood Ten) were apologists for Stalin? Who cares - they were "idealists" who meant well.
Decades of welfare programs actually hurt the already poor and and caused more to join them? Doesn't matter - we meant well.
Ted Kennedy is directly responsible for a young woman's death? Water under the bridge - he means well.
Carter's weakness made the US a laughingstock and emboldened the Iranians to kidnap Americans? Hey, c'mon, the man's practically a saint - he meant well.
Clinton's lack of response to terrorist aggression laid the groundwork for 9/11? That's okay - he meant well.
The UN is a corrupt friend to dictators that does nothing to stop mass slaughter, human rights abuses, and genocide? No biggee - it's a noble ideal and we support it because we mean well.
Pretending there are two sides to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when one side glorifies suicide bombers, rejoices when America is attacked, and can't even keep from fighting and killing amongst themselves? Sure - because we mean well.
Amnesty International equates Gitmo with Soviet-era gulags? Why not - they mean well.
Giving credence to nitwits with double-digit IQs who think the Bush administration had a hand in the 9/11 attacks? Of course - they're just "questioning authority," which makes them patriots who mean well.
Depending upon which California newspaper you read, "Global Warming and Environmentalists Blamed for Lake Tahoe Wildfires".
Hot Air has an extensive round-up; Stanley Kurtz wonders how a bill with such low poll numbers (something like 25 percent of those polled actively support it) could pass. Will Congress derail it?
Update: Even if they do, Dean Barnett writes that he's "outraged": "What the Republican Senate and the Bush admninistration have done is hardly forgivable, even if the House Republicans save them from their stupidity".
More: "Has Bush Squandered the Last of His Political Capital on Immigration?"
Elsewhere, one of Mickey Kaus's readers speculates that the cloture vote is merely C-Span Kabuki:
I think the first cloture vote is now itself possibly becoming a sort of kabuki for some senators, like Burr and Bond, as they will vote to proceed today to impress the leadership and the Grand Bargainers, in hopes of keeping their relationships decent with them for future favors. These guys can afford, they calculate, to vote for cloture today, knowing they can still filibuster it on the second cloture vote. (I think the message has been gotten by most that a traditional kabuki move of voting for cloture and against the bill won't work anymore.)I think that's a remarkably safe bet to occur.So this raises an absolutely critical question: what will happen between a vote to proceed today and the next cloture vote? The outrage and pressure, mainly from the right, will have to triple.
One of many amazing passages from Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man. To very slightly paraphrase Michael Herr: simple surfaces, long reverberations:
For years now, Roosevelt had been reading Duranty in the New York Times on Russia. The godlessness troubled him--the purge of the churches. He told Perkins about his meetings with Maxim Litvinov the Soviet envoy. “Well now, Max, you know what I mean by religion. You know what religion gives a man. You know the difference between the religious and the irreligious person.” He went on: Look here, sometime you are going to die, Max, and when you die, you are going to remember your old father and mother—good, pious Jewish people who believed in God and taught you to pray to God.” Roosevelt told Litvinov that religious freedom was important if the the United States was to recognize the Bolsheviks, and he told Perkins he thought he had made an impression on Litvinov.More from Shlaes, here.
Well to be fair, the nation does have quite a bit of prior experience in regards to mixing a "progressive" post-Christian cult-like pagan religion with made-up pseudo-science; best to cut them some slack on this one.
And incidentally, given the inevitable comparisons the film is sure to draw if it is completed, did Peter Mehlman do any work on its screenplay?
Update: Allison Kaplan Sommer links to Defamer:
There are suspicions that the decision was based “on an early treatment developed by Cruise, in which his von Stauffenberg character attempts to slowly kill Hitler by depriving him of the many self-actualizing services offered by Scientology, causing the Fuhrer to die from the despair of knowing he’d never reach his potential as a fully clear leader without the help of daily auditing sessions.”So it's Downfall meets Battlefield: Earth, I guess. The Color of Reichsmarks.
Mark Steyn writes:
Far away at the back of my mind, I still remember the Rushdie of the 1980s - reflexively leftist, anti-Thatcher, the works. The old line – a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged - goes tenfold for him. He’s not just a liberal mugged by reality; he’s a liberal whom reality has spent the last 13 years trying to kill.Long off the Peace Train, The Artist Formerly Known As Cat is very much up for the job.
So far, I've managed to avoid all of the Hollywood rat movies. I can handle Mickey Mouse, because as Tinseltown rodentia goes, he's gotten by far the best PR during the 20th century. But I've skipped Ben and Willard--and the latter's recent remake, needless to say. I've skipped King Rat, with George Segal and Denholm Elliott. I don't think I've seen the original Ocean's 11 all the way through, either--or any of the other Rat Pack movies, for that matter. While I've been planning to keep the streak alive by avoiding Pixar's Ratatouille simply on principle's sake, I've stumbled across yet another reason to sit it out.
(Of course, I probably would have watched it in the 1990s. It wasn't very hip to protest Hollywood back then.)
Don Surber writes:
The British princes join that American prince, Albert Gore, in saving the planet by living life to the hilt, spewing carbon dioxide and various pollutants into the atmosphere in order to save the planet from global cooling.I am fully prepared to do my part in this battle as well with as much binge travel as possible.
And I'm not alone: thousands of jet setters, not to mention dozens of THE HOTTEST ROCK STARS! will also Fight The Cooling come next month.
Or perhaps it's the daily post surveying the crazed fringe. In any case, Robyn Blumner of The Columbus Dispatch is in high dudgeon mode about those mean, mean Men In Black:
Often you can sum up the collective actions of the Supreme Court under a particular chief justice with one word. The Warren Court always will be remembered as liberal, the Burger Court as pragmatic and the Rehnquist Court as conservative. The Roberts Court in its short tenure has already earned the moniker mean.Funny, I've never confused Clarence Thomas with Roland Freisler myself, but I guess that's just my own naiveté.The addition of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito to the heartless duo of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas has cemented a plurality for cruelty. If there's a choice between casting a lot for the little guy or putting a foot on his throat, it's a safe bet that these four will put on their jackboots.
Neo-Neocon explores "The unintended consequences of teaching expurgated history":
In my day, what was left out was anything that was too complex, and also anything that conflicted with the perception of America as a righteous and near-perfect place—which included any personal foibles and imperfections of the Founding Fathers (and of course, anything remotely related to sex). What’s left out today is anything that isn’t politically correct on either side (which of course is virtually everything of truth) and anything that might make the US look good (I’m engaging in only a slight bit of hyperbole there, I’m afraid).In his latest essay, Mark Steyn explores how this sort of collective self-lobotomization can cripple a society: "It seems Her Majesty's Government in London was taken entirely by surprise by the scenes of burning Union Jacks on the evening news" as a result of the Queen knighting Salman Rushdie.In short, anything of interest is left out, as well as anything that would meaningfully connect the teaching of history with the problems we are facing today—which would be what would make it most interesting and most helpful.
The consequences of putting history into a blender and turning it into bland, featureless, and easily digestible pap is not just having students who are bored to tears, although that would be bad enough. Nor is it just that history textbooks now have a strong bias on the Left, although that isn’t a good thing either. The worst effect is that such an approach to the teaching of history creates an ignorant and naive populace that is even more condemned than would otherwise be the case to repeat history’s errors.
I’m convinced, for example, that failure to properly teach the history of the wars that we have fought in the past—their complications, controversies, and errors, as well as what led to them and what was accomplished by them—has led to unrealistic and simplistic expectations of warfare itself.
And, come to think of it, perhaps this is not an unintended consequence; it’s possible that the current overarching Leftist bias of the writers of today’s textbooks include a pacifist agenda, of which this is part.
"When we say that Congress lacks credibility, this is what we mean. When was the last time Congress worked so hard to pass legislation that so few supported, so many of which supported it because it won't work, and whose opponents hated it so badly? Certainly not within my memory".
Here are two of them (or four, depending upon how you do the math):
In contrast to Rudy Giuliani, who managed to clean up the porno-infested Times Square, Mayor Mike's Manhattan manages to have things uncovered from top to bottom.
"By the way, the image at the top of this post is of a real HDNet promotion for Dan Rather. Who needs PhotoShop!"
"Sea, sand and sunshine make Paignton the queen of the English Riviera. But for the next six months this sleepy Devonshire resort will be transformed into the blizzard-swept wastes of the South Pole. For today shooting starts on the epic Scott of the Antarctic, produced by Gerry Schlick":
Scott: Listen, I gotta fight the lion. That's what that guy Scott's all about. I know. I've studied him already.Forget Devonshire--they should have simply filmed in Peru.Schlick: But why couldn't you fight a penguin?
Rettin: Great! (falls over)
Scott: Fight a rotten penguin?
Schlick: It needn't be a little penguin. It can be the biggest penguin you've ever seen. An electric penguin, twenty feet high, with long green tentacles that sting people, and you can stab it in the wings and the blood can go spurting psssssshhhh in slow motion.
The bad news is that the superb article by Amity Shlaes on the New Deal (don't miss her new book on the topic, it's also a terrific read) that Jonah Goldberg linked to here is unfortunately behind the Wall Street Journal's pay-to-play firewall. The good news is that it's also available for free on the American Enterprise Institute's Website.
Really, who could imagine someone with these cleancut wholesome ma and apple pie good looks could ever run afoul of the law?
On the other hand, he probably wouldn't readily admit it, but he does look like he'd be surprisingly right at home with these fellas.
"Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Blames 9-11 on Ronald Reagan and Fuel Efficiency Standards".
I guess the left believes that if President Bush didn't cause 9/11, then perhaps President Reagan did. All I can say is, Calvin Coolidge--tanned, rested and ready for the next conspiracy theory!
The latest batch of Supreme Court rulings are occurring, including their decision on the infamous "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case. Orrin Judd writes, "the Left is going to be hyperventilating somethin' fierce" over their decisions.
And speaking of which, as Ed Morrissey writes, this action to ban free speech by the city government of Oakland and backed by--surprise!--the Ninth Circuit--can't hit the Supreme Court fast enough.
Update: Further thoughts on the SCOTUS' rulings from Stop the ACLU, Gay Patriot, and Betsy Newmark.
Meanwhile, John Hinderaker writes that in an era when "free speech is under attack as, perhaps, never before in our history", the Supreme Court's decision on Federal Election Comm’n v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc., is "A Small But Possibly Seminal Victory for Free Speech".
Thomas Lifeson has some thoughts on the Times' business model, such as it is:
Like some robber baron capitalist of yore, the New York Times is telling the remaining full price readers of its print product that they will pay more and get less, the same message it has been sending advertisers for years. But far from a sign of strength, this move is an indicator that the slow motion business collapse of the New York Times Company may be picking up its pace.Yet another sign of the industry's Red Queen's Race?
And speaking of the Red Queen's Race:
All the attention paid to Couric's tough start at CBS has overshadowed what's been going on at NBC. In Couric's first 39 weeks at CBS, she's lost 287,000 viewers from the average of a year ago, a drop of 4 percent from predecessor Bob Schieffer's audience. At the same time, "Nightly News" lost 533,000 viewers, or 5 percent, Nielsen said.Or as Drudge breathlessly puts it: "NBC Brian Williams loses more viewers than CBS Couric!"In [anchorman Brian Williams'] first three months after taking over from Tom Brokaw in December 2004, "Nightly News" averaged 10.79 million viewers. In the past three months, it's been 7.66 million. To be fair, the nightly news audience traditionally drops when warm weather arrives, and it has been a slow news period.
Still, that's a lot of missing viewers.
That's not the sort of comparison that Brian is used to--this sort of equivalence is much more his pace. And curiously, the AP piece that Drudge links to doesn't suggest that perhaps the two stories back April in which NBC personalities played a pivotal role might also be impacting their current ratings: the Imus scandal and, much more significantly, NBC's dreadfully ill-conceived decision to run photos mailed in by the horrific VT gunman, Cho Seung-Hui. As Mickey Kaus said back then, "Who Did More Damage, Brian Williams Or Don Imus?"
Update: Welcome InstaReaders! Glenn Reynolds writes that there may be a further connection (which actually ties both of the above items together) to be found here, and I'm inclined to agree.
More: Greg Pollowitz of NRO's media blog concurs:
What the AP leaves out as a possible reason for the lost audience is the Virginia Tech shooting and NBC's horrible pimping and airing of the gunman's video suicide note. The Tech massacre, like NBC's ratings slump, happened about two months ago.I wonder if this (a) never occurred to AP's writer or (B) the idea was cut from the article by his editor? In any case, it's certainly a curious omission.
Also, welcome readers of TV Week, tuning from the site's "Buzztracker" page!
NYT MONDAY PAGE ONE: 'Murdoch has used his media empire to advance his personal and political agendas'... Developing...Whew--thank Gaia the publisher of the New York Times could never be accused of that.
