As we noted in February of 2003, during the Pleistocene era of our humble corner of cyberspace, CNN dusted off the Q-word three weeks before the liberation of Iraq began. This week, the New York Times similarly is "Fearing Another Quagmire in Afghanistan" a week after President Obama is in office.

As Jules Crittenden notes:

The real question raised by this article is why a major American newspaper ... currently bogged down in a considerable quagmire of its own ... would want to jump into the quagmire of quagmirism again. But it looks like we may be witnessing a fascinating evolution in which Obama, having adopted a number of key Bush war policies and practices, will be subjected to the same shoddy reporting practices.

Fortunately, the Times has a legendary Pulitzer-winning journalist to airdrop into that far-off land.

(Incidentally, I wonder if the Age of Obama has caused the Times' publisher to revise this sage moment of '60s-minted Radical Chic philosophizing?)

Reuters reports that "New York City fears return to 1970s."

With a few notable exceptions, needless to say.

Sherman Frederick, the publisher of the Las Vegas Review Journal writes, "As our president said, it is time to grow up":

There is a growing faction of the American left that seeks revenge more than righteousness.

Intolerant of dissenting views, this faction thinks as comedian Janeane Garofalo does that some members of the opposing political party should be "jailed." Terrorist acts (such as mailing envelopes of white power to Mormon temples because the gay marriage vote in California went the church's way) are seen by this faction as understandable and acts of legitimate political expression.

There is also an ugly racial component to it. We first saw it with Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who said, among other things, that white America had deliberately inflicted black Africa with AIDS.

When the Rev. Wright first hit the national stage, we hardly knew what to make of his irrational and separatist statements. Consequently, we pretty much ignored the substance of Wright's racially divisive rhetoric and focused on it as a day-to-day political story. It made us more comfortable, I think.

But in light of the things we saw at the inauguration, it may be time to revisit the dangers of intolerance and hate -- no matter the color of the person who makes them -- and nip this ugly mean streak in the bud.

He's absolutely right, but he lost me with that last sentence. Nip it in the bud? This isn't exactly a new development: Garofalo's shtick dates back to 2003. The origins of the black liberation theology that fuels Obama's former spiritual advisor date back to the 1960s, not coincidentally, the terrorist heyday of Bill Ayers and other paramilitary Obama supporters. Radical payback for opposing views isn't exactly new, either.

Back in mid-2004 with an election year in full swing, Charles Krauthammer coined "the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release":

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five best sellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came 9/11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

Stripped of his halo, the president's ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally once again human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is re-elected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.

The media's pressure cooker would pop yet again the following year: as Mickey Kaus wrote at the time, Katrina allowed them to go nuclear on Bush without sounding unpatriotic, unlike their GWOT and Iraq-bashing coverage.

So this isn't exactly a new development in politics--this is merely SOP for the American left.

"What if the National Portrait Gallery had the graffiti it showcases in the exhibit vandalized on the side of their building? It would be helpful to have even a small amount of education."

David Horowitz has an exceptional piece on today's transition of power, placing it into both America's long-term history, and the last forty years of the left's culture war upon that tradition. As an up and coming player in Chicago politics, Barack Obama fell in with those who sought the latter; as the nation's 44th president, Horowitz lists numerous helpful signs of him embracing the former, richer tradition.

Which isn't all that dissimilar from the career path of Horowitz himself, come to think of it. As Paul Mirengoff writes, "David Horowitz may not have seen it all, but he has seen more than just about all of us, and from both sides of the political divide."

Paul quotes just about all of it, but I'll merely direct you to either link and strongly suggest reading the whole essay.

In "A Manual for Left-Wing Living", his new article in the Wall Street Journal, Kyle Smith reads Nation magazine's Guide To The Nation so you don't have to. Here's a sample:

In Monty Python's "Life of Brian," the People's Front of Judea was always prepared to respond to any crisis with an immediate burst of discussion. In "The Nation Guide to the Nation," praise is showered on the Brecht Forum cultural center in New York, which the editors note was recommended in 2000 by the Village Voice as the "Best place to start thinking about the revolution." Keep cogitating, revolutionistas. Someday your putsch will come.

Read the rest--then stop by Kyle's fine blog. (Berets, turtlenecks, sunglasses and bongos optional, of course.)

Headline on Contact Music.com: "Benicio Del Toro--'Che Guevara Was A Warrior, Like Batman.'"

Which fits nicely alongside the riff Oliver Stone went off on immediately after 9/11 that terrorists are like Einstein. Both quotes speak volumes of the moral inversion that is modern (and by modern, I mean insanely regressive) Hollywood.

(Found via "Big Hollywood", appropriately enough.)

Betsy Newmark reminds readers of the other side of Che Guevara:

Like the useful idiots who used to proudly wear their Mao jackets, now we have uncounted millions buying the Che T Shirts, putting up the poster, getting a Che tattoo, and buying tickets to see movies that portray Guevara as simply an idealistic revolutionary out to help the underclass. Actor Benicio del Toro who portrays him in the current film compares Che to Jesus except without that whole turn-the-other-cheek nonsense. It's a depressing commentary on the delusions of idealism that have led so many to idolize this guy and turn their own cheek to the reality of history.

Of course, as Mark Gladdblatt reminds us with a round-up of some of Che's more infamous quotes, the real Che was just a tad less sentimental than his modern disciples:

"In fact, if Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm."

Which of course sounds like something your average university Decon 101 professor would say to his freshman class. No wonder radical college professors like Bill Ayers (who emulated Che's actions) and Ward Churchill (who nostalgically emulates Che's poses) think he's Che chic.

At NewsBusters Kyle Drennen spots CBS with their shoe in their mouth:

According to CBS correspondent Richard Roth, in a report on Monday's CBS Early about an Iraqi journalist throwing a shoe at President Bush during a Baghdad press conference, the incident was reminiscent of the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein five years earlier: "Mr. Bush's message of progress was eclipsed in Baghdad by a sign of his unpopularity...The symbolism wouldn't have been lost on Iraqis, for whom shoes can be used to show extreme contempt, as with the footwear beaten against the statue of Saddam Hussein toppled by Marines five years ago."

Of course, in 2002, when Saddam held his last "election", CBS hilariously reported:

(CBS) Iraq declared Saddam Hussein the winner Wednesday - by an 11 million-to-0 margin - in a war-shadowed referendum on his two-decade military rule, sending celebratory gunfire crackling from the streets and rooftops of Baghdad.

The 100 percent turnout, 100 percent 'yes' vote shows all Iraqis are poised to defend Saddam against American forces, the country's No. 2 man said.

"If they come, we will fight them in every village, and every house," said Izzat Ibrahim, vice chairman of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council, announcing results on what Iraq billed as a people's referendum on keeping Saddam in power another seven years.

"Every home will be a front, and every farmer, every shepherd, every Iraqi, will play his role," Ibrahim said. "All Iraqis are armed now, and by God's will we will triumph."

* * *

CBS News Correspondent Tom Fenton, reports voters going to the polls in Baghdad faced a simple choice - to vote "yes" or "no" - and everyone seemed to be voting "yes."

Whether that's because they love their leader - as many people said they did - or for other reasons, was hard to tell.

A United Nations human rights report says 500 people were jailed in the last referendum after they voted "no."

Some voters went to extremes to make it clear where they stood.

"I love Saddam more than myself," one man told CBS News, as he wrote "yes" on his ballot in blood - his own blood.

Ibrahim, announcing the vote, said all 11,445,638 eligible voters had cast ballots, and all for Saddam.

"Someone who does not know the Iraqi people will not believe this percentage, but it is real," Ibrahim said. "Whether it looks that way to someone or not. We don't have opposition in Iraq."

Iraqi officials said popular outrage at the U.S. threats to Saddam's regime made the turnout and percentage even higher than in 1995, when Saddam received a 99.96 percent 'yes' vote.

Iraqi media compared it to Bush's 2000 election victory, eked out in the Electoral College despite losing to Al Gore in the popular vote.

"The truth of the matter is that he (Bush) won by a fraction of the votes, and this fraction was engineered by sly lawyers' games," said the state-run Iraqi Daily. "Maybe this is one of the main reasons for his hysterical threats on the Iraqi choice!"

Of course. More explorations of the Memory Hole, here.

Meanwhile, Power Line reviews HBO's whitewashed miniseries about Saddam and finds more than a little equivocation:

There is much more that could be said. But let us sum up: HBO and the BBC want us to see Saddam as a family man, a tyrant at home, a dictator at work, who became this way because his stepfather beat him. He was, in this version, an ordinary kind of dictator and this was an ordinary kind of Middle Eastern authoritarian regime run as a family business. The trouble is it was not. Saddam was uniquely brutal in his rise through the Ba'athist Party. His regime sought to eliminate entire groups from the nation. He launched two aggressive wars against neighbouring states. This was not a normal authoritarian regime, nor even a bad one. Saddam was a genocidal dictator who terrorized his own people. This attempt to normalize him is a disgrace.

Saddam became a dictator "because his stepfather beat him"? Moviemakers seem remarkably generous when it comes to forgiving a tyrant's excesses when they can blame them all on a dysfunctional childhood.

More Hollywood forgiveness offered here.

If you gnashed your teeth at Nick Gillespie's video look at Hollywood's obsession with terrorist chic, you're really going to hate "'Che' It Ain't So", Kyle Smith's review of Steven Soderbergh's endless encomium to everyone's favorite murderous thug and T-shirt icon. For the rest of us, here's a sample:

Meet Che Guevara. Just think of him as Jesus plus Abraham Lincoln with a touch of Moses and Dr. Doug Ross. After 4 1/2 hours of watching Dr. Ernesto "Che" Guevara heal the sick, teach the illiterate, daze the women, execute the lawless, defeat the corrupt, uplift the peasantry and spew the sound bite, I was convinced there would be a scene in which he turned water to Bacardi.

You can't spell cliche without "Che." And as I endured this mad dream directed - or perhaps committed - by Steven Soderbergh, I wondered where I'd seen it all before. The booted stomping through the greensward, the jungly target shooting? It's a remake of Woody Allen's "Bananas," right? Minus punch lines - or perhaps with them. "We are in a difficult situation," Che observes, at a point when his army is surrounded and forced to eat its horses.

The story of the Argentine doctor Ernesto "Che" Guevara is played with much broody self-importance by Benicio Del Toro. It will be shown in two parts after its one-week opening run. That way, on consecutive evenings, it can bore everyone but activist grad students.

Read the whole thing.

Nick Gillespie debunks Che chic in awesome new video from Reason.TV:

I was glad to see this moment from 2005 mentioned--and described as "Wearing a swastika in a synagogue."

Update: If you gnashed your teeth at Nick Gillespie's video look at Hollywood's obsession with terrorist chic, you're really going to hate "'Che' It Ain't So", Kyle Smith's review of Steven Soderbergh's endless encomium to everyone's favorite murderous thug and T-shirt icon. For the rest of us, don't miss it.

Bill Ayers admits that--surprise!--Obama was, in Ayers' own words, "a neighbor and family friend." Charles Johnson writes that "Whatever you think of Ayers, he played this one smart":

He stayed out of the news until Obama was safely elected, because he knew if he admitted the personal friendship, and expressed his real opinions about radicalizing students, reparations, abolishing prisons, etc., his relationship with Obama would--rightfully--become a major issue in the campaign. And he counted on the media not to investigate him.

And with ABC's post-election softball interview with Ayers now online, you don't need a Weatherman to know that the MSM will blow--especially during a presidential election.

Allahpundit--with an assist from the late great SoxBlogger himself sums it up:

One of the last things Dean Barnett said to me was that, as best he could tell, Barack Obama is "a good guy and a decent man." I don't think he'd mind me telling you that, especially under the circumstances. It's a testament to his generosity of spirit that even in the heat of a campaign, with every reason to think the worst of his opponent, Dean couldn't help but give him the benefit of the doubt. That's Barnett all over, and that's what made him an indispensable man whom we've been forced, horrendously, to dispense with.

I offer that as comfort to those of you who have no faith in The One but who do have faith in, and abiding affection for, DB. My guess is he'd have handled the news tonight with the same magnanimity that distinguished all of his writing. So in that spirit, congratulations to Barry O on a race superbly run and to our country for not having let the wrong reasons deter it from making the wrong choice. I'll never be a fan, but I swear I'll never take a nutroots posture either in relishing his failures because it helps my party. Like it or not, he's my president. As a great man once said, country first.

Indeed. An interview today with Bill Ayers provides a hidden ray of sunshine and some hope for the future:

In his first interview since he became an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign, Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground leader, said today that he had a distant relationship with Barack Obama and that Obama's opponents had turned him into "a cartoon character."

The Black Panthers seen in Philadelphia today also looked like cartoon characters, which is how those who practice the now forty year old sturm und drang of radical chic should look in the 21st century.

Megan McArdle wrote today that:

Whether or not you are for Obama, the candidate, I think you have to admit that there is one pretty exciting thing happening today: we will never again live in an America where a black man can't be elected president.

Spot-on. Barack Obama's victory should once and for all finally break the notion that race is a barrier to any goal in the United States. And those who've built their power from anger and racial divisiveness, like Ayers, the Panthers, and Reverend Wright should now be mocked like the small men they are. It will be up to Obama as president to transcend the figures of his past--and it's up to the rest of us as a nation to finally put them into the rearview mirror.

Good luck over the next four years President Elect Obama--and as this Onion satire suggests (as does your own vice presidential nominee), you're going to need it.

Radical chic rocks the vote! In Chicago, noted academic Bill Ayers and renowned UFO-ologist Louis Farrakhan are both seen waiting to vote at Shoesmith Elementary School.

And gosh, I'm sure every Philadelphia resident feels infinitely safer when he sees a "Black Panther poll watcher guarding the door to the polling station with a nightstick."

(Wonder who they're voting for?)