Yesterday, I quoted from Victor Davis Hanson, who noted, as had James Piereson, the flip-over of conspiracy theorists from the fluoridated John Birch right of the 1950s to today's left. As the passage I excerpted from VDH concluded:
But over the years, conservatism came to terms with civil rights and anti-Semitism. Free markets, not socialism, enriched America and brought a level of affluence undreamed of it to the poor. (When I was seven, outhouses and unpaved roads were common in West Selma; today in the same neighborhood you see SUVS, new tract houses, and I-pods and blue teeth in the ears of illegal aliens.). And so the Klan, Birchers, and other assorted embarrassments were peeled off.Proving Hanson's point, here's Peter Mehlman, former Washington Post sportswriter turned writer and producer for Seinfeld, in the Huffington Post today:The left in the 1940s and 1950s had likewise gotten rid of its communist wing, and ostracized its fellow travelers. Henry Wallace was taken off the ticket. Dean Acheson and George Kennan had made liberal anti-communism logical rather than paradoxical.
But now the Left, still going on the fumes of the 1960s, has the greater problem with its extremists. Of course, the “base” can attack Bush on immigration, gay marriage, etc. but not from a position of sheer lunacy. The same is not true of the netroots or the Cindy Sheehan/Michael Moore wing on the Left. They openly praise our enemies, whether in Syria or Iraq (“Minutemen”). They prefer the unfree world of Chavez and Castro to our own. And their language and methodology are as uncouth and repulsive as were the old tactics of the Birch Society.
You could argue that even the world's worst fascist dictators at least meant well. They honestly thought were doing good things for their countries by suppressing blacks/eliminating Jews/eradicating free enterprise/repressing individual thought/killing off rivals/invading neighbors, etc. Only the Saudi royal family is driven by the same motives as Bush, but they were already entrenched. Bush set a new precedent. He came into office with the attitude of "I'm so tired of the public good. What about my good? What about my rich friends' good?"It's been a while since I've referred to Jonah Goldberg's quote on the topic, but it sounds like the perfect rebuttal to Mehlman's conspiratorial ("How can anyone not see it?") rant:How can anyone not see it? It's not that their policies have been misguided or haven't played out right. They. Don't. Even. Mean. Well.
I don't say this because I feel a passionate need to defend George Bush. I would make the exact same points if Al Gore were president. I would make the exact same points if anybody running for the Democratic nomination were president. This has nothing to do with partisanship. It has to do with the fact that such comparisons are slanderous to the United States and historical truth and amount to Holocaust denial. When you say that anything George Bush has done is akin to what Hitler did, you make the Holocaust into nothing more than an example of partisan excess. Tax cuts are not genocide, as so many Democrats have suggested over the years. (For example,. during the Contract with America debate, Charles Rangel complained that "Hitler wasn't even talking about doing these things" that were in the Contract with America. In other words, the Contract with America was in some way worse than what Hitler did. At the end of the day, that is Holocaust denial.)Just as newspapers historically have had editors to--hopefully--tamp down on their writers' excesses, so to does Hollywood have story editors, directors, producers and network standards and practices divisions to keep their own writers' extremes in check."Darn those Republicans" does not equal "Darn those Nazis." The Patriot Act is not the final solution. The handful of men in Guantanamo may not all be guilty of terrorism, but it's more than reasonable to assume they are. And no matter how you try to contort it, Gitmo is not the same thing as Auschwitz or Dachau. There are no children there. You don't get carted off to Cuba and gassed if you criticize the president or if you are one-quarter Muslim. And, inversely, there was no reasonable justification for throwing the Jews and the Gypsies and all the others into the death camps. The Jews weren't terrorists or members of a terrorist organization. To say that the men in Guantanamo — or any of the Muslims being politely interviewed by appointment — are akin to the Jews of Germany is to trivialize the experiences of the millions who were slaughtered. Even if you think Muslims are being unfairly inconvenienced, when you say they are the Jews of Nazified America you are in essence saying the worst crime of the Holocaust was to unfairly inconvenience the Jews.
Fortunately, the Huff Post gives them the perfect salon in which to bare all their thoughts.
That's the opening announcement to each edition of Tammy Bruce's radio show. And it certainly sums up her hot new photographs as well.
This quote sounds like perfect James Taranto fodder:
Great Orators of the Democratic Party
Who is this "Chemical Ali" fellow I keep hearing about, and why is he being sentenced to death? The benign democratic peace-loving Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons and used them on his own people?
Obviously Dick Cheney feverishly invented these made-up atrocities out of whole polyester cloth and sold them to the conservative media.
Oh well. What time's the new Angelina Jolie movie? She looked pretty hot in Esquire this month!
Like the city being "tuned" in the sci-fi movie Dark City, Greg Pollowitz spots Tehran morphing almost overnight in the west's legacy media:
Newsweek - June 18th, 2007:Michelle Malkin has plenty of photos illustrating the brutal opression of Ahmadinejad's Iran and asks:June 18, 2007 - First things first: let’s get the most ridiculous Western caricatures of Iran out of the way. The capital, Tehran, is no armed camp, ready to do holy war with the Great Satan, who is lately personified by George W. Bush. In fact, in two days here I have seen precisely two Iranian soldiers—one standing on a guard tower, staring lazily out at Mehrabad Airport in the 95-degree heat, the other doing some off-duty shopping in downtown Tehran.
NY Times - June 24, 2007:
Iran is in the throes of one of its most ferocious crackdowns on dissent in years, with the government focusing on labor leaders, universities, the press, women’s rights advocates, a former nuclear negotiator and Iranian-Americans, three of whom have been in prison for more than six weeks.
The shift is occurring against the backdrop of an economy so stressed that although Iran is the world’s second-largest oil exporter, it is on the verge of rationing gasoline. At the same time, the nuclear standoff with the West threatens to bring new sanctions.
The hard-line administration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, analysts say, faces rising pressure for failing to deliver on promises of greater prosperity from soaring oil revenue. It has been using American support for a change in government as well as a possible military attack as a pretext to hound his opposition and its sympathizers.
Question: Will these photos be blared across the front pages of the international media with as much disgust and condemnation as the photos of Abu Ghraib or the manufactured Gitmo Koran-flushing riots?Fortunately, the New York Times' ombudsman has heard the call. And is running away from the topic as fast possible. But look on the bright side: he'll make sure every Times article on vegan diets is as fair and balanced as those diets themselves.Answer: Fat chance.
Question: What do leftist apologists for the Iranian regime have to say about the brutal, appalling, and escalating crackdown on human rights? Yeah, you, Rosie.
Answer: Nothing.
Question: Will the same moral cowards who sat silently while Mohammad Khatami, former President of Iran, advocated executing gays during a Harvard lecture stand up now against this barbarism?
Answer: Of course not.
Motley Crue sues their manager for--wait for it!--harming their image:
In the lawsuit, filed today in Los Angeles County Superior Court, the four founding members of the band (Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Tommy Lee) through Motley Crue Inc., claim manager Carl Stubner and Sanctuary Management Group gave them bad business advice and attempted to "divert revenue from [the band] and redirect it to themselves.Wouldn't the Crue and their lawyers have been better off simply suing the government for their slice of heavy metal disability insurance?Furthermore, the suit claims, Stubner forced Tommy Lee to "to become engaged in 'reality' projects that were bad career moves for Lee, harming [Sixx, Mars, Neil and Lee], the Motley Crue brand and Lee's own image." The suit calls the low-rated NBC show "Tommy Lee Goes to College" a "critical disappointment and a ratings disaster," adding it painted Lee as "incoherent, lazy and incompetent" and made him "look like a laughing stock who could not carry a drum beat." The suit also claims Lee's participation on "Rock Star: Supernova" "diminished the public's interest in Lee and their overall perception of his musical talents."
In other Life Imitates Spinal Tap news, 15 year olds everywhere are, even as we speak, thinking that this is the Coolest...Guitar...Ever.
Georgia man lives out ultimate libertarian wet dream.
(H/T InstaPundit, who writes, "If it were me, I'd set up toll booths . . . .")
Evan Almighty isn't: Libertas has the review; Nikke Finke has the box office.
Finke also notes some poetic justice:
Another movie opening was Paramount Vantage's A Mighty Heart, starring Angelina Jolie in the story of journalist Daniel Pearl's terrorist murder. It finished in 10th place with $1.1 mil Friday from 1,355 playdates for what should be a $4+ million weekend. But its per screen average was extremely low, indicating weak interest in this well-reviewed pic. I believe that releasing it this blockbuster-crowded summer, even as counter-programming, was a dumb movie. September would have been a better time.Uh, I don’t think so: Hollywood moral equivalence--just in time for September 11.
Technorati has been running a series of ads from MSN promoting all of the HOT ARTISTS performing at Al Gore's Live Earth concert next month. Here's a sample:
Needless to say, MSN's copywriter has raised some inconvenient questions which beg explanation.
If the goal of the concert is to stop the global warming that's coming before global cooling returns from the depths of the 1970s, do we really want all of that hotness concentrated in one area? Wouldn't cool artists be better than hot artists? Couldn't too much concentrated hotness burn a hole in the ozone layer over the Meadowlands? Maybe all of that hotness has actually caused global warming.
You never heard about global warming when Sinatra and Dino were playing Vegas and Miles Davis was Kind of Blue, did you? I rest my case. Especially since it's becoming too hot, and I need to put it down.
Further thoughts on those HOT ARTISTS! from the always cool Tim Blair.
Ace explores the New York Times' bias by selection.
Jonathan Foreman writes:
Don't expect to hear much about it in the mainstream media — especially now that John Burns is no longer in Iraq for the New York Times — but this Sunday a Baghdad court is expected to hand down a verdict in the case against one Ali Hassan Al-Majid — better known as Chemical Ali.Meanwhile, Investor's Business Daily explores another topic sure to be buried: if the massive U.S.-led assault under way in Iraq's Diyala province continues to be sucessful, "it won't be long until the story's pushed even further back in the nation's newspapers".He and five other Saddam henchmen have been on trial for their role in the genocidal "Anfal" campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1988. Around 182,000 people were killed during the Anfal, many of them with poison gas. Mass graves are still being found.
The trial is a problematic story for much of the media because it undermines the fashionable anti-war narrative in which Saddam Hussein was just another run-of-the-mill dictator, no worse than most others.
Mention of the Anfal or the mass graves - which are still being found by the way — is rather discomforting for the Bushitler crowd.
Jules Crittenden runs roughshod over Roger Ebert's review of A Mighty Heart, and quite rightly so, as he catches Ebert writing:
Although we do meet the possible suspect Omar (Aly Khan), there are not any detailed scenes of Pearl with his kidnappers, no portrayals of their personalities or motivations, and we do not see the beheading and its video. That last is not just because of Winterbottom’s tact and taste, but because (I think) he wants to portray the way Pearl has almost disappeared into another dimension.There's another another possible reason, that Ebert of course, will never even entertain in his mind.
Meanwhile, Allahpundit notes some additional staggering moral equivilence in the same review (which is par for that entire course, needless to say) and wonders if it Ebert would be willing to apply it equally to both sides of the political spectrum.
For our links yesterday to reviews of this film from Libertas and Debbie Schlussel, click here.)
Victor Davis Hanson writes on "The Crazed Fringe":
When I was growing in rural California in the 1950s and 1960s, my FDR parents winced at the nut right-wing fringe. This was, remember, the era of bulk mailings on pink paper, crazy “Did you know?” unsolicited newsletters detailing the names of local and national communists, usually sent from strange addresses in the Sierra Nevada foothills. At seven and eight, we used to pick them up from the garbage and ask our parents, “Hey, Mom, are Lucy and Ricky really communists?”A possible cause for that shift is explored in James Piereson's new book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution. He argues rather convincingly that it began to occur when mid-sixties liberals were unable to culturally process the ideology of the man who shot Kennedy. But whatever the reason why, a remarkable shift has seemed to happen over time, as VDH notes.My cattleman uncle Tango used to stop by with John Birch literature, warning us about the impending fluoride conspiracy to make us all impotent.
The boy-scout troop leader would stop by, trying to sell us his version of a metal bomb shelter (a septic tank with hatches), and preached how we could win a nuclear war against Castro et al.
A neighbor used to preach to us that Caesar Chavez was employed by the KGB, and that the UFW was controlled by Moscow. The local paper’s op-eds still fought over Social Security and the Minimum Wage as equivalent to the Revolution of 1917. And always were the “hate the Jews” subtexts and allusions, alleging some sort of world banking conspiracy to rob us white rural folk who worked hard to send our peaches eastward only to have them hijacked and resold at ten times what they gave us by long-nosed crooks “on the East Coast”. You get the picture—the Right had a problem with its so-called wing nuts.