Meanwhile, just to remind you that it is indeed Philadelphia:

GOP Election Board members have been tossed out of polling stations in at least half a dozen polling stations in Philadelphia because of their party status. A Pennsylvania judge previously ruled that court-appointed poll watchers could be NOT removed from their boards by an on-site election judge, but that is exactly what is happening, according to sources on the ground.

I'm not sure if W.C. Fields would still rather be in today's Philadelphia, but they've certainly manged to transform voting into a comedic farce.

The Weekly Standard's blog looks at "what might have been."

Forget the Black Panthers, hobnobbing with High Society on Park Avenue, happily dining on "asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi". Bill Ayers is the workingman's unrepentant former domestic terrorist, and as such has earned longest of long shot third party presidential candidate Dave Burge's coveted support.

(Sirhan Sirhan could not be reached for comment.)

Jonah Goldberg updates a Boomer/Gen-X Saturday morning video chestnut: "The new Schoolhouse Rock cartoon: 'Conjunction: a word that connects a racist attack and Barack Obama'":

This week, an editorial writer for the Kansas City Star denounced John McCain and Sarah Palin for suggesting that Obama is a socialist because he wants to "spread the wealth around." Don't they understand that "socialist" has always been a racist codeword used by bigots like J. Edgar Hoover to demonize black activists like W.E.B. Du Bois?

A couple problems: First, as best I can remember, Marx, Engels, Lenin, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas, and Michael Harrington do not usually get a lot of attention during Black History Month. Second, as writer Michael Moynihan recently noted, Du Bois wasn't merely a socialist, he was a Stalinist! (Du Bois was not entirely unsympathetic to the Nazis, either.) [Paul Robeson was also pretty keen on Uncle Joe--Ed] Besides, when did "socialist" stop being an anti-Semitic codeword for Jew? Maybe when the left started going batty over "neocons."

I'm pretty sure I received the memo replacing the outdated terminology a while back from the liberal Bletchley Park.

From the department of "Be Careful What You Wish For", in my recent "Bonnie & Nixon" video, I incorporated a little of the audio from Bobby Kennedy's March 1968 speech at the University of Kansas, in which he quoted early 20th century progressive William Allen White's call for violence and upheaval by way of higher education:

"I am also glad to come to the home state of another great Kansan, who wrote, 'If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.'"

As to bring things full circle (and then some), note who's namechecked on the dedication page of a book authored by a noted '60s rioter and rebel turned academician much in the news recently.

Somebody has been watching too much NBC.

"George this is of what I'm talking about. This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood who's a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from..."

Peter Wood's 2007 book, A Bee In The Mouth, explored the growing anger in American politics.

It's on full display, here, and here. Though of course, don't expect the Victorian Gentleman to investigate.

In the Weekly Standard, Sam Schulman asks, "Why is Bill Ayers a respectable member of the upper middle class and Sarah Palin contemptible?"

Pour yourself a Johnnie Walker Black and remember. The presidential campaign was going to be about sex--the sex of the inevitable winning candidate. Then it was going to be about race. We dreamed we would atone for slavery and the Berlin Airlift, impress Europe and charm the Arab world. But the undecided voters who will determine the winner are no longer interested in race or sex. They are looking at social class. Which ticket best expresses the values and tastes of the upper-middle-class--and captivates the rest of us who follow the lead of the upper-middles?

The class argument is why the Bill Ayers strategy won't do. In the sex and race eras, it would have worked nicely. Obama's longtime working collaboration with the radical educational theorist and retired terrorist would dramatize his carefully but hastily discarded political radicalism. But no longer. The anti-Ayers publicists are quite right about Ayers's malignity and Obama's connivance. But when they try to explain what Ayers has done in the past and still wants to do--turn schools into nurseries of revolution, make leftist views a condition for becoming a teacher, promote dictatorship, and glorify violence--they injure not help their cause. Class will always trump politics. Being the first in one's family to adopt liberal political sentiments or move to New York City means a step into the middle class, for most Americans, and an increase in social status. More extreme political radicalism lifts one a step or two higher.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn became Sixties royalty not because of the status of the Ayers family in Chicago, but because of their relish for violence. They attempted to kill, and celebrated the killings of others (like Charles Manson's victims and the murder of any number of cops), to set an example for the less privileged. "We've known that our job is to lead white kids to armed revolution. . . . Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don't do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way," said the future Mrs. Ayers in 1970. On the other hand, there were the masses of students who merely marched and flashed the peace sign. Socially, they were nowhere. That was the shock of the Kent State massacre--the veteran martyrs of Harvard's University Hall and Columbia's Low Library wondered that such a terrible and authentic event could have taken place at a far-away state school to people of whom we knew nothing.

Now mainstream Chicago regards Ayers as rehabilitated--but why?

Schulman's piece appears to have written before a certain Ohio tradesman became a household name. But the blowback caused by Joe's walk-on part in the cold civil war reminds us that it is very much a class war--and specifically, the left's attempts to eviscerate the middle and working classes.

Related: Jennifer Rubin writes, "Suddenly, the race card doesn't look as important as the class warfare card."

As I've written before here, the past two presidential elections have brought out numerous painful flashbacks from the dreadful late 1960s and early 1970s leftwing culture of radical chic anti-Americanism. But this post at The New Criterion by Michael Weiss is truly Six Degrees of Separation moment:

William Ibershof, the lead prosecutor of the Weathermen in 1972 (and so the Marcia Clark to Bill Ayers' O.J.), has written a letter to the editor of the New York Times in response to its article on Obama's association with the domestic terrorist. Ibershof does little beyond add another layer of sediment on top of a story that partisans of the Illinois senator, and evidently two-thirds of voters polled by Fox News, wish to see dead and buried. However, one point he makes merits attention for its historical irony:

I do take issue with the statement in your news article that the Weathermen indictment was dismissed because of "prosecutorial misconduct." It was dismissed because of illegal activities, including wiretaps, break-ins and mail interceptions, initiated by John N. Mitchell, attorney general at that time, and W. Mark Felt, an F.B.I. assistant director.

So Deep Throat's incompetence enabled Ayers escape jail, become a fixture in the radical groves of academia, and then head up an education program endowed by Richard Nixon's former ambassador to Great Britain.

As Yogi Berra said upon learning of the Jewish mayor of Dublin: Only in America.

Heh, indeed.^TM Weiss's post is titled "Nixonland", a topic we explored a bit in video form a couple of weeks ago.

That's the headline from Newsbusters, hence the quotation marks above. And it's not all that surprising from a six degrees of separation point of view. Walters was was in attendance at Leonard Bernstein's Park Avenue duplex for his infamous 1970 fundraiser for the Black Panthers--and the Panthers and Weathermen were this close.

(And still are!)

It's compare and contrast time! First up, this passage from academia's Ayers apologia:

All citizens, but particularly teachers and scholars, are called upon to challenge orthodoxy, dogma, and mindless complacency, to be skeptical of authoritative claims, to interrogate and trouble the given and the taken-for-granted. Without critical dialogue and dissent we would likely be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings to this day. The growth of knowledge, insight, and understanding--- the possibility of change--- depends on that kind of effort, and the inevitable clash of ideas that follows should be celebrated and nourished rather than crushed. Teachers have a heavy responsibility, a moral obligation, to organize classrooms as sites of open discussion, free of coercion or intimidation.

As witnessed by this moment at Brandeis:

Professor Donald Hindley, on the faculty for 48 years, teaches a course on Latin American politics. Last fall, he described how Mexican migrants to the United States used to be discriminatorily called "wetbacks." An anonymous student complained to the administration accusing Mr. Hindley of using prejudicial language. It was the first complaint against him in 48 years.

After an investigation, during which Mr. Hindley was not told the nature of the complaint, Brandeis Provost Marty Krauss informed Mr. Hindley that "The University will not tolerate inappropriate, racial and discriminatory conduct by members of its faculty." A corollary accusation was that students suffered "significant emotional trauma" when exposed to such a term. An administration monitor was assigned to his class. Threatened with "termination," Mr. Hindley was ordered to take a sensitivity-training class.

Call it "The Tyranny of Nice", to coin a phrase.

Or call it Anarcho-Authoritarianism, to borrow from an Fred Siegel's look at H.L. Mencken from a few years ago in the Weekly Standard, which I flashed back to earlier today, mainly because I was looking for a euphemism for "radical chic" in my post linking to Roger L. Simon's "Running On Empty" reminiscences on Bernadine Dohrn and her apologists in Hollywood:

The Sage of Baltimore needs to be placed in a broader intellectual context. The man who is still selectively celebrated by people like Rodgers, as if he were nothing more or less than an American iconoclast, was one of a number of anti democratic thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Some of them, like D.H. Lawrence, were proto-fascists; others, like H.G. Wells, were apologists for Stalin [Wells was no slouch as a proto-fascist himself, either--Ed]. But they all denounced democracy in the name of vitalism, eugenics, and a caste system run by an elite of superior men.

Part of the reason it's so hard to make sense of Mencken is that he was, paradoxically, an anarcho-authoritarian. He agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union on the importance of free speech. But while that organization, under the influence of principled men such as Felix Frankfurter, argued for such freedoms on the grounds that "a marketplace of ideas" (to use Justice Holmes's term) was the best method of arriving at the truth, Mencken supported it in order to shield superior men like himself from being hobbled by the little people. For the same reason, Mencken was a near anarchist when it came to America, but an authoritarian when it came to the iron rule of the Kaiser and General Ludendorff. We are more familiar with anarcho-Stalinists such as William Kunstler, who had a parallel attitude toward the United States and the Soviet empire, but it was Mencken who blazed the trail down which Kunstler and his ilk would travel.

That Ayers and Dohrn were consciously or not exploring concepts that were well over 60 years old at the height of their terrorist activities actually isn't all that surprising. When you're starting from zero, to borrow Tom Wolfe's line, it's easy to forget that you're also running in place--or at least in circles.

Victor Davis Hanson writes, "On the Ayers matter, there is only one question that matters":

After Ayers wrote his Fugitive Days (2001), and after he told the NY Times (on 9/11 of all dates!) that "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough," and adding when asked if he would do it all again, "I don't want to discount the possibility,'' did or did not Barack Obama continue to communicate at all with him in person and via email?

If so, that belies all his protestations that he was young when Ayers was bombing, or a mere casual acquaintance on boards and community projects. In other words, when the world knew via the New York Times, and a much publicized book tour in 2001, that Ayers felt no remorse about his bombing spree and terrorism, did Obama continue with his association? If so, ipso facto that is proof both of Obama's poor judgement and his later lack of candor in recalling his association with his terrorist-associate.

Jim Geraghty asks a related question: "Could you shake hands with William Ayers?"

Roger L. Simon makes a great observation:

The film Running on Empty was nominated for two Academy Awards for 1988 - one for its young star River Phoenix and the other for its writer Naomi Foner (she won the Golden Globe). I served with Naomi on the Writers Guild Board a couple of years later and we got to know each other pretty well. In those days, we were comrades on the left - more or less - and both "nominated" screenwriters.

Naomi's movie (an original script of hers) concerned life underground for veterans of the Weather Underground-about a couple and their son (Phoenix). Basically, to most of us, it was a fictional version of the hidden marriage of Wiliam Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. But it was more about Bernardine, really, because she was a hugely famous figure on the left for many years, talked of by some as an American version of Spain's La Pasionaria. I did not much care for what she did or said, even then. But I certainly recognized her charisma. And I knew that she was close to crazy. (Read the statements at the Bernardine link about the Tate-LaBianca murders.)

1988 was the same year that Barack Obama entered Harvard Law School. It was highly unlikely he did not know about Running on Empty. It was one of the most talked about movies of the year for serious people, like Ivy League law students. The subject of the film was clearly the ramifications of a life of violence on friends and family. And yet he choose to start his career in politics via Ayers-Dohrn (note the emphasis). And now he denies knowing who Ayers was or what he did. Well... as the saying goes... I lost it at the movies.

Running On Empty came out at the height of my film junky period, when I was subscribing to magazines such as Premiere, England's Sight & Sound and the American Film Institute's glossy monthly house organ, as I recall, each had laudatory articles about the movie, its radical chic plot, and its extremely well-known director, Sidney Lumet. Given the anarcho-authoritarian circles which the young Obama clearly aspired to at the time (one doesn't wind up spending years with Ayers, Dohrn and Wright by accident) he would likely have been infinitely more familiar with the movie than I was.

(Incidentally, the plot of movie, and the timing of the events it portrayed in docu-drama form squares remarkably well with Rick Perlstein's observations on the original radical chic movie, no?)

Kathy Shaidle suggests that the McCain campaign should make Bill Ayers "the hippie O.J.", adding:

It doesn't matter when Obama met up with Ayers, or how many meetings they ever had.

It's about the fact that Ayers went from domestic terrorist to "respected community leader", to the point where Ayers was throwing well attended fundraisers for Obama, and they sat on boards together.

Bill Ayers should never have achieved such respectable positions in the first place.

Bill Ayers should be sitting in jail, not on boards!

But that's how the 1960s Left's reputation-laundering works. Look at Angela Davis, and the convicted felon and torturer who invented (the Marxist inspired "holiday") Kwanzaa and, like Davis, is now a tenured prof.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Ayers was quoted in the New York Times as saying he and his wife only regretted that they hadn't blown up more buildings. People were reminded that Ayers wife praised the Manson family murders.

That story was widely remarked upon for incredibly obvious reasons.

That story alone would make any decent, intelligent person say afterward: "Wow, I better not be seen anywhere near this guy, let alone sit on a board with him or go to his frickin' house. Boy, would THAT ever look bad."

So that means Obama isn't a decent, intelligent person. Period.

He's just another craven, arrogant, Chicago style politician.

The McCain campaign needs to spin this as an anti-hippie, anti-lefty, culture wars story:

Ayers and his wife are dangerous criminals and traitors who got away with it, and are now well off and respected. At least the Rosenbergs got the chair...

Look at how average Americans view O.J. -- make Ayers the hippie O.J.

Ask folks how they'd feel if Charles Mason was a professor now too?

Look:

a guy who has been photographed, as late as 2001, stomping on the American flag is one of Obama's supporters. [Obama served with Ayers on a board during this period, Charles Johnson notes--Ed.]

It doesn't matter if Obama denounces Ayers tomorrow.

It doesn't matter if their connection is/was "tenuous".

Here's what matters:

What does it tell you about Obama and his policies and his worldview that people like Ayers and his ilk are obviously going to vote for the guy?

Do you really want to vote for the same guy that unrepentant, unpunished domestic terrorists vote for?

Yes or no?

Pretty simple, but the McCain camp is blowing it.

Of course--but that doesn't prevent the AP from slagging anyone attacking their candidate and friends.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey notes another former associate of Obama who openly* called for the US invading Israel:

Power's ultimate aim is to send a massive American or Western force into Israel to stop what Power apparently sees as an Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. She specifically states that the force has to be "massive", not like a Srebrenica- or Bosnia-sized force. Why would it need to be so large? In order to neutralize the Israeli Defense Force, and protect the forces of Fatah and Hamas.

Had Barack Obama kicked her off of his advisory panel (rumored to number 300) after making remarks like this, it could have assuaged fears about his intentions towards Israel. Instead, he invited Power to advise him after making these remarks. She resigned only after calling Hillary a monster and after insinuating that Obama may not retreat from Iraq in 16 months if the ground situation changed -- which Obama later adopted as his own position after the primaries.

The interview ran in 2002, the period when the left essentially went to ground during the culture war in the immediate wake of 9/11, only to explode in often violent protests and bitter rhetoric in 2003 and 2004, which Charles Krauthammer memorably described as "the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release."

Read More »

The Principalities And Powers blog has some interesting thoughts on my "Bonnie & Nixon" video from earlier this week--and welcome Founding Bloggers' readers, who are clicking over to it.

My "Bonnie & Nixon" video this week was inspired by a quote from Rick Perlstein to Reason magazine while he was promoting his new book, Nixonland. Orrin Judd has a lengthy review of Perlstein's book, here.

This past summer, Rick Perlstein, the author of the new biography called Nixonland, looked back on the period leading up to Richard Nixon's 1968 election and told Reason magazine that in his opinion, "Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left", adding:

"It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys--you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was."

It certainly was strange, compared with the nation's politics at the start of the 1960s.

In the latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti videoblog, we take a look back at the film, its radical chic times, and its champion--Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, who would reject traditional culture for "trash cinema." And we'll also look at Bobby Kennedy's Fascist Moment--and even a Bonnie & Clyde-related excerpt the fourth edition of Austin Bay and Jim Dunnigan's A Quick And Dirty Guide To War. Which sounds like one meaty, beaty, big and bouncy little video to me.

Tommy guns and fedoras are optional, of course.

(Previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, going back to the start of the year, can be found here.)

Update: Welcome readers of InstaPundit, the Brothers Judd, Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism blog at NRO, and--appropriately enough--the New Nixon Blog. Please look around, there's lots here we think you'll enjoy.

The legacy of the post-breakup Beatles comes full circle--the terrorists whom Yoko Ono publicly admires have told Paul McCartney, as Allahpundit puts it, "Play Israel and we'll kill you."

(Fellow 1960s Britpop vet Cat Stevens could not be reached for comment.)

While I've long thought that Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic was one of the most prescient essays on the moral collapse of the post-JFK left, in book form, it comes packaged with another Wolfe essay from 1970 that's somewhat overshadowed by the star power of Leonard Bernstein & Co. But Gerard Vanderleun spots a remarkably timely passage within "Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers", excerpted from a much longer block of the essay quoted by Steve Sailer.

(This video brings even more of that era back home.)

Wow, I was only kidding when I wrote that last headline, but Ed Morrissey writes, "Recreate 68? They're on their way."

He has a link to the live video feed of the Denver Post of the crowds in the street for those who want to see if the proverbial revolution really will be televised. On the other hand, as Ed notes, "So far, the protesters have managed to recreate '68 in at least one way ... reminding the nation to vote Republican."

Well that would ensure the most authentic recreation...

Update: The esteemed Zombie is in the midst of the scrum, fighting off the odd blast of pepper spray.

And look! It's a giant paper-mache puppet! Oh, sorry, that's Ward Churchill with his stylin' shades and Che beret--since paper-mache is literally French for "chewed-up paper", it's easy to get the two confused.

Jennifer Rubin writes, "The conservative blogosphere is agog: what was Barack Obama thinking?"

He took a story largely confined to the internet, (only briefly raised in the primary) about Obama's connection to former terrorist Bill Ayers, put it in his own ad, and then filed a claim trying to force the third-party 527 ad that first brought up the Obama-Ayers connection off the air. In the next 24 hours thousands if not millions of voters who never heard of or didn't understand the extent of the Obama-Ayers relationship are going to get a full education.

That Justice Department complaint is a stunt reeking of abject panic. Really, isn't this just unlimited free publicity for the McCain accusations? In the Right blogosphere there is a mix of amazement and delight. And in case you thought the McCain camp wasn't thrilled by this turn of events, read what Steve Schmidt has to say about it.

It is very hard to figure out the reasoning behind the Obama effort. Perhaps there is a deadly poll or maybe they think they can so skew the coverage as to insulate himself. But for now, it is just plain baffling.

Short of digging up Leonard Bernstein, at this point, there's really only one option left for Obama: start flaying about, yelling, "Make! Them! Stop!"--which is what another presidential candidate was doing right around this time four years ago. As James Lileks wrote back then:

John Kerry wants to be president because he is John Kerry, and John Kerry is supposed to be president. Hence his campaign's flummoxed and tone-deaf response to the swift boat vets. Ban the books, sue the stations, retreat, attack. Underneath it all you can sense the confusion. How dare they attack Kerry? He's supposed to be president. It's almost treason in advance. . . . Inconsistencies are irrelevant, because he's consistently John Kerry. And he's supposed to be president.

And as Tom Maguire writes, "Coming soon--'That's not the Bill Ayers I knew.'"

Obama better make sure he's driving one up-armored bus before he throws Ayers under it.

Words you rarely like to hear from a presidential candidate: "Beijing looks like a pretty good option."

In a devastating comparison, Maggie's Farm notes that Obama's gaffes have gotten so bad, he's beginning to make Bob Dylan sound sensible by comparison.

As Orrin Judd writes, "As tough is this ad is, consider how much information they have to provide you before they tie the whole message together. It takes twenty seconds longer than the voter's attention span...That said, it's like crack for us wonks."

And the left is reeling from the overdose; witness Michael Crowley of The New Republic's meltdown:

You thought Corsi was swift boating? This is swift boating. The 9/11 link is completely and utterly revolting.

Except that it's true on multiple levels: true in the actual definition of "Swift Boating", as opposed to the pejorative that the media want to think it is, and true in that Obama has to be comfortable on some level with domestic terrorism simply to be buds with Ayers, whose Radical Chic salad days not coincidentally occurred near-simultaneously with John Kerry's Winter Soldier phase. And as Allahpundit notes:

All of this punctuated, of course, but a reminder of how decidedly un-despicable the left would an ad along these lines targeting a conservative who was palsy walsy with an abortion bomber.

Of course, the timing is interesting: the Swift Vets waited until after the convention in 2004, and performed political jujitsu by using Kerry's "Reporting For Duty" speech against him; McCain is launching his pincer movement days before the convention--even before Obama has nominated his veep, which has got to be driving The One to bitter distraction--and hopefully, his colleagues in the Obamedia will all overreact as badly as Michael Crowley did above, thus writing McCain's next ad.

Preseason's officially over. As someone who's name rhymes with the GOP candidate once said, welcome to the party, pal.

Update: A correction--as Newsday notes, the above video wasn't from John McCain's campaign but the American Issues Project:

A conservative nonprofit group with a past link to Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign wants to spend $2.8 million on an ad questioning Democrat Barack Obama's relationship to a founder of the 1960s radical group Weather Underground.

The ad, which is expected to begin airing Thursday in Michigan and Friday in Ohio, focuses on William Ayers, whose Weatherman organization took credit for a series of bombings, including nonfatal explosions at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol four decades ago.

American Issues Project, the sponsor of the ad, is a nonprofit 501(c)4 organization. One of its board members, Ed Failor Jr., was a paid consultant for McCain's campaign in Iowa last year. The campaign paid his firm $50,000 until July 2007. American Issues Project spokesman Christian Pinkston said Failor has no connection to the McCain campaign now.

The ad signals the emergence of the type of tough advertising by independent organizations that operate outside the financial limits of campaign finance law. It is reminiscent of the Swift Boat ads aired against John Kerry four years ago questioning his military service and are widely blamed by Democrats for contributing to his defeat.

Organizers sought to air the ad on Fox News Channel, but a Fox spokesman said the network declined to run it. He would not say why.

All is proceeding according to plan.

While Jake Tapper of ABC has done a remarkable job for an MSM journalist at keeping all of the candidates' feet to the fire, "the fine ABC News folks who monitor Tapper's comments", as Bob Owens writes, sound like they're playing the same Chicago rules that the media's favorite candidate abides by as well.

(For my XM interview this week with Bob, click here.)

Hugh Hewitt explores the latest Obama pushback (because this man won't be Swift Boated! says in-the-tank-Time): "Ayers and Dohrn Are Members Of The Establishment."

Much more from Tom Maguire. You could make a pretty good case that 1960s-era radical chic is the new establishment. (see also: the Clintons, John Kerry, wide swatches of academia and judges, etc.) But that's really putting the bohemian into the bourgeois, to borrow David Brooks' theme.

Update: "My advice to the Obama people: 'proceed with extreme caution.' They don't want to get into a discussion of character and background. They are opening a door that they will not be able to close."

The central thesis of James Piereson's Camelot and the Cultural Revolution was that JFK's assassination was the key moment that caused a large portion of once sensible liberals to begin to tilt to the far, far left, and for lack of better word, become Unhinged.

Like this calm, rational fan of the New Frontier!

In the (admittedly totally tasteless) formulation of a friend of mine, the best thing that ever happened to civil rights in this country was the bullet through JFK's head.

Along the way, as I wrote three and half years ago on the after-effects of that sharp left turn:

You could make a pretty good argument (as I'm about to attempt) that "Radical Chic" was the most influential, or at least most significant, magazine article of the past forty years--and that it foreshadowed the next 34 years of American politics.

It helped that the timing of Wolfe's article and book was exquisite. 1970 was the apex between two key presidential election years: two years after far left anti-war protestors attempted to disrupt the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and two years before its 1972 equivalent, where, as Ben Wattenberg said back then, "there won't be any riots in Miami because the people who tried to riot in Chicago are on the Platform Committee."

And these days, serving on charitable funds with future presidential candidates, while new, experimental improvisations on that staid, old, National Anthem are being invented in yet another attempt to recreate the perigee of the year that refuses to die.

(And speaking of the afore mentioned Wattenberg, my PJM Political interview with him is online here.)

Back in 2003, in a post titled "Mao And The Godfather", we had some thoughts on, and a photo of, the Andy Warhol print of Mao Zedong that hung above the mantelpiece in Francis Ford Coppola's dining room at the height of his power as a film director in the mid-1970s.

A reader of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism blog quotes from an article by Jed Perl that suggests that Warhol didn't choose Mao as a subject randomly:

Mao is Marilyn, only more so. The terms "icon" and "global icon" are nowadays tossed around with slapdash glee, so it is important to make a basic distinction. It was the moviegoing public that made Marilyn Monroe an icon, because they responded to her beauty, her charm, her wit. The people who hang posters of Marilyn on their walls do so because they like her. It's that simple. But the omnipresence of Mao's image has an altogether different origin. While Leftists in the United States in the late 1960s may have gladly chosen to hang Mao's portrait on their walls, among the billion Chinese who were sure to have his portrait in their homes and in their workplaces, it was understood that they would have endangered their own safety if they did not put his portrait where Mao wanted it to be. There is a world of difference between an icon freely chosen and an icon imposed from above, and the difference has more than a little to do with the difference between a liberal society and an authoritarian society. Warhol's way of blurring this distinction leads straight to the political pornography that characterizes so much of the new Chinese art.

The distinction was not lost on Warhol. According to one of the umpteen books on him that has appeared in recent years, Warhol "often stated that his goal was to obtain the patronage of a dictator, who would then mandate that Warhol's portrait be placed in every governmental office, school, and so on, ensuring the artist unlimited financial opportunities." Was Warhol kidding when he fantasized about being a dictator's court painter? To some degree, of course, he must have been. But then again the fascination of Warhol's work was based on a confusion or conflation of a number of different kinds of power, beginning with the power of celebrity and the power of advertising and the power of art. In the early 1970s he added to that incendiary but still somewhat benign mix another element: the power of communist propaganda. That was the point at which his work turned foul. Warhol's Maos—as well as the Hammer and Sickle still lifes from later in the 1970s and the Lenin portraits of the 1980s—bring his own mercenary spin to a Western love affair with the certitudes of absolutist politics that dates back to the 1920s and 1930s. That was when some members of the European and American intelligentsia decided that the bombastic images of healthy working men and women coming first out of Russia and then out of Nazi Germany offered a relief from the intricacies of modern art. After all, there is nothing less intricate than a painting by Andy Warhol.
The impact that totalitarian imagery can have on free people is an enduring problem. Susan Sontag's essay on the subject, "Fascinating Fascism," was published two years after Warhol began to paint Mao. She could just as well have been thinking of Warhol's Maos, and more generally of the leftist infatuation with the iconography of the Cultural Revolution, when she remarked that the sophisticated public was beginning "to look at Nazi art with knowing and sniggering detachment, as a form of Pop Art." Sontag, who never liked to get too far ahead of her audience, was aware that her readership had still not quite outlived its infatuation with the Maoist look. But she made an important point when she observed that there is a difference between appreciating the peculiar power of a certain kind of totalitarian imagery and going right ahead and succumbing to that power.