But over the years, conservatism came to terms with civil rights and anti-Semitism. Free markets, not socialism, enriched America and brought a level of affluence undreamed of it to the poor. (When I was seven, outhouses and unpaved roads were common in West Selma; today in the same neighborhood you see SUVS, new tract houses, and I-pods and blue teeth in the ears of illegal aliens.). And so the Klan, Birchers, and other assorted embarrassments were peeled off.
The left in the 1940s and 1950s had likewise gotten rid of its communist wing, and ostracized its fellow travelers. Henry Wallace was taken off the ticket. Dean Acheson and George Kennan had made liberal anti-communism logical rather than paradoxical.
But now the Left, still going on the fumes of the 1960s, has the greater problem with its extremists. Of course, the “base” can attack Bush on immigration, gay marriage, etc. but not from a position of sheer lunacy. The same is not true of the netroots or the Cindy Sheehan/Michael Moore wing on the Left. They openly praise our enemies, whether in Syria or Iraq (“Minutemen”). They prefer the unfree world of Chavez and Castro to our own. And their language and methodology are as uncouth and repulsive as were the old tactics of the Birch Society.
Tim Blair's new secretary is looking good.
(If Tim is soliciting ideas for a sequel, I'd love to see what would happen if Inspector Dan ever showed up at his office...)
Libertas's "Dirty Harry" writes that Angelina Jolie's new A Mighty Heart, in which she plays the widow of the brutally slain Daniel Pearl is "a tragic and important story" that's "told by director Michael Winterbottom in a quasi-documentary style complete with shaky cam, jump cuts, idle chatter, and a willful determination to see Jolie win an Oscar and not portray jihadists as the dangerous madmen they are":
However, if you oppose fighting terrorists (or at least George W. Bush fighting terrorists) there’s a danger to adding an emotional investment to this story. It may make some who see the film more eager to go after the bad guys. And we can’t have that, can we? No, better to gut the narrative with clinical detachment and simply point to the subject matter rather than its handling as a sign of your own importance.In choosing to appease its leftist base after 9/11, which includes the 1,700 members of CAIR, Hollywood essentially checked out on this decade.
Hopefully they'll have better luck in the next one.
Update: Debbie Schlussel is, if anything, even more brutal in her review; it certainly sounds like this film's excoriation is well-deserved.
As I've written before, "Nostalgie de la boue" is a French phrase for "nostalgia for the mud". This site explains the meaning of the phrase:
"Nostalgie de la boue" means ascribing higher spiritual values to people and cultures considered "lower" than oneself, the romanticization of the faraway primitive which is also the equivalent of the lower class close to home. I have been submerged in such ideas since I was born and am just getting my head out of the waters. My parents romanticized Hungarian folk culture — my father photographed and published peasant architecture, my mother wore folk dresses, my uncle and father promoted native handicrafts in the weaving workshops they organized in the 1930's. I went much further in romanticizing the seemingly most unromantic Aztecs, leaping across an ocean, a continent and five centuries in revalidation.On the other hand, these reprimitivized folks seem to be taking their nostalgia for the mud just a little too seriously.
Jeff Goldstein looks at the growing--and surprisingly bipartisan--efforts to stifle free speech.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon: “The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change".
The rest of the UN? You can have our BMWs and Mercedes Benzes when you pry their steering wheels from our chauffeurs' cold dead hands!
Dean Barnett writes, "Michael Bloomberg is not an electrifying presence". Nevertheless, Dean believes Bloomberg could steal a few votes away from the only slightly more charismatic Hillary Clinton:
Students of the leftwing blogs know that the progressive community can’t stand Hillary. What’s more, they know that a Hillary presidency will banish the Nutroots to four years in the wilderness. At least. There’s a real chance that if the Clintons take back the Democratic Party, there won’t be a chair for the Nutroots when the music stops playing.Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg explores the technowonk utopian nanny aspect of Bloomberg:For some progressives, this is a worst scenario than President Romney, Thompson or Giuliani would be. The Nutroots’ top priority has always been accruing more power for their “movement.” A Hillary ascendancy would be their worst possible scenario. So will the most progressive of voters abandon Hillary for a third party candidate who has no chance? It’s a definite possibility.
Bloomberg’s dream of a New Politics transcending partisan bickering is deeply seductive. [Especially to Bloomberg's chief constituency, the media--Ed] Who wouldn’t want to live in a society where government just did good things without interference from special interests and other forces of selfishness? A big part of John F. Kennedy’s appeal was his claim to represent a New Politics based on what Bloomberg now calls “managerial competence.” As JFK said: “Most of the problems ... that we now face, are technical problems, are administrative problems,” best left to the best and brightest, starting with JFK himself.No--but by using such language, Bloomberg essentially casts himself as a billionaire version of another passionless northeast liberal with onetime presidential aspirations whose first name is also Mike: Michael Dukakis--which seems pretty accurate to me.That was nonsense then, and it’s nonsense now. Calling it “managerial competence” won’t make political decision-making any less political.
Update: Hear about Napoleon? He had a Bloomberg complex.
Science Daily breathlessly reports:
In new research, male circumcision is found to be much less important as a deterrent to the global AIDS pandemic than previously thought. The author, John R. Talbott, has conducted statistical empirical research across 77 countries of the world and has uncovered some surprising results.Be sure you're sitting down for this:
The new study finds that the number of infected prostitutes in a country is the key to explaining the degree to which AIDS has infected the general population. Prostitute communities are typically very highly infected with the virus themselves, and because of the large number of sex partners they have each year, can act as an engine driving infection rates to unusually high levels in the general population.Go figure. Or as Jonah Goldberg once wrote:
Indeed, if you were to read any one of the stories I cited at the beginning of this column — men and women aren't the same, men dig sex while women like security, having two dads but no mom has an effect on the kids, etc, — to my great-grandmother, she'd say "I need a newspaper to tell me this?" (of course they'd have to be translated into Yiddish first). But today, and for the foreseeable future, we're gonna be treated to headlines that say, in effect, "Your Father Was Right: Bears Do Sh-t in the Woods."Meanwhile, Jules Crittenden has further thoughts on studies, and where they can lead us.
James Lileks writes that if Back To The Future were produced today, and its makers wanted to send Marty McFly thirty years into the past, he'd wind up in 1977 instead of the fifties:
Think about that. 1977 would look like today, minus computers. Same clothes, same Pink Floyd tunes on the classic rock station, same smear of gimcrack commercial architecture interspersed with stalwarts from the 20s. Color TV, Star Wars, angry Iran. Marty could order a Pepsi Free in 1977, and they’d think it was a sugarless brand they hadn’t gotten yet.Meanwhile, this old Newsweek chestnut from the mid-seventies is suddenly new all over again!
Coming much sooner than 2019, fortunately:
For (slightly) less futuristic news from the cybernetics industry, click here.
Mark Steyn writes that "It's slightly depressing to read that Her Majesty's Government were entirely taken aback by the hostile Muslim reaction to their decision to knight Salman Rushdie":
One assumed they had factored into their calculations at least a bit of pro forma Death-to-the-Great-Satan prancing in the livelier quartiers of Pakistan - or even, with classic Brit cynicism, figured that enraging hundreds of millions of Muslims over an imperial bauble was a cheap way to look courageous and tough and determined after the recent humiliations inflicted on the Royal Navy. But no: the whole burning-effigies-of-the-Queen routine took them completely by surprise. It really is impossible to exaggerate the depths of self-delusion within which the multiculti bien pensants exist. With characteristic clumsiness, Margaret Beckett, the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, managed to make things worse. As The Sydney Morning Herald reported:Political correctness does tend to have that effect on the brain.
"Obviously we are sorry if there are people who have taken very much to heart this honour, which is after all for a lifelong body of literary work," she said, after protests in the Muslim world over the award.Er, yes, but Sir Salman does not, I believe, consider himself a Muslim. (Certainly, the last time I saw him, he was enjoying an alcoholic beverage.) So, locked into the usual identity-groupthink, Mrs Beckett has, in effect, repositioned Rushdie within the group that wants to kill him. Thanks a bundle. Few of us understood the full implications of the fatwa 18 years ago, but, if even ministers of the Crown can't get it in 2007, then we really have learned nothing.She stressed that Rushdie was just one of many Muslims who had been recognised by the British honours system - something she said "may not be realised by many of those who have been vocal in their opposition.
"People who are members of the Muslim faith are very much part of our whole, wider community ... they receive honours in this country in just the same way as any other citizen."
Paging Robin Aitken; the sequel to your new book just wrote itself.
Journalists estimated to donate nine to one to Democrats. Who knew?!
The fine line between stupid and clever just narrowed considerably, as Roger Tullgren, 42, of Hässleholm, Sweden, "is now the first person in his native country to receive disability benefits due to, of all things, his addiction(?) to heavy metal music".
The "Today" show graphic ran: "Breaking His Silence: Powell Blasts Bush's War Policies." Except he didn't.Huh. Though some say NBC is more than a little biased.
Here's this week's attempt to justify Nazi Germany’s collective actions, via England's Daily Mail, which breathlessly asks in its headline, "Did Hitler unleash the Holocaust because a Jewish prostitute gave him syphilis?"
A brief encounter with a Jewish prostitute may have led to Hitler's genocidal Holocaust, claim psychiatrists.Add it to John Cusack's 2002 film, Max, which explained away collective German atrocities by suggesting if only young Hitler had been more appreciated as an artist, and a German comedy(!) last year titled, Mein Fuhrer, which blaimed it on abuse Hitler received as a child. Regarding the latter effort, which Pajamas' Ron Rosenbaum absolutely buried, it doesn't take much to translate his thoughts from last December to the Daily Mail's article today:They believe he may have caught the sexually transmitted disease syphilis which, if untreated, can eventually cause madness.
According to a report, mental and behavioural disturbances triggered by the advanced stages of the disease could have resulted in Hitler targeting Jews and the mentally retarded.
There is "ample circumstantial evidence" for the theory, according to a team headed by psychiatrist Dr Bassem Habeeb.
Dr Habeeb said that there had been speculation that Hitler had syphilis from diary entries made by his personal doctor, Theo Morrell.
As I tried to point out in Explaining Hitler,so called “psycho-historical” theories of Hitler have long been justly discredited, but still attract those who find some kitschy thrill in contemplating the sexual and personal perversities of Nazis.As Rosenbaum adds, "The Holocaust was not the product of one man’s personal peccadilloes, but of a powerful historical, theological and racial ideology that a juvenile comic focus on 'bed-wetting' utterly obscures and in effect denies". Similarly, so does an article blaming it all on syphilis.Psycho-historical theories have been discredited both for lack of credible evidence and for flawed notions of causation. Here, for instance, it sounds like the director has blindly accepted the dubious, contradicted hearsay that Hitler’s father beat him, promoted strenuously without corroboration by psychoanalyst Alice Miller (who, again without corroboration “explains” Hitler’s anti-semitism by claiming Hitler’s father beat him because the father was upset that he, the father, might have “Jewish blood”—a concatenation of unproven, unprovable old wives tales). Even if it were true that Hitler’s father beat him this does not support the notion that therefore Hitler became a mass murderer because he resented Daddy. All too many children are beaten by their fathers, true, but only Hitler became Hitler because his exterminationist impulses had the enthusiastic support of hundreds of thousands of “ordinary” Germans and other Europeans.
Second, the focus on Hitler’s alleged personal peculiarities, de-historicizes the causes of the Holocaust; making it some kind of outgrowth of personal revenge and perversion rather the culmination of centuries of murderous anti-semitic hatred in Europe carried out by hundreds of thousands of non bed-wetting accomplices to Hitler. It de-politicizes the genocidal hatred in an utterly trivializing way.
Jeff Jacoby writes:
On one important issue after another, the right churns with serious disputes over policy and principle, while the left marches mostly in lockstep. Liberals sometimes disagree over tactics and details, but anyone taking a heterodox position on a major issue can find himself out in the cold. Just ask Senator Joseph Lieberman .Mindless conformity--it's so 1967!In the liberal imagination, conservatives are blind dogmatists, spouters of a party line fed to them by (take your pick) big business, their church, or President Bush. Yet almost anywhere you look on the right these days, what stands out is the lack of ideological conformity.
With a little help from his trusty Girl Friday named Katie Couric (and a lot of help from IowaHawk), Captain Dan the Detective Man swings into action that's hotter than a Laredo parking lot, crackling like a hickory fire, with two hands worth of white knuckle still hanging ten--and any other moronic Ratherism you can think of!
James Taranto writes that while Mayor Bloomberg "may not get many votes" during his run for the White House, "he'll get favorable enough press coverage to make John McCain jealous":
Bloomberg is so out of step with the GOP that he opposed the confirmation of John Roberts as chief justice. He is term-limited and thus cannot seek re-election, which means that the Republican line is no longer of any use to him. So why is it news that he is abandoning his Republican affiliation?As can "Some say", another dreaded expression of Journalese, according to analysts.Because, according to the AP's Sara Kugler, "many believe [it] could be a step toward entering the 2008 race for president."
To make sense of this assertion, you need to be fluent in the dialect of American English known as Journalese. In Journalese, many can be either singular or plural, and it is a first-person pronoun.
A record--this is twice in one week that I wholeheartedly agree with Chris Matthews:
Coming back from a commercial break that included a plug for "the best reporting, the power of NBC News" on "Super Tuesdays," MSNBC's Chris Matthews was caught uttering an expletive, complaining about the content of the network's programming.But at least the media are recycling their compost!The "Hardball" host complained that "we're all reacting here and putting on sh*t" with the network's breaking news coverage pertaining to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg leaving the GOP to become an independent.
Update: Allah has the video, and adds, "Thus is MSNBC’s new corporate motto born".
"Here’s New York Times op-ed contributor Ahmed Yousef in an appearance on Hizballah’s Al-Manar TV, explaining to the audience that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks—just like the US was behind Pearl Harbor".
Scott Adam's "Dilbert" cartoon yesterday is essentially Mark Steyn's latest Western Standard column in three-panel form.
Meanwhile, Tim Blair spots a harmonic convergence of a different sort that's definitely ripe for satire:
Al Gore’s planet-saving Live Earth gaiapalooza concerts are sponsored by Chevrolet.My dad (a former Chevy dealer from the late 1940s to the late 1960s) just rolled over in his grave.
Early last year, during the height of the Mo Toons eruption, in a post documenting a remarkably Neville Chamberlain-like response to the cartoons from the State Department, Glenn Reynolds wrote:
I'm sorry, but the lesson here is that if you want to be listened to, you should blow things up. That's a very bad incentive structure, but it's the one the allegedly responsible parties have created.Political asssassination, which posits that merely killing one man can cause enormous ripples in society if he's powerful enough (see War, Great), is very much a form of terrorism. That's one of the reasons why James Piereson’s new Camelot and the Cultural Revolution seems remarkably current, at least to me, despite its 1960s timeframe. As the book’s subtitle implies--How The Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism--I don’t think Piereson wrote it primarly to be another debunking, ala Vincent Bugliosi, of the usual Oliver Stone-style “mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma” conspiracy hash. Piereson’s much more interested in the enormous ripple in history that Kennedy’s assassination caused, coupled with the cognitive dissonance amongst American liberals who couldn't process the ideology of JFK's assassin.
As Piereson told John J. Miller yesterday:
Liberals who were rational and realistic accepted the fact that Oswald killed JFK but at the same time they were unable to ascribe a motive for his actions. They tended to look for sociological explanations for the event and found one in the idea that JFK was brought down by a “climate of hate” that had overtaken the nation. Thus they placed Kennedy’s assassination within a context of violence against civil rights activists. They had great difficulty accepting the fact that Kennedy’s death was linked to the Cold War, not to civil rights. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in his 1,000-page history of the Kennedy administration, published in 1965, could not bring himself to mention Oswald’s name in connection with Kennedy’s death, though he spent several paragraphs describing the hate-filled atmosphere of Dallas at the time — suggesting thereby that Kennedy was a victim of the far right. The inability to come to grips with the facts of Kennedy’s death pointed to a deeper fault in American liberalism which was connected to its decline.There’s a passage deep in Piereson’s book that builds on that interview quote:
Oswald thus brought about some surprising consequences by his intrusion into history. From the perspective of more than forty years, it appears that the assassination saved Castro from Kennedy’s concentrated efforts to overthrow or assassinate him, led to a change in focus in American foreign policy, and created an environment favorable to liberal reform. At the same time, it also led to confusion and disorientation among the American people, and it played an important part in turning many Americans against their country in the latter half of the 1960s when blame for the assassination was deflected from Oswald to the country more broadly. The effects of the Kennedy assassination, combined with the domestic backlash against the war in Vietnam, were so profound for the United States that for a period of years in the 1960s and 1970s they shifted the ideological momentum of the Cold War in the direction of the Soviet Union. If an assassin is judged by the far-reaching consequences of his act, Lee Harvey Oswald, in contrast to John Wilkes Booth, might rank as one of the more consequential assassins in history.I remember back in 1977 watching a ponderous ABC TV movie called The Trial Of Lee Harvey Oswald. What if Oswald had actually lived to stand trial? He'd have likely faced a state-mandated death sentence, rather than the business end of Jack Ruby's pistol. But the appeals process would probably have ground on long enough so that Oswald would have seen society reshaping itself in the mid-to-late 1960s as a direct consequence of his actions in November of 1963.
When you flash-forward to this decade, and how the events of September 11th have transformed the left, both in terms of its pivoting away from a policy in the Middle East that Bill Clinton favored in the 1990s, and the concoction of a conspiracy theory regarding the origins of 9/11 that dwarfs anything that Oliver Stone or his writers could have dreamed up, you can’t help but think that when accomplished on a large-enough scale, terrorism works. All too well.
And that’s one utterly depressing thought.
Update: Norm Geras looks at the left's confusion over Salman Rushdie's recent knighthood and the Islamofascist response and writes, "What a disgraceful capitulation to legitimating the taking of offence as a form of argument in the public domain".
Unfortunately, it's far from the first instance.
Another Update: Welcome readers of Jules Crittenden, and Salon's Blog Report. Please look around--you're sure to find much cheerier topics than this!
Greg Pollowitz asks the logical question: "So, which David Chase ending does Hillary envision for her campaign? Dead? Under investigation by the FBI? In the looney bin with Uncle Junior?"
Meanwhile, Peter Suderman notes that "The parallels to various Soprano characters are certainly unflattering:
Bill as a mob thug, Hillary as the petty wife blinding herself to her husband’s misdeeds. There just doesn’t seem to be anything to it other than, “Hey, people are talking about The Sopranos… let’s borrow from the show!” If someone has a better idea of what the video is really supposed to accomplish, I’d love to hear it.Perhaps Mike Gravel or his video guy can deconstruct its symbolism for us.
New York's Mike Bloomberg: the ultimate nanny RINO no more. (He'll always be the ultimate local government nanny, of course.) As Allah writes, "He’s running. If he wasn’t, this would be completely superfluous":
How he fares will depend largely on Iraq. If things go to hell and a good chunk of the GOP turns anti-war, they’ve got an easy target for their protest vote. If Petraeus can keep things under control and gin up a little optimism, B will end up playing Nader to Hillary’s Gore in some of the northeastern states. Welcome to the campaign.In 2008, if Mayor Mike does indeed literally end up playing Nader to Hillary’s Gore, his rock star status in liberal house organs such as Time magazine will dry up awfully quick come the ides of November.
Update: Suitably Flip adds:
Allah predicts Bloomberg pulls 10% of the popular vote. Given that Ross Perot managed 19% in 1992, I suspect Hizzoner's billion dollar purse buys him at least into the 20s."Or perhaps he'll be John Anderson"--the thinking man's Ralph Nader!
More: Glenn Reynolds adds, "I'd like to see a third-party candidate, but I'd like one who stands for more freedom, not less, and the nannyish Lee Kuan Yew-wannabe Bloomberg clearly doesn't fit that description". Well, he's no Ron Paul, that's for sure.
(Sorry--I've been endlessly trying to figure out how to mention He Who Must Not Be Named somewhere in this post.)
James Lileks writes:
An open letter to the nice young idealists who’ve decided to stand outside the supermarket and ask leading, guilt-inducing questions to people who just want to get some MILK, for heaven’s sake: let’s make a deal. I will listen to your concerns. I will nod politely while you make your points. Then I get to talk to you about my totally unrelated pet issue for an equal amount of time, during which you will be unable to ask anyone else to take your brochures or sign your petitions. And since you’re there every day, we can do this every day. Fair?Fortunately, early next month, the government will be rounding all such supermarket pests up and deposting them here. Sadly, their timeout--and ours--will only be for a day.I only bring this up because today was the 19th time you’ve asked if I had a minute to help the environment. I do, but it’s not this one. I need milk. Sorry.
In one of his many Orwellian moments, AP reports Jimmy Carter saying that the Bush administration's refusal to accept the 2006 election victory of Hamas was "criminal." Ed Morrissey responds:
So let's get this straight. Bush's refusal to engage with a terrorist group -- one that has long been on the State Department list of outlawed terrorist organizations -- is "criminal". Wouldn't it literally have been a criminal act to engage with Hamas? Federal law prohibits such direct contacts and the transmission of aid to terrorist groups such as Hamas.Or as Michelle Malkin puts it on her newly spiffed-up site, "Jimmy Carter said what? Part 999".Even more ridiculous, Carter feels that we should applaud the organizational skills of a terrorist group that just murdered its way to the top of the Gaza power structure. He applauds their "superior skills and discipline," while turning a blind eye to the ways in which they apply them. Rather than scold them for using violence to achieve their political goals, Carter wants the global community to welcome and reward them for it.
Carter started his post-presidential period as a model for retired politicians and statesmen. Had he stayed retired and focused on building homes for the poor, he would have gone some way towards mitigating his feckless presidency. Instead, Carter has become an apologist for terrorists -- and in this case, a cheerleader for them. Carter has embarrassed his nation and solidified his status as the appeaser-in-chief who coddled radical Islam at its birth, and seems determined to midwife it at every successive turn.
Over at Reason's "Hit & Run" blog, David Weigel writes:
The guerrilla reporters of Infowars—last seen being broken up and hauled out of the spin room at CNN's Republican debate—nailed Michael Moore at a screening of Sicko and got him to discuss 9/11 conspiracy theories. (Sorry, other theories of the events of 9/11.) The reporters clearly ask whether Moore thinks "9/11 was an inside job," and he implies that... it might have been.Here's the nut graph (in Moore ways than one):
MOORE: Well, I've had a number of firefighters tell me over the years, and since Fahrenheit 9/11, that they heard these explosions, that they believe there is much more to the story then we've been told. I don't think the official investigations have told us the complete truth. They haven't even told us half the truth. And so I support, and I hope, you know, if there's a new administration or somebody could open up a new investigation of this before we get too far away from it, to find out the whole truth. Let me just give you one thing that has—I've asked for for a long time. I've filmed before, down at the Pentagon, before 9/11. There's got to be at least 100 video cameras ringing that building, in the trees, everywhere. They've got that plane coming in with 100 angles. How come we haven't seen the straight—I'm not talking about stop-action photos, I'm talking about the video. I want to see the video, I want to see 100 videos that exist of this. Why don't they want us to see that plane coming into the building? Because, you know, if you know anything about flying a plane, if you're going 500 mph, if you're off by that much, you're in the river. To hit a building that's only 5 stories high that expertly, I believe that there will be answers in that video tape and you should demand that that tape is released.Like Oliver Stone and JFK, they'll never be answered to Moore's satisfaction; there's far too much cognitive dissonance for the awful truth to register.REPORTER: The idea that the hole is about 8 feet wide...
MOORE: See, I'm not very good at the physics and all that. But believe me, the questions need to be asked.
Update: Further thoughts from Allahpundit. Elsewhere, speaking of the left and cognitive dissonance...
More: Charles Johnson says that "It always comes down to that blasted, impossible-to-understand physics, doesn’t it? But that question has already been answered".
As Rich Noyes puts it, "ABC’s Dean Reynolds on Monday got out the ten-foot pole" to describe Hamas, "whose suicide bombers have killed numerous Americans in Israel as well as hundreds of Israeli civilians".
As opposed to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, once considered a benign model in democracy by ABC.
Being obsessed with "reducing Global Warming" and wanting lower gas prices is a logical incongruity of the first order, as Say Anything ponders.
Rich Lowry writes that Obama is "managing to paint himself into a corner where he can't possibly win the nomination":
It's just idiotic for him to play this game where if his campaign puts out a sharp-tongued oppo document, it's violating his pledge to uplift American politics (and the D-Punjab thing was playing off a Hillary joke about herself!). At this rate, he's going to be the relentlessly positive (until it was too late) Bill Bradley getting bull-dozed by a cut-throat Al Gore in 2000, with Hillary, of course, in the role of Gore.Do tell.
Meanwhile, "Hillary Clinton is inevitable", Howard Kurtz notes. "So why is there such unease about her within the party?"
Huh. Off the top of my head, I can't think of anyone in the Blogosphere who would enjoy this.
The CNN/Theodore Dalrymple connection, as spotted by James Taranto.
(Safely back home in the Bay Area, incidentally--regular blogging to resume later today.)
Finally in an act of almost reckless daring, Winston and Julia decide to go to O’Brien’s house together. They are astounded by the sheer luxury of the place. But the greatest surprise comes when O’Brien turns off the telescreen in his room, explaining that members of the Inner Party had the privilege to do this.