As Jonah's reader suggests, expect lots more totalitarian imagery during the coming Olympics in Beijing; in the meantime, we'll always have Che.

Will Kim Jong Il endorse Sen. Barack Obama? Yes he can!

Castro we knew about, and Qaddafi chimed in just the other day, but Kim Jong Il?

I wasn’t expecting that.

Take me now, Lord. My life as a blogger is complete.

The Obamessiah must ask himself once again: Why do all these anti-American tyrants keep s…um, endorsing my candidacy?

Meanwhile, See Dubya also asks, "Come on, Osama, your turn…you know you’ve got one tape left in you…"

If he does, will Uncle Walter once again blame it on Karl Rove, as he did when Punxsutawney Osama emerged and saw his shadow during the last weekend of October in 2004?

The Nashville Post's "Post Politics" blog notes that "Harold Ford, Jr. Throws Former Campaign Manager Under The Bus":

It was a long curious day for the Tennessee Democratic party yesterday. Divisions in the party were exacerbated when John Rodgers of the Nashville City Paper reported the words of Tennessee Democratic Party state executive committee member Fred Hobbs on Barack Obama:

“I don’t exactly approve of a lot of the things he stands for and I’m not sure we know enough about him,” Hobbs said when asked why he thought Davis wasn’t endorsing Obama. “He’s got some bad connections, and he may be terrorist connected for all I can tell. It sounds kind of like he may be.”

Adding insult to injury, Beecher Frasier, Chief of Staff to Democratic Congressman Lincoln Davis of Tennessee’s rural and conservative 4th District, was portrayed in the same article as saying he didn’t know for sure if Obama was “terrorist connected” but assumes he’s not.

The Tennessee Democratic Party almost immediately sent out a release rebuking Hobbs. Beecher Frasier, later in the day, released a statement setting the record straight asserting that “no one in their right mind, including me, believes Senator Obama has ties to terrorism.”

William Ayers could not be reached for comment.

Your friends:

Via See Dubya; you can see our videos featuring Obama's friends here and here.

Related: And it goes without saying that Obama will be there for you, too!

Listening to the clip of Father Pfleger on The Hugh Hewitt Show, before he goes off into the high dudgeon apex of his anti-Hillary shtick, I got a distinct Dick Shawn in The Producers flashback from the tone of his voice:

Come to think it, Pfleger sounds infinitely more appropriate for the role that Shawn's character was auditioning for.

As I wrote back in March, when the New Black Panthers dropped in on Barack Obama's Website:

Remember those carefree days so long ago when all we worried about with liberal presidential candidates were bimbo eruptions?

After squelching the Panthers, the Ayers, and Reverend Wright, comes yet another radical chic acquaintance to be thrown under the bus, and airbrushed out of the campaign:

As I have traveled this country, I've been impressed not by what divides us but by all that that unites us. That is why I am deeply disappointed in Father Pfleger's divisive, backward-looking rhetoric...

I'll bet he is.

Update: "Meanwhile, Back at Trinity United..."

More: "Houston, we have a problem."

Last Update For Now: "All of Barack Obama’s men of bad faith": Your one-stop shopping guide to all of Obama's men of the cloth (as Mort Sahl once quipped about Jesse Jackson, that cloth being cashmere), so far.

Found via Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism blog, PrestoPundit quotes this excerpt from Vanity Fair's recent cover story on RFK:

As Kennedy began [to speak at Kansas State U.], his voice cracked, and those near the stage noticed his hands trembling and his right leg shaking.

After praising [Al] Landon's distinguished career, he said, "I am also glad to come to the home state of another great Kansan, who wrote, 'If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.' " ...

At first he seemed tentative and wooden, stammering and repeating himself, too nervous to punctuate his sentences with gestures. But with each round of applause he became more animated. Soon he was pounding the lectern with his right fist, and shouting out his words.

Rene Carpenter watched the students in the front rows. Their faces shone, and they opened their mouths in unison, shouting, "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!"

Hays Gorey, of Time, called the electricity between Kennedy and the K.S.U. students "real and rare" and said that " .. John Kennedy ... himself couldn't be so passionate, and couldn't set off such sparks."

Kevin Rochat was close to weeping because Kennedy was so direct and honest. He kept telling himself, My God! He's saying exactly what I've been thinking! ..

Kennedy concluded by saying, "Our country is in danger: not just from foreign enemies; but above all, from our own misguided policies--and what they can do to the nation that Thomas Jefferson once said was the last, great hope of mankind. There is a contest on, not for the rule of America but for the heart of America. In these next eight months we are going to decide what this country will stand for--and what kind of men we are."

He raised his fist in the air so it resembled the revolutionary symbol on posters hanging in student rooms that year, promised "a new America," and the hall erupted in cheers and thunderous applause.
As he started to leave, waves of students rushed the platform, knocking over chairs and raising more dust. They grabbed at him, stroking his hair and ripping his shirtsleeves. Herb Schmertz was left with a lifelong phobia of crowds. University officials opened a path to a rear exit, but Kennedy waved them off and waded into the crowd ...

PrestoPundit doesn't give the date, a transcript of the speech in the Kennedy library notes that it occured March 18th, 1968.

As James Piereson has noted, it's impossible to picture JFK uttering such language himself, which illustrates how far to the left liberalism as a whole swung in less than five years after his death, and which has repercussions to this day. As I looked at the start of the month in a Silicon Graffiti video, by 1970, Radical Chic would become so prevalent that establishment liberal elites such as Leonard Bernstein would think little of holding fund raisers in his Park Ave. duplex for such fascist groups as the Black Panthers, who would quickly be supported by the Weathermen, who were founded by William Ayers, whom Sen. Obama has ties with.

Astonishingly, via the Huffington Post:

We may now understand why Barack does not wear a flag lapel pin. He's afraid that Bill Ayers will stomp on him.

Heh. You know, some blogger should make a video exploring all of that ancient Radical Chic rhetoric coming home to roost.

The Black Panthers and Weathermen (aka Weather Underground) were anarchistic paramilitary far left groups from the late 1960s, whose ties crossed at least once in 1970. They're resurfacing again though in a surprising place: each has been referenced via Barack Obama's presidential campaign, particlarly the latter group. Back in February, the Politico's Ben Smith noted:

In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district's influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they're better known nationally as two of the most notorious--and unrepentant--figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.

Now, as Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from a man in the Hyde Park left to one closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for president.

"I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers' house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress," said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. "[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor."

Obama and Palmer "were both there," he said.

Obama's connections to Ayers and Dorhn have been noted in some fleeting news coverage in the past. But the visit by Obama to their home--part of a campaign courtship--reflects more extensive interaction than has been previously reported.

And Tom Maguire also uncovered another connection:

The Obama/Ayers soundbite is this: Obama and Ayers (a professor of education) worked together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge for several years in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to reform Chicago's public schools. The extent of their relationship is not clear, since Obama has been opaque on this topic both in a televised debate and at his website. However, Ayers was instrumental in founding the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and Obama was the group's first chairman, so there is something being concealed there.

And it's not like Hillary Clinton is without sin in this department, herself.

(Earlier Silicon Graffiti videos can be found here.)

Need to raise your blood pressure in a hurry? Just check out the photo that Marathon Pundit found of Bill Ayers--in whose home Obama launched his first political campaign in 1995--dancing on top of a crumpled American flag.

(Via Hot Air.)

Last week, we mentioned the strange op-ed by Paul Auster that the New York Times published. The author of the Weekly Standard's Scrapbook column follows up with this:

Readers with long memories will recall the spectacle of Columbia undergraduates--children of privilege enrolled at a distinguished Ivy League institution founded when New York was still a British colony--invading classrooms and administrative offices, manhandling deans, professors, and fellow students, stealing and destroying books and documents, vandalizing chambers devoted to learning, roaming corridors in search of fodder to burn. The Columbia strike of 1968 made a temporary celebrity of a student named Mark Rudd, and publicized the episode's emblematic slogan: "Up against the wall, motherf--r!"

It also unleashed something instructive in Paul Auster:

Speech followed tempestuous speech, the enraged crowd roared with approval, and then someone suggested that we all go to the construction site and tear down the chain-link fence. .  .  . The crowd thought that was an excellent idea, and so off it went, a throng of crazy, shouting students charging off the Columbia campus toward Morningside Park. Much to my astonishment, I was with them. What had happened to the gentle boy who planned to spend the rest of his life sitting alone in a room writing books? He was helping to tear down the fence. He tugged and pulled and pushed along with several dozen -others and, truth be told, found much satisfaction in this crazy, destructive act.

One of the great parlor games of modern scholarship is pondering how the German people--citizens of the land of Bach, Kant, and Goethe--could find themselves marching in step behind Adolf Hitler. Well, Paul Auster and his Boomer companions at Columbia offer a clue. Here is as plain and startling a description of the mob mentality--together with the attendant hysteria and romanticized violence--as you are likely to find in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, nicely camouflaged in the language of nostalgia and social protest.

If, in this presidential election year, anyone wonders how the political left grew estranged from the American mainstream, yielding the politics of the past four decades, they need only read Paul Auster's tribute to the Columbia strike, written "alone in this room with a pen in my hand" as "I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever."

The writer of the Scrapbook adds that every now and then, he's "seized with the thought that the last, best hope of mankind--or at any rate, for our peace of mind--will be the death of the last surviving member of the Baby Boom generation."

Of course, he's far from alone in that department--and for those keeping score at home, just follow along with this easy-to-use toteboard!

Australia's Tim Blair has a theory that he calls, logically enough, Blair’s Law. He describes it “the ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force.” And in City Journal, John Murtagh writes that the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground were no exception in 1970:

During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up “a gentleman named William Ayers,” who “was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.” Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama’s answer: “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” Obama was indeed only eight in early 1970. I was only nine then, the year Ayers’s Weathermen tried to murder me.

In February 1970, my father, a New York State Supreme Court justice, was presiding over the trial of the so-called “Panther 21,” members of the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. Early on the morning of February 21, as my family slept, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at our home on the northern tip of Manhattan, two at the front door and the third tucked neatly under the gas tank of the family car. (Today, of course, we’d call that a car bomb.) A neighbor heard the first two blasts and, with the remains of a snowman I had built a few days earlier, managed to douse the flames beneath the car. That was an act whose courage I fully appreciated only as an adult, an act that doubtless saved multiple lives that night.

February 21st, 1970 was exactly five weeks after Leonard and Felicia Bernstein invited the Black Panthers up to his Park Avenue duplex for their fundraiser, along with some of his closest friends, including Otto Preminger, Barbara Walters, Frank Stanton, musician Peter Duchin, and the wives of Harry Belafonte, Arthur Penn, Sidney Lumet and Richard Avedon, as Tom Wolfe memorably described firsthand in Radical Chic.

(Via Hot Air, which has video of Murtaugh's appearance yesterday on Greta van Susteren's Fox News show.)

Update: And just to really bring things full circle...

With the reemergence of Rev Wright back into the limelight he so dearly craves, the name Bill Ayers has been pushed back into the underground a bit. But this story is a reminder of why his relationship to Obama matters as well:

During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up "a gentleman named William Ayers," who "was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol and other buildings. He's never apologized for that." Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama's answer: "The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn't make much sense, George." Obama was indeed only 8 in early 1970. I was only 9 then, the year Ayers' Weathermen tried to murder me.

Much more here, from Ed Morrissey.

With Al Sharpton threatening to "close this city down", Michelle Malkin asks, why is Al "still welcome in polite society?"

As I wrote just this past week, linking to my article on the topic from a few years ago in The New Partisan:

From politicians such as Al Sharpton, Robert Byrd and John Kerry to artists such as Michael Moore and Philip Johnson, it's amazing what you can get away with in your salad days as long as you emerge with the right politics afterwards.

Michelle writes, "Some readers wonder why I continue to write about the Sharpton-MSM lovefest. Why? Because the enablers deserve to be held responsible and shamed publicly until they stop."

Since the modern MSM has not a molecule of shame in their collective nervous system, I'm not sure if that's possible. Besides, as Mark Steyn notes, it suffers from an enormous moral inversion:

In a scrupulously politically correct age, it's not offensive to organize a "Kill the police!" demo or to preach that the government invented Aids in order to perpetrate an African-American genocide. You can pull that stuff and still be part of respectable society, hanging out with presidential candidates and whatnot. What's grotesquely offensive is the chap who's insensitive enough to point out such statements and associations.

Which is never more obvious in an election year, just as we saw in 2004, when it was the Swift Vets who were demonized by the media for pointing out John Kerry's 1970s-era anti-American demagoguery, not the man actually made those remarks.

The MSM once had a monopoly on the past. Today, with that control broken, they get quite cross with whomever points out a leftist's otherwise grandfathered radical chic past.

Update: Which may be why, as people abandon the MSM's top down control of information, we've entered "The 'Golden Age' of Web news".

"After 30 years of railing for separation of church and state, Bill Moyers comes to the aid of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright."

Glad to see that there's one man of the cloth that Moyers is willing to support! Meanwhile, several names and Webpages mysteriously have begun to go missing on Obama's Website.

Perhaps the rapture has arrived there.

Related: "In adversity, bitter pundits cling to their Obamessiah."

Jim Geraghty explores Barack Obama's radical ties with former Weatherman (and I don't mean in the Willard Scott sense) Bill Ayers who, like the fellow that Wretchard linked to on Wednesday, hasn't changed his worldview a jot since 1968, other than no longer literally putting his Semtex where his mouth is.

Geraghty writes:

The problem for Obama isn't that his ties to Ayers are so close (that we know of so far). Ayers hosted a party that was, effectively, the first fundraiser for Obama. They served on the Woods Foundation board together, and he spoke on some panels. That's not as close a relationship as with, say, his mentor Jeremiah Wright, but it's a lot closer than most Americans will ever come to a person who set bombs in public buildings.