Greetings from the command center itself--Pajamas HQ in El Segundo, where Burt Prelutsky is channeling Criswell:
Moreover, I predict that whoever hosts the Oscars will feel compelled to tell us that Jack Nicholson is the epitome of cool for no apparent reason other than that he wears sunglasses indoors, and for some unfathomable reason, is always smirking.Hey, that just wouldn't be hip.And, finally, gazing into my crystal ball, I predict that no matter how many troops we have left in Iraq, so long as a Democrat wins the presidential election in 2008 the mainstream media will not say a single word about a quagmire or ever mention an exit strategy.
Austin Bay interviews Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) in the latest Blog Week In Review, online now at Pajamas HQ.
You have no idea the shame I'm feeling right now, both for recycling that hoary old joke in the above headline, and for linking to this.
It's not something that I say very often these days, but Chris Matthews is absolutely correct; up until 80 years ago news sources were quite willing to admit their biases to their consumers. Fortunately, that discarded tradition has increasingly resumed this decade, making statements such as these increasingly outliers.
Bryan Preston writes, "Rather than stand with the administration against Iran" Joe Biden and the Democrats "have chosen to keep applying political pressure against the administration at home":
It has the effect of a classic pincer move, one pincer political and formed by the Democrats for the purpose of weakening the administration to the point that’s ineffectual; the other pincer formed by the Iranians arming terrorists from Afghanistan to Gaza and nearly everywhere in between. I don’t think it’s a coordinated pincer, but it might as well be: The mullahs probably can’t believe the luck they’re having in getting useful noises and pressure from the Democrats against Bush. So we will see more violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, northern Israel and southern Israel, and Biden will use that violence to argue that “See, this administration can’t do anything right.” Biden will never do two things that might help make the situation marginally better. He’ll never show unity against an enemy of the US as long as a Republican administration is in the White House, and he’ll never just shut his yap long enough for the administration to do what may need to be done.Read the whole thing.
Dinesh D'Souza asks, "Now, what about those Duke professors?"
So Nifong is going to resign, and maybe get his license taken away too. Now what about the mau-mau artists at Duke, influential figures on the faculty, who whipped the campus up into a racial hysteria? What happens to the people who helped to create a mob mentality against students, rendering their lives miserable for more than a year, when their guilt was never established, never even probable, and now they have been shown to be innocent?No wonder that on campuses across America, it's been a revolt of the alumni, as Opinion Journal notes.
Update: Power Line is also curious about what happens next at Duke.
Hugh Hewit spots Robin Wright of the Washington Post blaming the US "for the spread of Islamist radicalism. An excerpt from a classic of the genre":
But even former Bush administration officials blame Washington for the region's latest woes. "The U.S. bears responsibility, both for things it's done, particularly in Iraq, but also for things it's not done, which is where the peace process comes in," [Richard] Haass said. "The president never developed his idea of a Palestinian state. He never used his leverage to help Egypt get launched on a trajectory of greater openness."As Hugh writes, "Yes, of course. And Churchill was to blame for Hitler".
Hey, be thankful for small favors--at least the Post didn't blame Islamic radicalism on global warming.
James Lileks has some fun with urban renewal; but a la Malcolm Muggeridge, as always, real life trumps satire.
Glenn Reynolds links to a Telegraph article on the BBC's biases:
The report concludes BBC staff must be more willing to challenge their own beliefs.Blimey--do tell, old sport!It reads: “There is a tendency to 'group think’ with too many staff inhabiting a shared space and comfort zone.”
A staff impartiality seminar held last year is also documented in the report, at which executives admitted they would broadcast images of the Bible being thrown away but not the Koran, in case Muslims were offended.
During the seminar a senior BBC reporter criticised the corporation for being anti-American.
Update: Further thoughts from Newsbusters and Jules Crittenden, who writes that it's a good thing the BBC "didn’t go looking for pro-Jihadi sentiments. That could have got ugly quick".
Say, maybe Reuters should investigate!
Tim Blair and Charles Johnson link to links to a news reports which claim that Hamas looted the home of Yasser Arafat, who by all accounts is still dead:
A crowd on Saturday looted the home of longtime Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, destroying one of the strongest symbols of the Fatah movement in the Gaza Strip, witnesses and Fatah officials said.Including, apparently, Arafat's Nobel Prize. Hopefully the father of late-20th century terrorism is enjoying the irony of it all, from his window seat in Hell.Fatah officials said the crowd took furniture, wall tiles and Arafat’s personal belongings.
With his omnipresent case of BDS, CNN's Jack Cafferty can't help but blame President Bush for Hamas's takeover of Gaza. I wonder how this all ties into Rosie's 9/11 meta-conspiracy.
Speaking of leftwing conspiracies, Charles Johnson notes:
According to the international left and the paleo-right, Israel is a fascist apartheid state, a brutal occupier, universally despised by the oppressed Palestinian people.You got it!So where do the oppressed Palestinians look for sanctuary, when the terrorist government they elected begins the inevitable slaughter?
(Greetings from sunny Orange County, by the way.)
Jules Crittenden writes that Gaia's more than happy to fight back against those who try to immanentize the eschaton.
(I'm about to tempt Gaia's wrath myself, as I'm flying--unfortunately not on one of Al or Laurie's Gulfstreams--to Los Angeles this weekend.)
As Triumph the Insult Comic Dog demolishes any and all liberal shibboleths at the Tony Awards, all I can say is wow--all comedy really is conservative:
Via Don Surber, who looks at the rest of The Week That Was.
Last year, Jonah Goldberg wrote, "Here's a short rule of thumb for how to tell who is a 'respectable' conservative in the eyes of liberals: any conservative out of power or not seen as supportive of those in power":
An even shorter rule of thumb would be: conservatives are respectable if they are useful to liberals. Pat Buchanan became respectable, even adorable, among a loose coalition of liberals leftists, from MSNBC's Chris Matthews to Ralph Nader, when he turned on the GOP establishment. Kevin Phillips, David Gergen and John Dean have been "real" Republicans — though rarely conservatives — for decades because they are willing to confirm the assumptions of liberals. An even more telling example would be the "neocons." Before the Iraq war, neocons were the nice conservatives, the good conservatives, the idealistic conservatives the un-racist conservatives, according to academics, The New York Times and others. This is not to say that they aren't nice, good, idealistic and un-racist. Rather, it's to point up the way in which conservatives become evil as they become influential, relevant, or otherwise inconvenient to liberals. John McCain was touted as a good choice for president by The New Republic and other liberal voices. Today, McCain is increasingly villified by many of these same voices because, it turns out, he's actually a Republican.A year later, Ace of Spades notes that those same basic liberal media rules also apply when they report on their collective arch-nemesis--conservative blogs.Similarly, William F. Buckley is suddenly the voice of humane and decent conservatism, according to liberals. A more humane and decent man, you'll never meet. But it's doubtlessly true that if WFB had the president's ear, the same voices cheering him would once again be calling him a fascist. And, needless to say, if Bush governed on Pat Buchanan's playbook, Chris Matthews would lose his crush on him awfully fast.
After his brutal assassination, liberals understandably elevated President Kennedy to secular sainthood, but simultaneously, they moved 180 degrees out of phase from Kennedy on virtually every issue he believed in (the Cold War, Vietnam, Cuba, the Space Race, tax cuts, American exceptionalism, etc., etc.) As Pat Moynihan once said, "Most liberals had ended the 1960s rather ashamed of the beliefs they had held at the beginning of the decade".
That dichotomy is the subject of James Piereson's exceptional new book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution. Meanwhile, the Instant History blog flashes back to how very differently--and with infinitely less piety--Kennedy was viewed by the media before his death; in this case, the last issue of Time magazine printed while he was still alive, dated November 22, 1963.
Some assorted recent reviews of mine on the 'Net and dead tree:
SciFi.com gives us a sneak preview of what the laptop of the future will look like. As to what it will have inside, see my recent CE Pro article on 64-bit computing.
Of course, this is all contingent on the UN's forecast of the world coming to an end in 2015 not coming true, but somehow, I think we'll muddle through...
Michael Medved asks, "Does heavy TV viewing push people toward more liberal opinions? Or is it the impact of pre-existing leftist attitudes that lead viewers to invest more of their lives on television?"
Analysts may argue about causation, but there’s no real doubt about correlation: an important new study from the Culture and Media Institute shows that those who describe themselves as “heavy” TV viewers embrace distinctly liberal attitudes on a range of crucial issues, placing them well to the left of those who report “light” TV viewing.Television's heyday was somewhere around the time of the Great Society, so it's not at all surprising that it imparts a similar legacy mindset amongst its heaviest viewers.* * * Liberalism cherishes such meaningless feel-good notions. The Democrats feel outraged at the rise in gas prices, so they demand a satisfying and vindictive “wind-fall profits tax” on the greedy oil companies—never mind the fact that raising taxes on an industry always makes the prices of its product go up, not down. The nation feels disgusted and outraged at the brutal death of Matthew Shepard, so the liberals demand new “hate crimes” legislation – regardless of the reality that it’s already against the law to rob any victim (gay or straight) and to beat him to death, and that the gay student’s two killers are already serving two consecutive life sentences (each) for his murder.
Liberal hero Lyndon Johnson looks at the pain of destitution in the United States and launches his vaunted, costly “War on Poverty” – but as President Reagan ultimately observed, “We had a War on Poverty, and Poverty won.” Five Trillion dollars in social spending attempted to redeem the status of the nation’s poor but by most measures, the many well-intentioned programs only made the situation worse. Nevertheless, leftists defend the failed efforts at amelioration (just as they apologize for failed socialist experiments around the globe) because the do-gooders made us all feel better about attempting to address the suffering of the wretched of the earth – regardless of disastrous outcomes.
Like the tacky ending of a supposedly uplifting TV show, liberal programs emphasize feelings more than consequences, good intentions more than good results. No wonder that those who make TV the major factor in their lives feel most comfortable with leftist efforts to remake the world; and no wonder that those who embrace liberal values, find encouragement and sustenance in the shallow, manipulative, context-free world of televised news and entertainment.
A brief 20th century history of the Jewish Mother in comedy, from Nichols & May, to Woody Allen, to Sarah Silverman.
Fred Thompson explores the current state of freedom of speech--or lack thereof--on American campuses.
Related: Is the lack of free speech on campus a logical result of treating your politics as a religion?
"Salon: 'Ambiguity' of 'The Sopranos' Offered an Alternative to 'Self-Righteous' Bush"
Geez--on the other hand, does Mike Gravel own this mindset, or what?
The Jimmy Carter late-1970s enters Star Trek's Mirror Universe: In January, the US captured the Iranian consulate (in Iraq at least). Today, Iran begins gas rationing.
What will constitute Iran's equivalent of The Last Days Of Disco?
Video surrealism-a-go-go! First, it's the return of the "Once In A Lifetime"-era David Byrne.
Second, Mike Gravel owns the American Zeitgeist, creating campaign ads that brilliantly feed off the postmodern final moments of the Sopranos finale. Groove with your space, Zen Master Mike!
As Hunter S. Thompson once said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. And at the moment, there's nobody weirder than today's professional politicians.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, who's apparently found his RINO soul mate in Mike Bloomberg, goes politically incorrect and gets it right. Meanwhile, Trent Lott appears to be doing an infinitely weirder RINO impersonation--he was last seen praising Teddy Kennedy (and of course, the Dixiecrats) and is now attacking talk radio--which brought him to the height of his power 13 years ago, thus allowing him to live out the Peter Principle on a national stage.
On the left, that's something that Harry Reid seems to demonstrating right now, as he first unintentionally echoes Mark Steyn--then tosses his quote down the Memory Hole.
Related: Via Instapundit, "Did Reid Really Say That?"
Update: Oy.
Look, it's Iran's answer to Greg Packer!
Meanwhile, Ann Althouse has some thoughts on Iran's answer to Ron Jeremy.
The top ten nine reasons why Ron Paul shouldn't be the Republican presidential nominee.
Clearly, there's only person who can save Paul's campaign at this point. And her name is Amber Lee Ettinger.
Jonah Goldberg writes that, like Bonnie Tyler, the media are holding out for a hero--and they found not just one brave warrior, but two of them!
In an age when Fox News is a ratings juggernaut and Katie Couric is ratings roadkill, it seems almost antique to talk about liberal media bias. But it's still out there, my friends. Just look at the hilarious press release masquerading as a news story in Time magazine. With a picture of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg looking like henchmen from Murder Inc., Time proclaims these politicians "The New Action Heroes." And why are the Munchkin Mayor and the glandular Governator so heroic? Because they're taking care of business in a flash, as Elvis used to say (and probably still does on that Pacific island where he lives with Bruce Lee). Time's Michael Grunwald comes close to sounding like a teenage girl talking about Justin Timberlake. Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger are doing "big things," he tells us. "Specifically, they're doing big things that Washington has failed to do." Unlike politicians in the nation's capital, where "partisanship-on-crack has made compromise almost impossible," Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg have "got better things to do than bicker and posture."Read the whole thing, which is a great explanation of the template by which the legacy media frames virtually all of its government-related stories:And what are these better things? Well, they're both fighting global warming, natch. And Arnold's fighting for embryo-destroying stem cell research while Bloomberg, Grunwald gushes, has implemented "America's most draconian smoking ban and the first big-city trans-fat ban."
Heroes indeed!
The false advertising here is the never-ending story of elite journalism's bias toward "heroes" who expand government (which is why FDR remains the greatest hero in American history to so many Washington scribes).Meanwhile, as Edward Glaeser writes in the New York Sun, "Amity Shlaes's fascinating new history of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man (HarperCollins, 480 pages, $26.95), challenges this conventional wisdom". It will be interesting to see if her book makes any dent in this sclerotic paradigm, now in its seventh decade and ripe for updating.
Update: I don't think that Harry “I think we should just drop it" Reid is going to qualify for hero status in the media--at least this week.
Last week while in New Jersey, I met Iraq War blogger extraordinaire (and one of the few not named Michael!) Bill Roggio at a secure, undisclosed location a local restaurant we both knew well near his home. He appeared yesterday on the Hugh Hewitt Show; click here and scroll to about ten minutes in to listen.
Once again, America's conservative media blocks a frank and open discussion of sexually-oriented topics.
Update: More censorship spotted here; though fortunately, it looks the forces of free speech may have actually won this round.
Premiere magazine looks at 20 movies stuck in development hell, and I'd add Total Eclipse, a film I've been waiting to see for seven years. Before it was cancelled, some test footage was shot though; James Lileks has a rare clip of its surprisingly wooden star.
In the old days, celebrities tried to build as big an audience as possible, one fan at a time. Of course, that was back when stars actually bothered to entertain, rather than play the role of politicians with better plastic surgeons.
But today, they prefer their audiences much more segregated.
Back in 2004, Linda Ronstadt admitted to an interviewer:
"It's a real conflict for me when I go to a concert and find out somebody in the audience is a Republican or fundamental Christian. It can cloud my enjoyment. I'd rather not know."Angelina Jolie would prefer that they not watch her at home, either.
Update: "Babs Streisand, relinquish that crown as Miss Prima Dona of the Universe".
James Taranto writes that "Life Imitates Team America":
Hans Blix: "Let me see your whole palace or else." Kim Jong Il: "Or else what?" Blix: "Or else we will be very, very angry with you. And we will write you a letter telling you how angry we are."--from "Team America: World Police" (2004)Derek and Clive could not be reached for comment."Top US congressional Democrats bluntly told President George W. Bush Wednesday that his Iraq troop 'surge' policy was a failure. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi challenged the president over Iraq by sending him a letter."--Agence France-Presse, June 13
Related: "Harry Reid: Military Analyst"; "Politico 1, Lefty Blogosphere Zero".
Ace of Spades: "Wow, I think I'm catching Ron Paul Feveh!"
If inbound flights to LAX seem even more crowded than usual this weekend, here's the reason why.
Last week, I quoted this passage from a Tech Central Station article, which stated that "In the future, a war correspondent will either effectively be a soldier for one faction of a conflict, or he will literally not survive in the war zone" suggesting that "The days of the independent, neutral war correspondent, objectively reporting from a war's front lines, are quickly coming to an end".
They may have come to an end sooner than we think...
Assuming that the above video isn't a complete put-on, the ongoing efforts to virtually bury television images of 9/11 has paid off brilliantly, and the American media can pat themselves firmly on the back for creating a informed and knowledgeable citizenry.
If you haven't heard it yet, Austin Bay's lengthy and informative interview of Dr. David Kilcullen, the senior counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. Petraeus, calling into Pajamas HQ from Baghdad, is a must-listen. And don't miss Austin's latest syndicated column, which expands on Dr. Kilcullen's thoughts.
Mark Steyn writes:
There is no evidence anywhere in the "Palestinian Authority" that anyone there is interested in building a state and running it. In conventional post-colonial scenarios of the Sixties and Seventies, liberation movements used terrorism as a means to advance nationalism. By contrast, Arafat's gang used nationalism as a means to advance terrorism.Via Gateway Pundit, which has an extensive round-up and photos of Hamas in Gaza, executing Fatah members in the streets.
Apparently both sensing that a Doomsday Countdown in boring old decade-long increments is just a little too Ted Danson 1980s infomercial for the new millennium, and understanding that the Internet speeds everything up--even Doomsday itself--the UN warns "that the world has just eight years left to save itself".
As Tim Blair writes, "Our new Doom Year is 2015. Make a note of it".
Here's the perfect background music for updating your calendars.
Back in 2005 when CNN experimented with something called "Storytelling" in which they would jettison whatever ties they had left to objective media for "some sort of hybrid of news and strong dramatic narrative. You know--kind of made-up fictitious s*** with a pleasing emotional resonance", as Ace of Spades put it back then.
Really worked out well in the ratings, huh?
But somebody must like the concept, because a variation is being adopted by the Associated Press under the brandname of "accountability journalism", as James Taranto explains, adding:
The AP's embrace of "accountability journalism" would seem to be a response to the proliferation of opinion, especially on the radio and online. You would think that given the glut of opinion, "mainstream media" organizations like the AP would emphasize what they are particularly good at, namely impartial reporting. But maybe they weren't that good at it to begin with.No--and the rise of talk radio, Fox News and the Blogosphere have apparently so unnerved the MSM that they seem to be rushing headlong into abandoning their remaining claims of objectivity.
To be fair, an 80-year old paradigm maybe long overdue for a tune-up. But just make sure everyone gets the memo when the new model is announced, please.
Exploding into your local theater the summer of 2002!
Seriously--if this film had been made five years ago, its makers would have cleaned up at the box office--which ironically is why it never was produced. And Hollywood leaves $100 million or so on the table in order to appease the 1,700 members of CAIR.
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one:
Wouldn't it be great if the happy GLBT crowd decided to rise as one mass and troop over to the anti-Israel group and DEMAND justice for oppressed gays and lesbians in the Middle East? After all, while Israel hosts a big Gay Pride parade, other countries have a rather different attitude. This site has a good overview of the issues.Rosie would have kittens.Think about it: a politically aware, progressive group taking a vital message directly to a group that, in at least some extreme elements, would want nothing more than to do a mass stoning. Let them take the Gay Pride march to Middle East and then let's see where tolerance and acceptance begins and ends (somewhere in the middle of the Jordan River).
But Jules Crittenden explores what "Dawn Over DC" should look like.
John Podhoretz describes the upcoming sequel to Bruce Almighty as "basically a pro-environment rip on the Republicans":
The new Steve Carell movie, Evan Almighty, opens next week. This sequel to Jim Carrey's Bruce Almighty made headlines because it is, by far, the most expensive comedy ever made, approaching $200 million in production costs (and probably another $50 million in marketing costs). That's a lot of money. A movie like that needs a very broad-based appeal. Probably not the best idea to spend that kind of money on a movie that basically writes off and insults the political views of one-third of the United States. Right?Of course, over at the New York Times, films that write off and insult the political views of half the United States are a feature, not a bug, as the Times calls for more pro-abortion movies.
Jonah Goldberg asks, "Here’s a good question for you: Why have public schools at all?"
Read the rest; further thoughts from Jonah on the topic here.
Michael Chapman writes, "100 Million Victims of Communism Memorial Dedication = Minimal Liberal Media Coverage":
The liberal media love to talk about "victims," particularly victims of alleged economic or social oppression, such as illegal immigrants, children without enough Head Start funding, the homeless, the transgendered, detainees at Gitmo, and so on. But when it comes to victims of left-wing ideology--i.e., Communism--the liberal media don't say too much. And this is evident in the minimal (in my view) coverage given to the dedication of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Washington, D.C. on June 12, an event where President Bush spoke and where some of the world's leading experts on communism's atrocities--more than 100 million victims--spoke as well.As Chapman writes, "You'd think a memorial dedication to the 100 million victims of the greatest evil in modern times would get a little more attention from the dominant liberal media", but perhaps making faux-victims out of Paris Hilton, Hillary, and Katie is more important to them.
Dr. David Kilcullen, General David Petraeus’ chief adviser on counter-insurgency warfare was the guest on this week's Blog Week In Review podcast, which will hopefully be up in the not too distant future. Building on a topic explored by Dr. Kilcullent, Austin Bay writes, "Al Qaeda Fails Sexual Politics":
Welcome to 21st century warfare, where knowing your enemy includes knowing his myths and marriage mores as well as his political goals and military capabilities.Read the whole thing.
Wow, it's like Camile Paglia meets Nick At Nite!
(And for some real Paglia, click here.)
No, not the pundit--the guitarist. Over at Blogcritics, Michael J. West writes:
It’s for that reason that I suggest (not propose, but suggest; this one needs far more examination before it can really be a solid theory) that John McLaughlin is the real key figure of jazz fusion. He and Miles stand toe-to-toe in that sub-genre's pantheon: Miles, the man with the vision, and McLaughlin, the only one who knows how to execute it.Since the death of Segovia, I think you could easily make the case that McLaughlin is the world's greatest living guitarist, in terms of both breathtaking technique and all of the musical genres he's dared to survey. But I'd argue (and in fact already did so back in 2003) that McLaughlin's greatest moment with Miles Davis wasn't the much more celebrated Bitches Brew, but the next album the two men would record together, the blazing (and most definitely rocking) A Tribute To Jack Johnson.
(For McLaughlin in a much more tranquil vein, check out the above clip from the mid-1980s with his then wife, pianist Katia Labeque, which I've been looking for an excuse to post for a while now.)
On the left, everyone's ultimately a victim, no matter how powerful he or she is--in this case, one of the most successful women on television: "CBS blames sexism for [Katie Couric's] bad ratings".
(Previous victimology spotted here.)
As Tim Graham wrote shortly after President Reagan passed away in 2004, "Think of everything Reagan did, and then add: He did it all before Fox News. He did it all before the Rush Limbaugh phenomenon. He did it all before the instant battle cry of his defenders could hit the Internet".
He did it all before C-SPAN caught on and people could enjoy the game of watching entire speeches and debates and then observing how the network tricksters discombobulated them into liberal hatchet jobs. He did it all when (well, eventually) the only conservative regular on the big networks was ABC's George Will, and at that time Will was still fashionably fussing about Americans being "taxophobic" and spurning Reagan's "Morning in America goo."Over at Town Hall, Stephen Bird flashes back to 1987 and "What the press saw at the Brandenburg Gate".
Update: The circle is complete: TV networks ignore the 20th anniversary of President Reagan’s "Tear Down This Wall" speech.
In the New York Sun, Ronald Radosh explores the early days of Pete Seeger:
The film's most egregious moment comes when it tells us that Mr. Seeger joined the Communist Party in 1939, and drifted out of it a decade later. It relates how in 1941 he joined the first folk music group, the Almanac Singers, which sang for the labor movement and the CIO. Next the film mentions that Mr. Seeger entered the Army during World War II, another sign of his patriotism.Fellow useful idiots to Stalin such as Dalton Trumbo and Charlie Chaplin would make similar pivots at the same moment; it's even possible to observe 180-degree pivots today if you look carefully enough.Nowhere does this documentary describe the Almanac Singers' very first album, "Songs for John Doe." As readers of this newspaper know, in August 1939 Hitler and Stalin signed a pact and became allies. Overnight the communists took a 180-degree turn and became advocates of peace, arguing that Nazi Germany, which the USSR had opposed before 1939, was a benign power, and that the only threat to the world came from imperial Britain and FDR's America, which was on the verge of fascism. Those who wanted to intervene against Hitler were servants of Republic Steel and the oil cartels.
In the "John Doe" album, Mr. Seeger accused FDR of being a warmongering fascist working for J.P. Morgan. He sang, "I hate war, and so does Eleanor, and we won't be safe till everybody's dead." Another song, to the tune of " Cripple Creek" and the sound of Mr. Seeger's galloping banjo, said, "Franklin D., Franklin D., You ain't a-gonna send us across the sea," and " Wendell Willkie and Franklin D., both agree on killing me."
The film does not tell us what happened in 1941, when — two months after "John Doe" was released — Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. As good communists, Mr. Seeger and his Almanac comrades withdrew the album from circulation, and asked those who had bought copies to return them. A little later, the Almanacs released a new album, with Mr. Seeger singing "Dear Mr. President," in which he acknowledges they didn't always agree in the past, but now says he is going to "turn in his banjo for something that makes more noise," i.e., a machine gun. As he says in the film, we had to put aside causes like unionism and civil rights to unite against Hitler.