But what is really revealing about this mess for Obama is that when asked about it, the candidate reacted with a mix of surprise and indignation that we haven't quite seen since, "I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not.. have... sexual... relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." Recall, Clinton's finger-wagging tone wasn't striking just for the audacity of the lie, but for the barely-suppressed outrage; Bill seemed genuinely offended that anyone could accuse him of such a thing.

In the case of Obama, he clearly felt that George Stephanolopous asking about this was completely out of bounds. That no one in their right mind could possibly be concerned, disgruntled, or disapproving of associating with someone like William Ayers. As Obama insisted, this is just a professor who lives in his neighborhood.

But the average professor who lives in the neighborhood didn't set bombs, even a long time ago.

Obama could have easily said, "I met Ayers and worked with him briefly, but I don't like him. I don't have any use for those who set bombs, or those who enthusiastically praise the acts of Charles Manson" (as Bernadine Dohrn did). But he didn't. In this whole set of circumstances, Obama felt that Stephanopolous was the one out of line.

Meanwhile, Tom Hayden, last seen bemoaning the growth of capitalism in Vietnam, notes that Hillary has plenty of radical chic baggage of her own.

Cuffy Meigs does the job that old media used to claim to do.

Update: More here (and note the accompanying photo) on what is likely to be a bottomless well. But Glenn Reynolds' readers note that John McCain hides a radical affiliation of his own:

"Hasn't McCain had a long association with former Klansman and fellow Senator Robert Byrd?"

As Glenn writes, Heh.^TM

HuffPo: "Gingrich: Left Wing Of The Democratic Party 'Admires' American Terrorists".

Leonard Bernstein, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could not be reached for comment. If we want to expand the list to Democrats who admire foreign terrorists, we can add Ramsey Clark, Jimmy Carter, Patty Murray, Ward Churchill, Michael Moore, "Pinch" Sulzberger, Chrissie Hynde, Oliver Stone, Margaret Cho and John Kerry to the list as well.

John Stephenson has more.

Related: "What Will Karl Do?"

More: "A Timeline Of Crime For Obama’s Buddy William Ayers".

David Brooks writes:

Back in Iowa, Barack Obama promised to be something new — an unconventional leader who would confront unpleasant truths, embrace novel policies and unify the country. If he had knocked Hillary Clinton out in New Hampshire and entered general-election mode early, this enormously thoughtful man would have become that.

But he did not knock her out, and the aura around Obama has changed. Furiously courting Democratic primary voters and apparently exhausted, Obama has emerged as a more conventional politician and a more orthodox liberal.

With the inevitable leftwing radical chic baggage, to boot.

"Halle-frickin'-lujah", writes Mark Hemingway, "Someone in the mainstream media finally mentions the William Ayers connection" during the Democrat debate Wednesday night:

Obama knows the unrepentant domestic terrorist much better than he's letting on, and Hillary calls him on it. Obama worked with him for years and was even serving on the board of directors of the Woods Fund with him at the time he made his infamous remark in the New York Times about not regretting setting the bombs.

Mr. Cool actually looks angry and flustered. How flustered? At one point, he refers to Ayers' actions "four years ago" when he meant to say forty. Then Obama points out that (Bill) Clinton pardoned two members of the Weather Underground. That little bit of info doesn't help either of them. It is a good night to be Republican.

Speaking of Radical Chic: The Next Generation, as Tom Wolfe has noted in innumerable interviews, when he showed up at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein's infamous 1970 Park Avenue fund raising cocktail party for the Black Panthers, he had his reporter's notebook out and was openly taking notes and jotting down the conversation in plain view for all to see. (Wolfe wrote for New York magazine back then, in that publication's long-bygone era.)

It was only when his article hit the streets that the Bernsteins hit the fan, as they apparently never realized the backlash that would result from their fund raiser amongst people who didn't share their punitive far left politics--which would soon have a name, thanks to Wolfe's article and subsequent book.

Which is very reminiscent to the way that a Huffington Post blogger observed firsthand and recorded the audio that would become known as Barack Obama's Bittergate, as Betsy Newmark writes--and rather than pasting in virtually her entire post, go over and read the whole thing.

Found via Liberty Peak Lodge, Thomas Sowell writes, "Like so many others on the left, Obama rejects ‘stereotypes’ when they are stereotypes he doesn't like but blithely throws around his own stereotypes about ‘a typical white person’ or ‘bitter’ gun-toting, religious and racist working class people":

However inconsistent Obama's words, his behavior has been remarkably consistent over the years. He has sought out and joined with the radical, anti-Western left, whether Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers of the terrorist Weatherman underground or pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli Rashid Khalidi.

Obama is also part of a long tradition on the left of being for the working class in the abstract, or as people potentially useful for the purposes of the left, but having disdain or contempt for them as human beings.

Karl Marx said, "The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing." In other words, they mattered only in so far as they were willing to carry out the Marxist agenda.

Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw included the working class among the "detestable" people who "have no right to live." He added: "I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves."

Similar statements on the left go back as far as Rousseau in the 18th century and come forward into our own times.

It is understandable that young people are so strongly attracted to Obama. Youth is another name for inexperience -- and experience is what is most needed when dealing with skillful and charismatic demagogues.

Those of us old enough to have seen the type again and again over the years can no longer find them exciting. Instead, they are as tedious as they are dangerous.

George Will adds:

Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

And Noemie Emery traces leftwing elitism back to the days of Adlai Stevenson--brought up to date via Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas:

In Our Country, Michael Barone traces this strain back to 1956 and the second campaign of Adlai E. Stevenson, who, when told "thinking people" were for him, said, "Yes, but I need to win a majority," and when praised for having educated the voters, said that too many had not passed the course. "Stevenson," Barone says, "was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture--the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting," and since Stevenson, there have been many such. Hart and Michael Dukakis were brought down by this failing, as was John Kerry, whose 2006 swipe at George W. Bush and those forced into the armed forces brought this response from some servicemen: "Halp us, Jon Carry--We R Stuck HEAR N Irak."

After their unexpected loss in 2004, Democrats were much too impressed by Thomas Frank's treatise What's the Matter With Kansas? which complained that they lost because middle-class voters were too stupid to vote their 'real' interests (which were presumably served by the Democrats), because conservatives wickedly played on their fears. ('Fear' is the Democrats' answer for every vote they don't get.) Whether middle-class interests are better served by liberalism is an open question--they did so much better, after all, under Carter than Reagan, and the Clintons did so much to help them get health care--but condescension remains an unpromising strategy. There is, it appears, not muchthe matter with Kansas. Obama's mother, he says, did come from Kansas. But the matter with Democrats, and with Obama, seems to be Thomas Frank.

Heh, Indeed.^TM

Matthew Sheffield writes, "If you've always thought her music was hackneyed and dull now you may have another reason to dislike Alicia Keys: she's apparently a racist conspiracymonger", as this AP report highlights (ellipses in Matthew's post):

There's another side to Alicia Keys: conspiracy theorist. The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter tells Blender magazine: "'Gangsta rap' was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other."[...]

Keys, 27, said she's read several Black Panther autobiographies and wears a gold AK-47 pendant around her neck "to symbolize strength, power and killing 'em dead," according to an interview in the magazine's May issue, on newsstands Tuesday.

Another of her theories: That the bicoastal feud between slain rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. was fueled "by the government and the media, to stop another great black leader from existing." [...]

Though she's known for her romantic tunes, she told Blender that she wants to write more political songs. If black leaders such as the late Black Panther Huey Newton "had the outlets our musicians have today, it'd be global. I have to figure out a way to do it myself," she said.

Matthew adds, "All this nonsense really should come as a surprise to Keys's mother, Teresa Augello, who is white. Is this just a phase? In any case, it's hard to see how a white entertainer or a religious-oriented entertainer making statements like this and it not doing significant harm to their career."

She's not alone of course; Keys' remarks regarding her profession sound much like those expressed by Rev. Eric Lee of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who featured prominently in several recent articles over on the main Pajamas site this past week, including this one:

“In a very small part of my presentation, I referenced a meeting I had with Rabbi’s and other community leaders. A Rabbi stated in that meeting that the close relationship between the African American and Jewish communities had been disconnected after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. I further referenced in my speech that my response to the Rabbi was that the Black Power Movement emerged after the assassination of Dr. King and it was a direct response to the negative characterizations of African Americans through the silver screen, TV and the music industry, industries that are influenced by many in the Jewish community. I then stated to the Rabbis that the Black Power Movement was our effort to define for ourselves our own identity rather than be defined by anyone else. I then indicated in my presentation that I told the Rabbis’ that before a genuine coalition could be rebuilt between our communities, there would have to be dialogue and efforts made to deal with the negative characterizations of African Americans.”

But Keys' and Lee's conspiratorial ravings ignore a crucial element of the success of "Gangsta" rap: nobody twisted the arms of performers to record those records, or to strike thugish poses in videos and magazine covers to promote them, or consumers to purchase them. As Mark Steyn wrote last month regarding another prominent conspiracy theorist:

The Reverend Wright believes that AIDs was created by the government of the United States — and not as a cure for the common cold that went tragically awry and had to be covered up by Karl Rove, but for the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens. The government has never come clean about this, but the Reverend Wright knows the truth. “The government lied,” he told his flock, “about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”

Does he really believe this? If so, he’s crazy, and no sane person would sit through his gibberish, certainly not for 20 years [as Obama had].

Or is he just saying it? In which case, he’s profoundly wicked. If you understand that AIDs is spread by sexual promiscuity and drug use, you’ll know that it’s within your power to protect yourself from the disease. If you’re told that it’s just whitey’s latest cunning plot to stick it to you, well, hey, it’s out of your hands, nothing to do with you or your behavior.

Rather than conspiracy theories about "the government and the media" as Keys believes, the latter "influenced by many in the Jewish community" as Lee believes, and the former fermenting "genocide against people of color" as Wright believes, where are the calls for personal responsibility, by three people who are all voices of influence in their respective circles?

(Onion video originally found here.)

Last year, Ryan Lizza, the senior editor at The New Republic wrote:

After many lectures like this, Obama decided to take a second look at Wright’s church. Older pastors warned him that Trinity was for “Buppies”–black urban professionals–and didn’t have enough street cred. But Wright was a former Muslim and black nationalist who had studied at Howard and Chicago, and Trinity’s guiding principles–what the church calls the “Black Value System”–included a “Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.’”

Which means, if TNR (cough...Beauchamp ...cough) is correct, then, as Charles Johnson notes, "the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, is an ex-Muslim, Nation of Islam style." Which may also explain another radical chic connection: in 2000, Obama said that "I don't think there are a lot of ideological differences," between himself and former Black Panther Bobby Rush.

And watch for anyone who comments on these stories to be demonized, despite the fact the passage quoted above came from TNR, the house organ of ancien régime liberals. But as Jim Geraghty noted last week, when the far left can call one of their own--and a former first lady and sitting US senator to boot--"a whore", it's all just business, nothing personal.

Infidels Are Cool believes that "This is just another blow to the Obama campaign. The American people are not ready to hand the reigns to someone who’s associations are beyond sketchy." I'm not at all sure about that myself, but as Charles Krauthammer recently noted, the only reason these details are so sketchy is that "Saint Obama awaits his Michael Kelly".

Tim Graham writes, "the folks at Barack Obama's church are telling the supposedly anti-Obama, anti-Jeremiah Wright news media to back off", attempting to connect Wright with Martin Luther King:

AP reporter Christopher Wills added that Otis Moss, Wright's replacement at Trinity, is still treating Wright as a prophet straight out of the Old Testament, even if the words he used sounded more like annoying 20th century socialist boilerplate:

The Rev. Otis Moss III, who is replacing Wright when he retires June 1, defended Wright's comments.

"One of the roles of the prophets: Sometimes you offend. You afflict the comfortable but comfort the afflicted," Moss said.

Is Wright a fiery, Marxist, racist preacher, or merely a fiery, Marxist, racist journalist?

And as far as attempting to tie Wright to MLK, Juan Williams is having none of it: "What would Jesus do? There is no question he would have left that church."

By the time of his death in 2005 at the venerable age of 98, Philip Johnson was arguably America's best known architect, having designed his famed "Glass House" in 1949, and worked with Mies van der Rohe on Mies's Seagram Building a few years later. The former was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1997; the latter dubbed "Building of the Millennium" by the New York Times.

But Johnson's puckish demeanor in his later years, which earned him decades of good cheer from fellow Manhattan elites, hid a dark journey through the liberal fascist politics of the 1930s, which culminated in his cheering on the Nazis as they marched through Poland in 1939. "We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle", he would write to a friend at the time.

At the start of the 1930s, Johnson was an admirer of the socialist-leaning architects of Germany's Bauhaus, as he founded the newly born Museum of Modern Art's architectural department, and helped put modern architecture on the map in the US. Apparently after witnessing a Hitler rally in Potsdam in 1933, Johnson was immediately attracted to the Nazis. That moment sent Johnson on a seemingly strange journey: shortly thereafter, he would leave MoMA to seek employment with first Huey Long and then Father Coughlin, before ultimately winding up cheering the Nazis on at the start of WWII.

During that same period though, while Johnson openly admired the Nazis, he befriended the last director of the Bauhaus, Mies van der Rohe, even as the Nazis were shuttering the design school's doors. Returning to MoMA in the 1950s and establishing himself, via his famed Glass House, as a known architect in his own right, as Hilton Kramer noted in the mid-1990s, and Anne Applebaum shortly after Johnson's death, Johnson did a near-thorough job of tossing his radical past down the memory hole. At the least, most of his fellow Manhattan elites didn't lose too much sleep over it.

And yet, comparing Johnson's past with the lost history of the 1930s described in Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, in retrospect Johnson comes across as a sort of dark version of Woody Allen's Zelig character, appearing alongside several of the fascist left's most important figures in both the US and Europe during the Depression.

(More video blogging found here, incidentally.)

"Karl Rove had the audacity to hope Democrats would nominate a hard-left Cook County hack...and they did!"

Ever four years, there's at least one article mentioning that the left hates to be called liberal; here's Rich Lowry's take from 2004 (which actually namechecks Obama, then a newly minted senator). And in the International Herald-Tribune (a Pinch of a spinoff from the NYT), here's this year's model: in addition to never mentioning his middle name, one must never use the L-word to describe Barry O in polite company:

Simon Rosenberg, who leads the New Democrat Network and is currently unaligned in the Democratic contest, argues, "My basic belief is the generation-long era of political domination, the ascendancy of conservative politics, is at an end, and Obama has captured more than anyone else the opportunity of this era." He added: "It's very hard to put labels on him. He's building his own sandbox." [Is he old enough to play in it unsupervised?--Ed]

Obama, in fact, had the support of 64 percent of independents in the last New York Times/CBS News Poll. But can that transpartisan appeal be sustained? He has only begun to take some hard political hits - from the Clinton campaign, from conservative commentators and radio hosts, and from Senator John McCain's campaign. The recent flare-up about his pastor's racial views was one example. And Republicans are just starting up their attacks.

"Nobody's yet taken him on as a liberal," said Andrew Kohut, who leads the Pew Research Center. "But McCain will."

So far, Republicans give every indication of planning to portray Obama as a big-government liberal out of touch with American values and unprepared to be commander in chief.

"When you're rated by National Journal as to the left of Ted Kennedy and Bernie Sanders, that's going to be difficult to explain," said Danny Diaz , a spokesman for the Republican National Committee.

Coupled with Michelle Obama's punitive liberalism, Rev. Wright's radical chic-era boilerplate conspiratorial racism, Tony Rezko's questionable financial dealings, and Obama's own minimalistic voting record, that's quite a load of baggage for someone with a featherweight history as a national politician to tote on the road to the White House.

Related: Well, related conceptually, at least: "Kinder, gentler euphemisms for failure."

Mark Steyn's column on the now-infamous Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the implications of his radical chic sermons for the Obama campaign is a must-read:

‘I’m sure,” said Barack Obama in that sonorous baritone that makes his drive-thru order for a Big Mac, fries, and strawberry shake sound profound, “many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”

Well, yes. But not many of us have heard remarks from our pastors, priests, or rabbis that are stark, staring, out-of-his-tree flown-the-coop nuts. Unlike Bill Clinton, whose legions of “spiritual advisers” at the height of his Monica troubles outnumbered the U.S. diplomatic corps, Senator Obama has had just one spiritual adviser his entire adult life: the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, two-decade pastor to the president presumptive. The Reverend Wright believes that AIDs was created by the government of the United States — and not as a cure for the common cold that went tragically awry and had to be covered up by Karl Rove, but for the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens. The government has never come clean about this, but the Reverend Wright knows the truth. “The government lied,” he told his flock, “about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”

Does he really believe this? If so, he’s crazy, and no sane person would sit through his gibberish, certainly not for 20 years.

Or is he just saying it? In which case, he’s profoundly wicked. If you understand that AIDs is spread by sexual promiscuity and drug use, you’ll know that it’s within your power to protect yourself from the disease. If you’re told that it’s just whitey’s latest cunning plot to stick it to you, well, hey, it’s out of your hands, nothing to do with you or your behavior.

Before the speech, Slate’s Mickey Kaus advised Senator Obama to give us a Sister Souljah moment: “There are plenty of potential Souljahs still around: Race preferences. Out-of-wedlock births,” he wrote. “But most of all the victim mentality that tells African Americans (in the fashion of Rev. Wright’s most infamous sermons) that the important forces shaping their lives are the evil actions of others, of other races.” Indeed. It makes no difference to white folks when a black pastor inflicts kook genocide theories on his congregation: The victims are those in his audience who make the mistake of believing him. The Reverend Wright has a hugely popular church with over 8,000 members, and Senator Obama assures us that his pastor does good work by “reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDs.” But maybe he wouldn’t have to quite so much “reaching out” to do and maybe there wouldn’t be quite so many black Americans “suffering from HIV/AIDs” if the likes of Wright weren’t peddling lunatic conspiracy theories to his own community.

Found via the Brothers Judd; much more from the Anchoress, in a post titled, "Obama, Psychic duality & the churches":

It has been exceedingly difficult to discuss race in this nation for about 30 years, because anytime anyone - white or black - has tried to make a serious point, the word “racist!” is immediately flung out; lasting and damaging labels are instantly attached to people, and so everyone just shuts down. People guard their words and swallow provocative debating points - even if their aim is to generate a real, open and honest forum of ideas - because no one wants to be called a racist. This happened to Bill Clinton and to Bill Cosby; it happened to Rush Limbaugh and Geraldine Ferraro, and driving today I heard the word spat out at Sean Hannity. It happened to me, actually, last week, when I was called a “racist” on another blog for writing this; I was also deemed “hypersensitive” about being called a racist.

To which I replied, “I don’t think you’d like it.”

But see, I didn’t think anything I wrote was “racist.” I simply made the mistake of trying to discuss race at all.

“Black” America is forced to live a psychic duality, but in a way, “white” America is, too. We are supposed to - apparently - somehow split our brains, into never even noticing that there are racial differences between us, unless we’re working in praise of those differences. So, there are no differences between us…but we celebrate the differences…but their are none, and if you think there are, you’re a racist. Now celebrate!

Does that make sense? No wonder the national psyche is so battered. No wonder Obama is having difficulty straddling this chasm, despite his long legs. No wonder issues of race are distracting us from a much larger issue, which is whether he is competent to be our president and CIC.

No one likes being called a racist, and fear of being so labeled (or called “sexist”) is part of what is roiling both the nation and this particular election. You cannot talk “race” (or gender) without being denounced by people who don’t want to shatter their own illusions about their own “righteous” ways, or who don’t want to enter the discussion because they might be called “racist,” or a “sexist” too. Toxic, toxic.

Obama’s candidacy has, for better or worse, - I think probably for better - revealed the complicated and shaky state of race-relations in America. Middle class “white” America had not realized just how touchy things were, perhaps because we hadn’t “wanted” to see it, or perhaps because in our minds, with our kids rapping and adopting “street” clothes and lingo, and the popular culture seeming fairly ingrained with a “multi-culti” mindset, it simply seemed like race had become a secondary or tertiary matter. Or we hoped it had.

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King waited for the day when his children would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character. That day seems very far away, right now, and “white” America - even “well-meaning” white America - shares blame in that. But perhaps “black” America does too. Dr. King was not, I don’t think, exempting blacks from the challenge of considering a man’s character before his skin color, but modern reverends like Wright and Meeks seem to be teaching otherwise.

I wonder what Rev. Wright's typical Easter message is like.

Tom Stoppard describes 1968 as "The year of the posturing rebel". Or as John Lennon confessed a decade later:

"I dabbled in politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, more out of guilt than anything. Guilt for being rich and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn't enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face to prove I'm one of the people. I was doing it against my instincts."

Fascinating though, that the 1960s and '70s, a period that was rife with poseurs such as Lennon, is still influencing us to this day. You can see it in music, in the form of ersatz nostalgia acts such as Lenny Kravitz and Sheryl Crow, who dress in period costume (sort of the tie-dyed equivalent of greasers like Sha Na Na in leather jackets and D.A.s in 1975, or a big band that same year still playing in tan dinner jackets and bow ties). Or much more dangerously, in a politics that still takes it rhetoric from a period now four decades in the past, whether it's John Kerry in 2004, or Rev. Wright in 2008.

But then, when starting from zero, one is always tempted to stay trapped in Year One.

After hors d'oeuvres with Lenny & Felicia, the New Black Panther Party drops in for a nightcap on Barack Obama's Website.

Remember those carefree days so long ago when all we worried about with liberal presidential candidates were bimbo eruptions?

CliffsNotes Edition: I've been misquoted hundreds of times about the charges I never made slandering the US troops, which incidentally were subsequently verified by different entities.

(Snarky comments aside, don't miss this one. No wonder it's so painful to watch Kerry fumble, bumble and mumble his answers: he's being asked the key questions about his radical chic past that he rarely had to face from a complicit legacy media while he was campaigning four years ago.)

Assuming that those who attacked the Times Square military recruitment office turn out to be the usual suspects, (and it ultimately may not, of course), it's further proof that the radical left is trapped in the time machine, with the dial permanently set at 1968. Ed Morrissey writes:

Given the escalating protests over military recruitment, it seems inevitable that people would bomb those who seek to protect the nation and fight our enemies. This morning, unknown attackers bombed a Times Square military recruitment office. Thankfully, the office and the building that housed it was closed at the time of attack:

An explosive device damaged a military recruiting station in Times Square early Thursday, and police blocked off the area to investigate.

The explosive device caused minor damage, and no one was injured, police said. The explosion shattered a glass entryway. …

Witnesses staying at a hotel in the area said they heard a “big bang” and could feel the building shake. A large plume of smoke was also visible after the explosion, they said.

Melanie Morgan just wrote about the escalating attacks on military recruiters a week ago. She lists several cities where recruitment centers have been attacked in varying degrees, usually limited to vandalism and threats of violence. These operations have not hurt military recruiting at all. Michelle wrote about this two years ago (and many times since), and quite obviously the attackers have grown frustrated that they haven’t frightened off enough people to slow down the flow of recruits.

Now the movement has decided to morph into domestic terrorism. Of course, the people responsible will claim that they bombed the office during the night to keep anyone from being hurt. That’s exactly the same kind of rationalization that people like the Weather Underground and the SLA used at first, anyway — that terrorism was justified by their politics. In fact, a few like William Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn still claim that.

And speaking of "Recreate '68", found via Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit, Michael Goldfarb writes:

I wrote a little while ago about the plan of some protest groups to 'Recreate 68' at the Democratic National Convention in Denver this year. If there's a close delegate count and the convention is contested -- which is still unlikely, but possible -- that stands to raise the tension level for Democrats. If the anti-war base is dissatisfied with Congress' failure to bring the troops home -- a virtual certainty -- that could raise it as well. The pressure is on the DNC to ensure that despite the potential trouble, the nominating party goes smoothly.

Since writing previously, I've learned that the folks trying to screw up the liberalpalooza have their own website: Recreate 68.org. The site is set up to facilitate communications between protesters, and help them with planning. It includes a primer on 'Direct Action.' The first part is devoted to an argument over semantics -- trying to explain how Direct Action is different from terrorism. Then they assert that while it's not terrorism, 'it is violent:'

To say that it is violent to destroy the machinery of a slaughterhouse or to break windows belonging to a party that promotes war is to prioritize property over human and animal life. This objection subtly validates violence against living creatures by focusing all attention on property rights and away from more fundamental issues.

The organizer of Recreate 68 (a Ward Churchill buddy) is already sparring with the City of Denver over the permitting process for protests. It seems like there's real potential for this to get ugly.

The obsession with calls for "Action" is a topic that Jonah Goldberg thoroughly explores in Liberal Fascism, which appropriately dubs fascist the more violent, often paramilitary elements of the late 1960s, such as the Black Panthers, and Weather Underground, and the often surprisingly respectable veneer of their enablers.

But instead of trying to "Recreate '68", isn't it time to move beyond a year that's forty years in the past? Trying to relive the 1960s today is as pathetic as trying to recreate the era of Benny Goodman and Bing Crosby in the 1970s.

Or as Daniel Henninger wrote in November:

What fell out of 1968 was a profound division over what I would call civic vision.

One side, which took to the streets in Chicago or occupied Columbia University, concluded from Vietnam and the race riots that America, in its relations with the world and its own citizens, was flawed and required big changes. Their defining document was the March 1968 Kerner Commission report, announcing "two societies," separate and unequal. The press, incidentally, emerged from Vietnam and the riots joined to this new, permanent template. That, too, has never stopped.

The other side was, well, insulted. It thought America was fundamentally good, though always able to improve. The Voting Rights Act passed in 1964 on a bipartisan vote, opposed mainly by southern Democrats. This side's standard-bearer called the U.S. "a shining city upon a hill." But after 1968, no Democratic presidential candidate would ever speak those words. Nor will Mr. Obama ever repeat Mr. Sarkozy's explicit repudiation of that era.

If it's Hillary versus Rudy, McCain or even the placid Mitt Romney, we will be in those streets again. Besides, her candidacy comes with Jumpin' Jack Flash himself, Bill Clinton. Would it be a good thing if the country's politics said bye-bye baby to the children of 1968? Probably. But it won't happen this time.

Will it happen, ever?

Update: "First the Times Square bombing, now this. How does Rove do it?"

Fluoridation, no doubt.

Ed Morrissey writes that Barack Obama had a Leonard Bernstein moment in the mid-1990s.

(And watch for this story to quickly go back down the memory hole.)

Update: And thus, this story isn't very surprising:

Barack Obama will have a big problem attracting the blue-collar white voters he needs to win the presidency, writes Bob Owens: they like guns and he wants to take their guns away.

Steve Green predicts, "Obama probably will be the Democratic nominee. He might even be the next President. But he’ll have no coattails at all. In fact, right now I’d bet there are a bunch of very nervous freshmen Blue Dog Democrats in Congress."