Update: Orrin Judd puts it succinctly: "A few good tunes for nursery school kids don't make up for being an agent of a murderous enemy power".
In 2000, Tom Wolfe wrote "Hooking Up: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the Second Millennium: An American's World":
By the year 2000, the term "working class" had fallen into disuse in the United States, and "proletariat" was so obsolete it was known only to a few bitter old Marxist academics with wire hair sprouting out of their ears. The average electrician, air-conditioning mechanic, or burglar-alarm repairman lived a life that would have made the Sun King blink. He spent his vacations in Puerto Vallarta, Barbados, or St. Kitts. Before dinner he would be out on the terrace of some resort hotel with his third wife, wearing his Ricky Martin cane-cutter shirt open down to the sternum, the better to allow his gold chains to twinkle in his chest hairs. The two of them would have just ordered a round of Quibel sparkling water, from the state of West Virginia, because by 2000 the once-favored European sparkling waters Perrier and San Pellegrino seemed so tacky.In contrast, what did The New Republic think of the finale of HBO's Sopranos?European labels no longer held even the slightest snob appeal except among people known as "intellectuals," whom we will visit in a moment. Our typical mechanic or tradesman took it for granted that things European were second-rate. Aside from three German luxury automobiles—the Mercedes-Benz, the BMW, and the Audi—he regarded European-manufactured goods as mediocre to shoddy. On his trips abroad, our electrician, like any American businessman, would go to superhuman lengths to avoid being treated in European hospitals, which struck him as little better than those in the Third World. He considered European hygiene so primitive that to receive an injection in a European clinic voluntarily was sheer madness.
the thing is so good it is almost not American.As Bill Quick writes:
And this bit of smug, preening bullshit from TNR’s Leon Wieseltier is precisely what is wrong with the American academy today.Punitive liberalism? How very bourgeois.Consider what Wieseltier is actually saying here: If something reaches a pinnacle of quality, then it cannot be American. It must be un-American because, as everybody he knows, reads, or speaks with is aware, America can only produce crap. So a fictional television “study” of a mob of neurotics clustered around sociopaths and psychopaths engaged in a murderous criminal enterprise is “art” so “good,” it must be “not American.”
Today is the twenty year anniversary of one of the great speches of the 20th century. National Review and Power Line have retrospectives; Steve Hayward explains how President Reagan came to say it, over the objections of many of his advisors.
Last night I looked at CNN's continuely declining ratings; BizzyBlog explains why, with an exploration of the pioneering news network's decade-long reign of error. Meanwhile, Stone Dead Parrots wonders when CNN's stone dead ratings will be reflected in its ad revenues.
(Title via Hugh Hewitt.)
A Reuters article begins thusly:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid rejected on Monday another prominent senator's call for a military strike against Iran, saying a U.S. attack would destabilize the Middle East.Exactly. Hasn't destabilizing the Middle East been the whole idea since about mid-morning 9/11/01? (Actually, in a sense, it's been the whole idea since around 1998.)
Related: Power Line's John Hinderaker looks at Sen. Reid's poll numbers:
Scott Rasmussen's latest survey has Harry Reid in a dead heat with Scooter Libby, each with a 19% approval rating. And Reid hasn't even been convicted of anything yet! Rasmussen attributes Reid's dismal standing to his visibility on the immigration bill, and that no doubt played a part. I suspect, though, that word of the Democrats' corruption is starting to leak out.UPDATE: One more thing--given that President Bush's approval rating is approximately double Harry Reid's, how soon do you think the media will start referring to Reid's "unpopularity" and his low approval ratings every time he's mentioned in a story?
Yeah, that's what I think, too.
Victim politics reaches its apogee: Hillary's one of the most powerful women in America, and come November of 2008, could be the most powerful person in the world, but as Newsbusters notes, for the Chicago Tribune's ombudsman, "Using Hillary's First Name In Headlines Is Sexist, 'Diminishing'".
Because no matter how successful you are, you're always a victim.
"It was a scene eerily reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s: protestors outside a Jewish-owned store warning anyone attempting to enter and spend their money that the premises were owned by a certain type of person".
Grim as the forecast this story portends, I know one Manhattanite who should definitely enjoy it.
Sorry--just reading this headline through Rosie-colored glasses.
Eschewing conventional wisdom, Jules Crittenden isn't afraid to declare a lame duck when he sees one. Or maybe two, depending upon how you look at them.
Disgraced former anchorman laces into perky but ineffective replacement. Schadenfreude overload ensues.
Speaking of stats, here's one you won't find on CNN anytime soon:
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- "I worry about CNN more than I do about CNN.com."Immediately after the 2004 presidential election, a Republican strategist told National Review that even though "The ferocity of the assault [by the MSM in general] was not anything anyone had ever seen before", it was "important to remember that if something was on CNN in the middle of the afternoon, it was being seen by only a couple hundred thousand people."Many news junkies already feel the same way, but when the person expressing concern about the state of the 24-hour TV news network is Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons, the guy who ultimately runs both properties, it's pretty telling.
Mr. Parsons, who was discussing the company's entire portfolio at a London media conference last week, was positive on the subject of AOL ("we have it in a nice track") and slightly less effusive about Time Inc. ("they are going to be around for a long time, but they're not going to grow like they have in the past") but bordering on pessimistic about the state of his cable-news operation.
For good reason: CNN's ratings have been on a steady decline since 2003, when it regularly got 689,000 households to tune in each day, to a low of 383,000 last year, according to Nielsen Media Research. For the first six months of this year, it's up to 431,000. Fox News, its younger, more conservative competitor, routinely trounces it in the ratings, often garnering twice the household ratings and recently besting CNN in prime time for key coverage of the presidential debates.
Will that number be even smaller in 2008? Maybe--which could be why Parsons seems to be sweating more than a little this year, as his "We are the Sioux nation" gaffe last month indicates.
Update: Speaking of gaffes, here's the latest production from HBO, a division of Time-Warner.
Related: Yet another competitor to CNN's daily viewership numbers emerges--or more accurately, converges...
More: Uncorrelated notes:
Instapundit averages 190,000 a day. Huffpo gets 600,000 unique visitors every day.You'd think.Unfortunately for Glenn Reynolds, he's getting nowhere near the 400 million in ad revenue CNN is getting for its poor performance.
That kind of revenue disparity is a signal for change. Instapundit's demographic is almost certainly more interesting than CNN's which averages nears 60 years old.
Ed Morrissey links to a Washington Times article containing some statistics regarding the Council on American Islamic Relations that you won't be seeing on the evening news anytime soon:
According to tax documents obtained by The Times, the number of reported members spiraled down from more than 29,000 in 2000 to less than 1,700 in 2006, a loss of membership that caused the Muslim rights group's annual income from dues to drop from $732,765 in 2000, when yearly dues cost $25, to $58,750 last year, when the group charged $35.Indeed--as Morrisey adds:
The organization instead is relying on about two dozen individual donors a year to contribute the majority of the money for CAIR's budget, which reached nearly $3 million last year. ...Critics of the organization say they are not surprised membership is sagging, and that a recent decision by the Justice Department to name CAIR as "unindicted co-conspirators" in a federal case against another foundation charged with providing funds to a terrorist group could discourage new members.
M. Zuhdi Jasser, director of the American-Islamic Forum for Democracy, says the sharp decline in membership calls into question whether the organization speaks for 7 million American Muslims, as the group has claimed.
For a group that only has 1,700 members, it has an inordinate amount of political clout. The fact that roughly 25 people paid $3 million and represented the majority of its financing should raise some eyebrows. It comes to an average contribution of $120,000 each for last year alone.But don't expect the legacy media to investigate anytime soon. They've got bigger stories to persue.Who are these fundraisers and what do they want? The organization just got named an unindicted co-conspirator in support of the terrorist group Hamas. They pressed hard for Keith Ellison's election here in Minnesota; it would be helpful to know who these donors are to understand the motivation behind using CAIR's rapidly-diminishing resources for the election.
Much more on the Times and John Edwards from Jim Geraghty, who writes, "I would mention to the Edwards campaign that when New York Times magazine writers are mocking your excuses, you're in trouble".
Read the whole thing, as they say in at least one of the Two Americas.
Related: Jim finds the Times waxing nostalgic for the Great Depression. In a sense, so is Rich Lowry!
Update: From the Times to Time: "Edwards Strategist Not Liberal Enough for Commenters at Time Blog".
Glenn Reynolds has a fascinating take on how the rise of identity politics on the left has caused politicians such as John Edwards to appear increasingly phony--even to a fellow lefty like Paul Krugman:
In his latest column -- link here for Times $elect subscribers -- Paul Krugman complains about the cult of "authenticity" in politics, and how it makes people like John Edwards come across as phonies. FDR was a rich guy who cared about the poor, he says, so why can't John Edwards be?And yet, something that Patrick Ruffini wrote during the time of the Oscar Awards still holds very much true, I think:Well, John Edwards is no FDR. But the answer to Krugman's complaint is found in the post 1960s political zeitgeist. Back before identity politics, and the notion that "the personal is political," the idea of a rich guy representing poor people was entirely plausible. He could be rich, but still have ideas about poverty, and care about them. But now that we have identity politics and the like, that's impossible: If only a woman can represent women, only a black person can represent blacks, etc. -- Barbara Boxer even suggested that Condi Rice couldn't understand mothers because she was childless -- then obviously only a poor person can represent poor people. And since there are no poor people in American political office, poor people perforce go unrepresented. Thus, the "progressive" causes of identity politics and personalization mean that the progressives' key clients can't get "authentic" representation. This is probably bad for the country, but it's certainly a bed that the progressives have made for themselves.
Of course, maybe Krugman's column on how Really Rich People can authentically Care About The Poor is just a stealth defense of the New York Times' advertisers:
Did anyone else read the NYT magazine this weekend? It was all about poverty and income inequality. Some articles were better than others, and I didn't read them all, but the hilarious part wasn't in the articles. It was in the ads. On page after page, the magazine hawked luxury condos starting in the 8 figures. Pictures of these glorious $10 million-plus pied-à-terres with 24-hour doormen, room service and Master of the Universe views of Manhattan were punctuated with ads for financial advisers and garish jewelry — and, oh yeah, essays on what to do about the poor. There was an almost Edwardian irony to the whole thing; a magazine for the New Aristocrats discussing the poor and how they live with a mixture of dispassionate, almost academic, bemusement and charity ball passion.It's all making sense, now . . . .
Liberals get all pissy when conservatives decide to tune out institutions that don't represent them and create new ones -- just look at the sneering at "Faux News" and Rush and homeschooling and values voters. In Hollywood as in mainstream media, there is a price to be paid when an institution decides to leverage its prestige to push a political position where none is warranted; it's a price that is paid in viewership, influence, and profit -- in this case, a 30% falloff in viewers.That was only two years ago, and it's safe to say that liberals still continue to "get all pissy when conservatives decide to tune out institutions that don't represent them and create new ones". But given the near universality of identity politics and related "absolute moral authority" claims amongst the left, should they really be that surprised when a group of voters seek media (whether it's news or entertainment) that they feel best represents their own identity?
Libertas's "Dirty Harry" writes that HBO and Tom Hanks will producing a mini-series version of Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. As Variety states, the ten-part series "will debunk long-held conspiracy theories and establish that assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone". Dirty Harry adds:
Liberals loath remembering that Kennedy was a fervent anti-Communist. But he was. Kennedy was the guy who tried to invade Cuba for crying out loud. Yes, take out Uncle National Healthcare. Kennedy was the guy who got us into Vietnam to stop Communism from spreading in Southeast Asia. The left doesn’t want to be reminded that their cherished martyr was much closer to Reagan in ideology (Kennedy also lowered taxes across the board and increased military spending) than John F’n Kerry.That's the thesis of James Piereson's brilliant Commentary essay last year, "Lee Harvey Oswald and the Liberal Crack-Up" which itself is being expanded--though not into a mini-series.The Vietnam War is the left’s Holy Grail of hate-justification for America. It defines who they are. It’s their theology and rallying point. But John F. Kennedy is also their Prince. So, to justify both a wild-eyed conspiracy must be created whereas Oswald was in fact an anti-Communist used by the military industrial complex to assassinate Kennedy because Kennedy was going to pull our forces out of Vietnam.
As for modern-day displacement, Allahpundit explores “The Soft Trutherism of the Mainstream Media".
One of the themes of Virginia Postrel's terrific The Future And Its Enemies is that for many, top-down control of markets can seem awfully reassuring. There are still lots of people who preferred the simplicity of the days when AT&T was synonymous with telephone, because of how simple and universal it made things. But never mind that rates for a long-distance call were much, much more expensive before AT&T was broken up. Similarly, many people long for the days when men wore suits when flying, even though an airlines ticket cost a heckuva lot more before the industry was deregulated to the casual masses.