Brent Bozell writes, "For decades, this has been an easy display of the media�s foreign affections. Every right-wing dictator, like Chile�s Pinochet, is a �dictator,� while every left-wing dictator is merely a �leader,� or in Castro�s case, a �dashing revolutionary� and a �rock star.� That was ABC�s Diane Sawyer on the morning of Castro�s abdication announcement":

Throughout Castro�s long history of dominating Cuba, he has also dominated the American media, who have covered him with a sickening parade of ardor and accolades, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Consider these morally bankrupt valentines:

1. Barbara Walters on ABC, in 2002: "For Castro, freedom starts with education. And if literacy alone were the yardstick, Cuba would rank as one of the freest nations on Earth. �

2. Dan Rather on CBS feeling all warm after Elian Gonzalez was ripped away from those �so-called Cuban exiles� in 2000: �There is no question that Castro feels a very deep and abiding connection to those Cubans who are still in Cuba.�

3. Katie Couric applauding communist achievements on NBC in 1992: "Considered one of the most charismatic leaders of the 20th century....Castro traveled the country cultivating his image, and his revolution delivered. Campaigns stamped out illiteracy and even today, Cuba has one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world."

4. Peter Jennings on ABC, in 1989: "Castro has delivered the most to those who had the least, and for much of the Third World, Cuba is actually a model of development."

5. Even sportscasters darkened their reputations. In a 1991 special covering the Pan Am Games, ABC�s Jim McKay could have been speaking for the media in 2008: "You have brought a new system of government, obviously, to Cuba but the Cuban people do think of you, I think, as their father. One day you�re going to retire. Or one day, all of us die. Won�t there be a great vacuum there? Won�t there be something that will be difficult to fill? Can they do it on their own?"

They always do back the mustache on the left--the MSM's coverage of Castro dovetailed remarkably well with their equally obsequious coverage of fellow despot-in-fatigues Saddam Hussein.

"Would Chris Matthews have asked a Russian during the 1930s why people continue to support Stalin? Does Chris Matthews really need to have the facts of life in a brutal Communist dictatorship explained to him? Apparently yes."

A youthful case of Radical Chic is always tough to dispel.

Update: Richard Miniter adds that on NPR today, "in the morning, came the mourning":

Mostly it was from NPR’s “Morning Edition,” where the host twice referred to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro as a “hero.” And the funny thing is, Castro isn’t even dead yet.

This story is overblown by both sides: the aging hippies who somehow still admire the monster and impatient exiles waiting for reform and democracy. Suddenly everyone is breathlessly talking about Castro relinquishing power.

But it isn’t true. He will remain head of the Cuban Communist Party, which is where the real power lies. This obvious point has been missed in all of the commentary, offline and online, that I have seen.

All the autocrat has done is decline to accept another term as president of the council of state. He had already provisionally turned over those responsibilities to his brother Raul in July 2006. He is too old and sick to manage petty internal debates about which young comrade should address the provincial deputy assistant commissars planning commission. So Fidel keeps his hand on the big issues and leaves the micromanagement of his gulag island to someone else.

And who is that someone else? Why didn’t any one point out that turning over power to a member of your family, without even a pretense of an election, is what monarchs do, not Marxists? Talk about internal contradictions…

What if that someone else turns out to be Hugo Chavez?

There's a frightening thought.

Jeff Jacoby has some thoughts on one of history's stranger rhymes.

Recently, the dovish, leftwing Barack Obama received the support of Teddy Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy, and even Maria Shriver, Mrs. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the “new son of Camelot", as Terry Moran put it.

All of which of course is staggeringly ironic to anyone who looks at the 1960s with a gimlet eye, considering what a staunch cold warrior, and especially anti-Castro hardliner JFK was. As James Piereson told me last year:

"In 1963, you have a fairly conservative country, culturally," Piereson notes. "You have a communist assassinate the president, a popular president. In 1968, the country has kind of gone off the rails, especially liberal-left culture as you find in the universities, and places like that. The students are taking drugs, and they're demonstrating, and they're rioting against the war in Vietnam.

"Their hero is Castro, and people like Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse Tung," Pierson says, noting the surfeit of Castro and Ché-style army fatigues being worn on campuses. "So how do you get, really, from this place in 1963, where Kennedy is shot by a communist, to '68 where communists like Castro are heroes to the left?"

And much of the left has been frozen in amber, since, as juvenilia such as this illustrates.

(I think we can safely say though, that with this photo, Obama has Carlos Santana's vote locked up.)

Update: Related thoughts from Captain Ed.

Race42008, whom we quoted on this week's PJM Political show on XM regarding their spotting of a key Romney flip-flop, suggests that "the Democrats are in quite a pickle with their NASCAR-like rules, but, unlike the racing circuit, the world’s oldest political party has a little totalitarian detour on the way to the nomination":

NASCAR settles all its points on the tracks.

Democrats, on the other hand, borrow from Figure Skating and the old Politburo, with elitist judges holding ultimate coronation power.

Many Obama supporters have given notice that they will not abide winning the “standard” delegate race only to lose due to “super” delegate votes.

It appears that it is near impossible for either candidate to amass the needed majority of delegates via only standard delegates.

But then, there is Florida squared.

In 2000, the Democratic Party considered itself aggrieved when it lost the presidency despite the fact that Gore got the most national popular votes.

No matter that the rules have been in place since 1789 that make such calculations irrelevant. Also, no matter that they they tried to change the rules in Florida.

So, now the Dems find themselves rhetorically committed to exalting mob-rule pure democracy.

Add to all this the Clintons extreme ambition and the religious fervor of the Obama-ites, and one sees the makings of a convention that could make 1968’s look pedestrian.

As T.O. would say, bring your popcorn.

Update: More from Glenn Reynolds.

Back in September, I wrote:

As detailed in Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover's Mad As Hell: Revolt at the Ballot Box, 1992, what some may not recall these days about Bill Clinton's "Sister Souljah Moment", was that it had little to do with insulting a two-bit virtually unknown rapper, and everything to do with distancing himself from the failed radic chic 1970-era politics of her backer, Jesse Jackson. It was one of many gestures that allowed Clinton to position himself as much more moderate than the average Democrat presidential candidate, and went far towards cementing his candidacy.

Amazing how the Democrats' PC Identity Politics Playdough Fun Factory this campaign finally caused Bill to come full circle.

Scott Hinderaker of Power Line writes:

The American Jewish Congress submitted this understated advertisement about the status of women in Israel to Ms. Magazine. Underneath the attractive photographs of Israel's foreign minister (Tzipi Livni), Supreme Court president (Dorit Beinish), and speaker of the Knesset (Dalia Itzik), the ad reads: "This is Israel." I think it is fair to say that in most parts of the United States it would be deemed an utterly innocuous ad.

Ms. rejected the ad. Yesterday the AJC issued this press release with the following comments:

"What other conclusion can we reach," asked Richard Gordon, President of AJCongress, "except that the publishers -- and if the publishers are right, a significant number of Ms. Magazine readers -- are so hostile to Israel that they do not even want to see an ad that says something positive about Israel?"

When Director of AJCongress' Commission for Women's Empowerment Harriet Kurlander tried to place the ad, she was told that publishing the ad "will set off a firestorm" and that "there are very strong opinions" on the subject -- the subject presumably being whether or not one can say anything positive about Israel. Ms. Magazine publisher Eleanor Smeal failed to respond to a signed-for certified letter with a copy of the ad as well as numerous calls by Mr. Gordon over a period of weeks.

According to the press release, the powers-that-be at Ms. provided advice on the kind of ad that might pass muster with them:

A Ms. Magazine representative, Susie Gilligan, whom the Ms. Magazine masthead lists under the publisher's office, told Ms. Kurlander that the magazine "would love to have an ad from you on women's empowerment, or reproductive freedom, but not on this." Ms. Gilligan failed to elaborate what "this" is.

Yes, that's certainly a tough one to figure out.

Update: Meryl Yourish writes:

What time is it, folks? That’s right. It’s Israeli Double Standard Time. It occurs every day of the week that ends with a y.

Read the whole thing.

Hillary lets a glycerin tear flow--since it's on the eve of New Hampshire, does this count as her Edward Muskie moment? If so, Power Line's Paul Mirengoff writes that it could work to her benefit, unlike Muskie's waterworks:

They say that, as in baseball, there's no crying in politics, and Ed Muskie came to a bad end in New Hampshire in 1972 after he appeared to cry in public. But the video of Clinton doesn't necessarily cast her in a bad light, and could even help her with female voters, upon whose support she's more dependent than ever.

And for more news from 1972, George McGovern, who back then was comparing Ho Chi Minh to George Washington, reminds us that in contrast, he just doesn't like the cut of Dubya's jib.

Update: The Anchoress predicted Hillary's Iron Eye Cody impersonation last week; Tammy Bruce has video of the Other Clinton Crying Moment.

Just click.

"Vuitton-clad Venezuela minister spouts socialism."

(As opposed to your average Reuters columnist, of course.)

Theodore Dalrymple writes, "For millions of its inhabitants, Britain is a failing state. It assumes responsibility for education and health care without regard for results; and it fails in its most basic duty, to ensure that its inhabitants can go about their business with reasonable security":

A recent incident—the assault of a 96-year-old man—has brought home to the British public just how little it can rely on the state for protection. The assailant, 44, was frustrated that the elderly man was in his way as he tried to board a train. Shouting “You bastard!,” he punched the man in the face, blinding him in one eye. The attack occurred in full view of many other passengers, and a closed-circuit television camera captured it as well.

Police subsequently apprehended the man, who claimed that the 96-year-old had attacked him first. It would be difficult to imagine a more brutally unfeeling and egotistical crime or more cynical self-justification. It is extremely unlikely that the guilty man is a model of kindness in his other human relations.

The judge in the case, however, said that sending the man to jail would “do nothing to protect the public,” and therefore sentenced him to just three years’ probation. How he came to the opinion that requiring the perpetrator to have a brief chat once a week with a probation officer would achieve this objective is a complete mystery. As the judge himself conceded, “a significant prison sentence would well be justified,” and the charge was such that he had the power to sentence the guilty man to life imprisonment.

The very next day, fittingly enough, the government released figures revealing how probation endangers the public. Over the previous year, serious offenders who had been released from prison early and placed on probation committed at least 83 murders and rapes, a significant portion of the national total. Given the extremely low arrest rate for reported crimes of violence in Britain—and bearing in mind that one-half of all crimes are not even reported—the real figures for violence committed by serious offenders placed on probation after early release from prison must be significantly higher.

Much like its condition in England today, FDR-style American liberalism thoroughly exhausted itself as rational governing force by the late 1960s and (especially) the 1970s. And a big reason why, as Steven Hayward noted in example after example in the first volume of The Age of Reagan, were liberal prosecutors who were often remarkably lenient to criminals. (See also: Horton, Willie.) The vast majority of Americans eventually stopped tolerating such radical chic permissiveness in their government officials and criminal justice system. But is such a course correction still possible in England--and if so, how long will it take to occur?

Update: Needless to say, the crime prevention techniques of this nation are no great shakes, either.

Jonah Goldberg finds Frank Rich having a sad case of Nostalgia De La Radical Chic:

The Frank Rich column Jon Adler links to would be laughable if it weren't so shameful. Indeed, it's precisely the sort of paranoid nonsense Frank Rich would mock if it came from an anti-Clinton conservative in the 1990s. But it is interesting in one respect. He's angry at the American people for not replaying the 1960s. I keep seeing this weepy babyboomer nostalgia popping up. Rich writes:

In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11, our democracy has so steadily been defined down that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we’ve propped up in places like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll. We’ve become inured to democracy-lite. That’s why a Mukasey can be elevated to power with bipartisan support and we barely shrug.

This is a signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not necessarily for the better. During that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions. The Bush years have brought an even more effective assault on those institutions from within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General Musharraf’s.

Ah, yes. Things would be so much better today if we had riots and "angry assaults on American governmental institutions. Just like in the good old days.

It's an interesting duality, isn't it? As James Piereson has noted, punitive liberals such as Rich and Times publisher Pinch Sulzberger believe that America can do no good, having been born of Original Sin. And yet they long for some of the darkest days in America's recent history: Rich waxes nostalgic for the urban riots of the 1960s, just as more Bohemian New Yorkers miss Manhattan in the 1970s, when crime and urban decay ran rampant.

Update: Jules Crittenden declares "Both thumbs up for a Rich tour de force of BDS. Or maybe, just BS."

Back when I was a kid, the only thing I recall being able to build out of Legos were lame-looking toy houses. But these days, their catalog is filled with surprisingly complex toys promoting very un-PC concepts, not the least of which are Gaia-defiling construction equipment, dispensaries of Big Oil, and race cars, which the left holds in utter contempt due to their goreball worming connotations, as Tim Blair would say. And Lego also produces a whole line of toys promoting the violent destructive fantasies of a raaaaacist Hollywood filmmaker. But as James S. Robbins notes, Lego as a corporation is as reactionary and politically correct as they come:

A few days ago I posted a bleg asking for ways to reach out to Lego Systems, Inc. to see if they would donate Lego sets to wounded warriors at Walter Reed who use the sets for therapy. Quick response from Lego — forget it. Now we learn that Lego has awarded $5000.00 to eight year old Kelsie Kimberlin, as part of their first annual Creativity Awards. Her entry — a 5 minute anti-Bush video set to an altered John Lennon tune ("Happy Springtime/Bush is Over").

Problem: the video was actually produced by her father, Brett, who runs Justice Through Music, a civic engagement nonprofit. Brett is also noteworthy for being a convicted bomber (aka terrorist), and for having claimed to have sold pot to Dan Quayle in 1988. Just the kind of person you want associated with your child's favorite toy. Some free advice to Lego — want to fix this PR nightmare? Do the right thing and help the wounded warriors already.

Further thoughts on postmodern corporate hypocrisy here.

If you haven't read it yet, don't miss Roger Kimball's devastating obit for Norman Mailer, who as Woody Allen once quipped, donated his ego to science long ago. Read the whole thing, but for me, this passage really stood out:

A few years before, at a party he threw to announce his mayoral candidacy on the “Existentialist” ticket, Mailer got drunk and stabbed his wife Adele (number two), nearly killing her. (In 1969, Mailer ran for mayor again, this time on the “Secessionist” ticket, which included proposals that New York City become the fifty-first state and that disputes among young criminals be settled by jousting tournaments in Central Park.) Adele declined to press charges, and so Mailer escaped this outrage with a fortnight in Bellevue for observation.