As Glenn Reynolds writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Andrew Keen, the author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture (and at least for a time, a frequent contributor to Pajamas Media, ironically enough) waxes nostalgic for the days of mass media:
Keen's thesis is that talent is rare and that worthwhile products - whether we're talking about news reporting, music composition or filmmaking - can be produced only if that talent is nurtured at great length and filtered to a great extent. Only a long and expensive process of refinement can dispose of the common dross and produce the pure gold of quality work.Remember when films like Rollerball and Network hyped the dangers of a world controlled by a handful of big corporations? That's exactly the mid-20th century mass media model that Keen prefers.This argument would be more impressive if the "quality work" from the big media organizations he describes were, well, golden. Keen references Bach and the Beatles as examples of quality music, but when he complains about the music industry's current travails he doesn't note that today's record industry isn't giving us Bach and the Beatles - it's giving us Britney. Likewise, he blames Internet piracy for declining movie attendance when the cause appears to be elsewhere: a recent Zogby poll found that people are going to the movies less often because they think the films stink and, in a more literal way, so do the theaters.
Likewise, Keen decries the decline of the news business, invoking Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, without mentioning that today's top newscasters include Dan "Forged Documents" Rather, Katie Couric and Geraldo Rivera. A lesser breed, by any standard. Keen even complains about declining radio listenership leading to financial problems for Clear Channel broadcasting - a chain many people regard as having ruined radio in America through its imposition of rigid formatting and too many commercials. What Keen sees as a tragedy, many will see as just desserts.
And that's the story of Keen's elites overall. The Golden Age of mass culture didn't end just because the Internet let people do their own thing. It ended because people looked at the low - and steadily declining - quality of mass-marketed television, radio, news, films, and music and concluded that they could do better. And they are often right, not necessarily because the amateur productions are so terrific (though sometimes they are), but because the big media productions are so often dreadful.
Like U.S. car companies in the 1970s, the television networks, movie and record studios, newspapers, and radio stations grew comfortable in their protected positions, and forgot how (or just didn't bother) to make good products. Now their market shares are declining, as people find substitutes. And while people in the 1970s had to look to Japan or Germany for substitute cars, they have only to look to the Internet for substitute sources of news and entertainment - sources that are often, Keen's assertions notwithstanding, just as good as their traditional versions. (Amateur embedded bloggers such as Michael Yon, Michael Totten, Bill Roggio or Bill Ardolino, for example, are producing some of the very best reporting from Iraq, supported by ads on their blogs and donations from their readers, not by big media organizations.)
Sturgeon's Law is an absolute in the sense that if, as Theodore Sturgeon quipped, "Ninety percent of everything is crud", then today's explosion of information and entertainment on the 'Net produces an exponentially greater amount of crud then the mid-20th century, when there were only three television networks, a handful of movie and TV studios and record labels, and only one or two newspapers per big city. So it is that much more difficult to mine the gold from the dross. But I'd rather have many more news and entertainment choices to pick from then less, (plus the option of creating in these genres myself) particularly when today's legacy medias, despite more competition than ever before, continue to underperform.
As Glenn Reynolds writes:
They've already used ambulances, so why should anyone be surprised when Palestinian terrorists use a car labelled "TV" to stage an attack? It's all upside for them -- no significant outrage now, and maybe it'll lead the Israelis to accidentally shoot up a truck full of real reporters, which will then cause worldwide condemnation. Of the Israelis.Of course, Palestinian terrorists and news agencies have always been on particularly good terms; yet another reason why this development isn't all that surprising.
It must be tough being a television reporter; you really can't play favorites. Imagine if say, CBS's Mike Wallace, or CNN's Soledad O'Brien were seen hugging someone that they were covering. Not that such a thing would ever happen of course, but what would it say about their endless claims of objectivity and lack of bias?
Watch for regular blogging to resume shortly.
A commenter on the Brothers Judd Blog coins a great variation on Godwin's Law:
The instant I even hear the word "neocon" brought up, I immediately dismiss whovever is writing / talking as having absolutely nothing of any interest or value to say. The entire "neocon" concept is a crock. It never existed outside of a few political journals until the Bush admin, and since then has served as a catch-all polite expression of anti-semitism, anti-Americanism, and certainly anti-Bushism (BDS?).With the exception of those who used the word prior to 2001 (Commentary, National Review, the Weekly Standard all immediately come to mind), I'd say that's a perfectly viable rule.Neo-con! Booga Booga Booga! Hide the kids!
"Neo-con" is short for "turn the page now, and go on to to something worth reading".
Update: Further thoughts and links here.
Regarding the terrorist plot to blow up the fuel pipeline to JFK airport, Ed Morrissey writes:
This looks like one of the most serious plots brewing in the US since the 9/11 attacks. The most fascinating part of the story is the lack of coverage. We have seen little in any of the major newspapers about the JFK plot since last week, and even though almost all of them use the AP's wire service, none of them reported this development. I'm curious why.Let's ask Nora Ephron!
Helpful note for our California readers: merely substitute the word "Dude" for "Mate" in Tim Blair's latest Sunday Telegraph column, and all of his linguistic rules will work for you, as well.
Jules Crittenden finds that BDS is everywhere (kind of like Elvis)--even in posts defending Paris Hilton.
If Paris really wants to play this hand for all its worth, I suggest hiring Ramsey Clark to represent her in court, and printing Mumia or Che-style T-shirts. A working class hero is something to be!
Kimberly Strassel of Real Clear Politics writes:
There's been a capitulation on global warming, but it hasn't happened in the Oval Office. The Kyoto cheerleaders at the United Nations and the European Union are realizing their government-run experiment in climate control is a mess, one that's incidentally failed to reduce carbon emissions. They've also understood that if they want the biggest players on board--the U.S., China, India--they need an approach that balances economic growth with feel-good environmentalism. Yesterday's G-8 agreement acknowledged those realities and tolled Kyoto's death knell. Mr. Bush, 1; sanctimonious greens, 0.Read the whole thing.
(H/T: OJ)
Bill Quick, who gave the Blogosphere its name, believes that its starboard side was crucial in sinking--for now at least--the near-universally reviled immigration bill:
And I have to say that the right blogosphere as a whole did an excellent job of revealing and mobilizing this sentiment. First, we exposed the crudely hacked polls that claimed amnesty was overwhelmingly favored by those they polled. Second, we publicized the polls that showed the true state of affairs - that Americans hated this travesty - and thus gave folks who thought they were alone in their opposition the comfort of knowing that, far from being a lonely minority, they were part of a whopping majority. Third, we turned up the heat on congress, and kept it on flambe until the bill was toast. Fourth, we exposed the bill itself to public scrutiny, so that voters understood what was being attempted supposedly in their name. Fifth, we acted as instant response teams to the lies being told about the bill by the hacks, flacks, and whores desperate to pass it on behalf of the special interests they fronted for.On the other hand, Politico writes that it's not over yet.Ten years ago, this bill would have been passed and signed by the president before most Americans were even aware that it existed. Those days are over.
The right blogosphere has put many notches in its belt - Dan Rather, Trent Lott, Ports Dubai, Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzales (for SCOTUS), the destruction of the GOP congressional majorities, and now the Bush/Kennedy/McCain amnesty plan. This one was the biggest yet.
Pat yourselves on the back, folks. And welcome to the big leagues.
Che Guevara: "He’s the ultimate symbol of radical chic but was Che Guevara really a homophobic, racist square who personally ordered the jailing and executions of innocent men, women and children?"
Che detested rock and roll and railed against “long hairs,” “lazy youths,” and homosexuals. At one point, he wrote that the young must always “listen carefully - and with the utmost respect – to the advice of their elders who held governmental authority.”Read the whole thing, then someone tell Carlos Santana!
The New York Post notes:
The steamy e-mails that landed a CNN reporter in the news and out of a job detailed more than his adulterous affair - they revealed that the Africa correspondent apparently admitted paying militiamen to help him stage a story, according to several sources.Wow, CNN accused of faking news--I'm shocked, shocked!
Flashback: CNN--"The most busted name in news".
In case you haven't heard, Amnesty bill cloture vote fails, 45-50. The bill is dead...For now.
John Hawkins has "The Inside Story Of How The Senate Immigration Bill Died".
Update: "Mr. Bush, Build Up That Wall!"
ABC News' Claire Shipman on Russia: "Everybody is very happy with Vladimir Putin there".
Sure, but does he get these kind of results at the ballot box?
Michelle Malkin dons her Planet of the Apes mask to go Beneath The Planet Of The Wall Street Journal.
In other movie-themed news from the Blogosphere, Don Surber wonders if Keith Olbermann is Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. But who would be Andie MacDowell in that scenario?
Don't miss the Paris Hilton Prison Diaries, a rare piece of celebrity satire in the L.A. Times.
At least I think it's satire. With Hollywood (not to mention the L.A. Times itself) these days, it's awfully hard to tell.
(Via Tim Blair, who highlights Paris' thoughts on "the Jews and all the horrible things that happened to them during Vietnam".)
Or gets a bucket in his Buzz, or something like that. In any case, the Strib definitely hired the right man to oversee its nascent blog.
Writing about "The Other War" in Afghanistan, Michael Fumento writes that AP has at least one truther on its payroll:
One of the AP reporters says he believes 9/11 was a Bush administration conspiracy hung on al Qaeda. [Captain Richard] Slusher gives him hell about it — albeit in a good-natured way. I don't hear the other reporter sound out on the subject, but he never takes off his Che Guevara T-shirt. Maybe these two will provide unbiased footage and commentary notwithstanding their personal views — maybe not.Probably not.
Roger Ailes: "The candidates that can't face Fox, can't face Al Qaeda".
"So, if the Left insists that 4,000 deaths is reason to get out of Iraq, why does it want to get into National Health with a death rate 100 times higher?"
"The days of the independent, neutral war correspondent, objectively reporting from a war's front lines, are quickly coming to an end. In the future, a war correspondent will either effectively be a soldier for one faction of a conflict, or he will literally not survive in the war zone".
The word "objective" isn't truly applicable, of course, but otherwise, considering how poorly "The days of the independent, neutral war correspondent" have worked out for both sides of the equation (the US military and the MSM journalists who use it to score points with editors), a change in that tired paradigm is more than welcome.
Plenty of boobs of all types exposed at Jules Crittenden's Forward Cleavage, err, Forward Movement.
NBC-Universal chairman irked at his company's information leaked by a blogger. "I hate the blog world...it ends up interfering with people's lives".
As opposed to Big Media, whose leaks merely end up interfering with soldiers' lives.
(And note that the blogger in question is the late Cathy Seipp's bete noire Nikke Finke, an MSM veteran herself.)
It's hard to believe that England was once the embodiment of cool, but from Savile Row in the 1930s, to the early James Bond films and the Beatles, England could certainly be cool when she wanted to be. But to be "cool", it helps to know what you're about, and to maintain a certain inner reserve. It prevents aesthetic abortions such as the 2012 Olympics logo, of which James Lileks writes:
Seriously, what is the matter with people who come up with this? And what is the matter with the people who approved it? Ads that showed the logos have reportedly caused seizures among British epileptics, but I think this thing would make a fossilized femur bone suffer convulsive muscle spasms. If you can’t tell, it’s the year of the London games – 2012. I think it’s also meant to imply a human form – say, a discus thrower, or a runner bursting from the blocks. Whatever it is, it’s an aesthetic catastrophe, and would seem to indicate there’s no one around in the London Games who had the nerve to bark “rubbish, that; try again, and give me a proper logo with some bloody numbers.” I think there’s a point at which people lose the ability to pretend they have any sort of aesthetic criteria, and embrace whatever’s loud and ugly simply because loud and ugly is the style of the times. There’s always a fair amount of coin to be had for dissing the traditionalists, of course; I imagine that if someone submitted a logo with a flag or a bulldog they would have suffered a gentle sneer: still pining for the empire, eh, Smithson. Well, Kipling’s dead. Yes he is. Dig him up, you’ll find Posh Spice’s heel stuck in his heart, the coffin stuffed with I Heart Diana memorial teddy bears.Ugh, indeed. Peter Hitchens' The Abolition of Britain began by contrasting England's collectively dignified response to the death of Churchill (who in large part won the Second World War) in the mid-1960s, to Britain's emotional spasms over the death of Diana (who in large part modeled Versace) in the 1990s. Churchill would roll over in his grave if he saw what has happened to England's sensibilities even in the short period after Diana's death, let alone after his own.Ugh.
On the other hand, Glenn Reynolds notes that the possible military implications of the Olympic design. (Too bad the remaining members of Monty Python have gone reactionary--a sketch about "The Killer Logo" would have been a scream.)
Michael Rosenberg explains the secret rules of journalism. Number Six (quoted in the above headline) is only applicable to the