Mailer’s obsession with violence against women seems to have had a long gestation. Carl Rollyson opens his biography of Mailer with the story of John Maloney, a drunkard and a friend of Mailer and William Styron. In 1954, Maloney stabbed his mistress and fled. He was later jailed but released when charges were dropped. Styron recalled that at the time Mailer said to him: “God, I wish I had the courage to stab a woman like that. That was a real gutsy act.” That tells one all one needs to know about Norman Mailer’s idea of “courage.”

What is perhaps most alarming about Mailer’s violence against his wife was that it seems to have titillated more than it repelled his circle of friends. In any event it brought very little condemnation. “Among ‘uptown intellectuals,’” Irving Howe wrote “there was this feeling of shock and dismay, and I don’t remember anyone judging him. The feeling was that he’d been driven to this by compulsiveness, by madness. He was seen as a victim.” Readers who wonder how stabbing his wife could make Mailer a “victim”—and who ask themselves, further, what Mailer’s being a victim would then make Adele—clearly do not have what it takes to be an “uptown intellectual.”

And then add to it the drug-fueled primitive William Burroughs, who played William Tell with his common-law wife Joan Vollmer in 1951, with disastrous results, as his Wikipedia biography notes:

In 1951, Burroughs shot and killed Vollmer in a drunken game of "William Tell" at a party above the American-owned Bounty Bar in Mexico City. He spent 13 days in jail before his brother came to Mexico City and distributed funds to Mexican lawyers and officials, which allowed Burroughs to be released on bail while he awaited trial for the killing, which was ruled culpable homicide. Vollmer’s daughter, Julie Adams, went to live with her grandmother, and William S. Burroughs, Jr. went to St. Louis to live with his grandparents. Burroughs reported every Monday morning to the jail in Mexico City while his prominent Mexican attorney worked to resolve the case. According to James Grauerholz two witnesses had agreed to testify that the gun had gone off accidentally while he was checking to see if it was loaded, and the ballistics experts were bribed to support this story. Nevertheless, the trial was continuously delayed and Burroughs began to write what would eventually become the short novel Queer while awaiting his trial. However, when his attorney fled Mexico after his own legal problems involving a car accident and altercation with the son of a government official, Burroughs decided, according to Ted Morgan, to "skip" and return to the United States. He was convicted in absentia of homicide and sentenced to two years, which was suspended.

Birth of a writer

Original Ace Double edition of Junkie (a.k.a. Junky) from 1953, credited to "William Lee". This was Burroughs's first novel publication. Burroughs later said that shooting Vollmer was a pivotal event in his life, and one which instigated his writing:

I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan's death... I live with the constant threat of possession, for control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invador [sic], the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.

O.J. Simpson is currently spending the second half of his life in a well-deserved career purgatory, his reputation presumably ruined permanently. I have no idea of how aware he is of Mailer and Burroughs, but I wonder what he would think if knew how easy it was for them to get off virtually scott free from such bloody acts in the early days of what would ultimately become long and well-rewarded careers.

Anne Applebaum explains why actors like Sean Penn and fashion models such as Naomi Campbell get the warm and fuzzies around murderous thugs such as Hugo Chavez:

In fact, for the malcontents of Hollywood, academia, and the catwalks, Chávez is an ideal ally. Just as the sympathetic foreigners whom Lenin called "useful idiots" once supported Russia abroad, their modern equivalents provide the Venezuelan president with legitimacy, attention, and good photographs. He, in turn, helps them overcome the frustration John Reed once felt—the frustration of living in an annoyingly unrevolutionary country where people have to change things by law. For all his brilliance, Reed could not bring socialism to America. For all his wealth, fame, media access, and Hollywood power, Sean Penn cannot oust George W. Bush. But by showing up in the company of Chávez, he can at least get a lot more attention for his opinions.

As she explains, it's the same radical chic urge that drove celebrities, intellectuals, and the original useful idiots of 90 years ago to flock to the then-new Soviet Union.

I've been getting numerous visitors today searching on "Deborah Santana"; they've been going to my post with a photograph of Carlos Santana and his wife Deborah at the 2006 Oscars, with Carlos in his dinner jacket and uber-reactionary Che T-shirt, and now I know why: they're declaring their marriage splitsville.

For those who are interested, here are the details from the San Jose Mercury of their divorce announcement.

Eric Scheie spots the Columbine killers in the process of becoming cult heroes:

Considering Che a hero while blaming the NRA for kids who go bad?

In a twisted way, there's a certain logic to it.

Sadly, yes (see also Oswald, Lee Harvey and his benighted status in Oliver Stone's JFK.) And if Cho Seung-Hui joins the list, we can trace a key moment in his ascension to this decision by NBC to create his Che/Oswald/Travis Bickle-style anti-hero pose.

Newsbusters: "AP Ignores Farrakhan's Threats, Merely Refers to Him as 'Fiery Orator'":

Furthermore, it surely is not very arduous for a reporter to discover the racist and anti-Semitic vitriol that Farrakhan has spewed over the years.

I've long known the media have rather short memories when it comes to their favored sons, but this is ridiculous:

Tuesday night's address was the keynote speech for Farrakhan's Holy Day of Atonement, which also commemorated the 12th anniversary of the Million Man March, held Oct. 16, 1995 in Washington.

Farrakhan cut a healthy-looking figure Tuesday in a gray and gold pinstriped suit, a wide smile flashing often under the trademark side-part in his wavy, black hair and thin-rimmed glasses.

Geez--I haven't seen a hate-filled man praised in such fulsome language since...well, since last month.

Radical chic--it's not just for Park Avenue orchestra conductors anymore!

(Someone should send a case of these T-shirts to BBC HQ.)

The New York Post notes:

In his most detailed comments on the Iraq war, Mayor Bloomberg last night suggested the United States was in the same difficult position as the British in the Revolutionary War - facing a determined band of insurgents.

Bloomberg said the comparison occurred to him when he visited his mother recently and was driving through Lexington, Mass., where a scrubby group of farmers rose up against a well-trained militia more than 200 years ago.

"We're the British," the mayor said during an interview with Tom Brokaw at Cooper Union, part of a series featuring potential presidential contenders hosted by former Gov. Mario Cuomo.

Which dovetails absolutely perfectly with comments that Michael Moore and NBC's Brian Williams have previously made.

After reading all that, I need to hit the hookah bar.

At Pajamas HQ, Burt Prelutsky writes:

I can see how Rather may have decided that if he can somehow get his case heard in Los Angeles, he just might win his case in a cakewalk.

Still, if I were as old and as rich as Dan Rather, I don’t think I’d want to get myself tangled up with a slew of lawyers. Instead, I’d figure that I’ve already had all the revenge on CBS that I ever really needed. And her name is Katie Couric.

Meanwhile, Roger Simon has some thoughts on the malignant narcissism of "OJ, Dan Rather and now... Lee Bollinger", the latest successor in a surprisingly long line of Columbia presidents who've never met a radical chic mustache they didn't want to kiss.

As detailed in Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover's Mad As Hell: Revolt at the Ballot Box, 1992, what some may not recall these days about Bill Clinton's "Sister Souljah Moment", was that it had little to do with insulting a two-bit virtually unknown rapper, and everything to do with distancing himself from the failed radic chic 1970-era politics of her backer, Jesse Jackson. It was one of many gestures that allowed Clinton to position himself as much more moderate than the average Democrat presidential candidate, and went far towards cementing his candidacy.

Barack Obama has just quietly generated his own Sister Souljah moment. It will be interesting to see if he can capitalize on it further.

Update: Welcome Chicago Sun-Times readers!

Found via Mark Steyn, the New Republic's longtime publisher Martin Peretz writes:

The American Left and even the mainstream of American liberalism (which includes TNR) has never gotten over its dalliance with Stalinism and its guileful romance with revolution. This is one of the costs of McCarthyism. But it is sadly true that some of the things Joe McCarthy believed and said were not false.

Peretz is typically a very smart writer, so maybe I'm misconstruing his point. But it sounds--at least at first glance--like he's blaming McCarthy on some level for nearly ninety years of the left's love of all things Radical Chic, and an eagerness to ally themselves with any tin-pot tyrant with a thick-enough moustache. That seems like an awfully heavy burden for a man dead 50 years who had already done a pretty good job on his own destroying much of his credibility long before the left turned into (a) a punchline and (b) an evil thought far worse in Hollywood and academia than Stalin himself.

Wow, it's Cruz Bustamante all over again! The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

A high-ranking official in Gov. Blagojevich's office spent nearly two years in a federal prison for refusing to aid a government terrorism probe into a series of bombings in Chicago and New York City.

Steven Guerra, Blagojevich's $120,000-a-year deputy chief of staff for community services, was identified by federal prosecutors as a member of the Puerto Rican separatist group, FALN, which was behind a wave of violence and killings in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Radical Chic--it's not just for classical music conductors, academia, and Hollywood anymore.

(Oh, and other than a reference to the affiliation of the person who recommended Guerra for his job, the usual Spot The Party rule applies to the Sun-Times' article.)

Two new articles explore the death of middlebrow culture in America. First up, Mark Steyn reviews Wilfrid Sheed's The House That George Built, which Steyn describes as "A music book that's not muzak":

"You can't receive all your inspiration from listening to old records," writes Wilfrid Sheed. "It's like receiving your fresh air in cans."

I know what he means. Today, in 2007, we understand that It Had To Be You and The Way You Look Tonight and My Funny Valentine are great songs. They've been declared to be so, over and over. But I wonder if we'd have figured it out at the time. If you happened to be in a dance pavilion in 1924 foxtrotting with your baby and the band played It Had To Be You and you'd never heard it before, would it have sounded any better than the other hits of the day? Better than There's Yes! Yes! In Your Eyes or Oh Gee, Oh Gosh, Oh Golly, I'm in Love or Say it With a Ukulele, which was a pretty cool instrument eight decades back.

Speaking of 1924, when Puccini died that year, I don't suppose opera buffs around the world declared: "Okay, that's it. Game over." It's not always immediately clear that an art form has crossed a line, from something living and breathing to "fresh air in cans" -- a beautifully climate-controlled mausoleum. As terrific as it is to have the canon of the "Golden Age," it's not the same as having it happening right now, all around you, in unlimited supply. It's 1937, and you go to see some rinky-dink musical comedy called Babes in Arms and it's some stupid plot you can't even remember 10 minutes after the show, but every 10 minutes somebody sings My Funny Valentine, or Where or When, or The Lady is a Tramp, or I Wish I Were in Love Again, and they're all new: nobody's ever sung them before.

Flashforward to the present, as Terry Teachout explores the difficult job that Alan Gilbert, the next music director of the New York Philharmonic has in store, as symphony audiences become grayer and grayer:

Even if he proves to be a conductor comparable in quality to Bernstein, there is no possibility whatsoever that he will become as famous as Bernstein.

Why is this so? Because our predominantly popular culture has withdrawn its attention from classical music. The means by which a classical musician could once become famous thus no longer exist. Major labels no longer record this music except sporadically, just as the national media no longer cover it with any frequency.

* * *

If we want to see a revival of the middlebrow culture of the pre-Vietnam era, in which most middle-class Americans who were not immersed in the fine arts were nonetheless aware and respectful of them and frequently made an effort to engage with them through the mass media, then high-culture artists will have to learn how to use today’s mass media in the same way and to the same ends.

Should we attempt to revive the old middlebrow culture? After all, there is a serious case to be made for not doing so: the case, in brief, for artistic elitism. The critic Clement Greenberg put it best in the pages of Commentary a half-century ago when he claimed that “it is middlebrow, not lowbrow, culture that does most nowadays to cut the social ground from under high culture.2 Greenberg's point is still arguable—but there is no getting around the fact that if you care about the continuing fate of symphony orchestras, museums, ballet, opera, and theater companies, and all the other costly institutions that were the pillars of American high culture in the 20th century, you must accept that these elitist enterprises cannot survive without the wholehearted support of a non-elite democratic public that believes in their significance.

Leonard Bernstein and Beverly Sills apprehended this, and did something about it. Perhaps more than any other American classical musicians of their generation, they did their best to communicate to ordinary middle-class Americans the notion that the fruits of high culture are accessible to all who make a good-faith effort to understand them. While that may not be strictly or wholly true, it is largely true—and an ennobling idea. I would not be greatly surprised if Sills in particular is remembered for delivering this message long after the specifics of her performing career are forgotten.

Alas, the message has to a considerable extent been forgotten by the orchestra that Bernstein led. To be sure, the New York Philharmonic, like all American orchestras, works hard at cultivating new audiences—but since Bernstein’s time, its efforts in this direction have rarely involved its music directors. Neither Kurt Masur nor Lorin Maazel made any serious attempt to reach beyond the purview of their regular duties to communicate the significance of classical music to a mass audience. Like most conductors of their generation, they saw their job as purely musical, and took for granted that its value would be appreciated by the larger community they served.

Alan Gilbert will not have that luxury. Instead, he must start from scratch. He must realize, first of all, that mere exposure to the masterpieces of Western classical music does not ensure immediate recognition and acceptance of their greatness—least of all when those doing the exposing make it clear that they expect young audiences to like what they are hearing, on pain of being dismissed as stupid.

This condescending attitude is part of the “entitlement mentality” that has long prevented our high-culture institutions from coming fully to grips with the problem of audience development. Too many classical musicians still think that they deserve the support of the public, not that they have to earn it. One of the signal virtues of America’s middlebrow culture was that for the most part it steered clear of this mentality. Its spokesmen—Bernstein foremost among them—believed devoutly in their responsibility to preach the gospel of art to all men in all conditions, and did so with an effectiveness that our generation can only envy.

And Bernstein didn't have to contend with this:

The school superintendent in Amherst put the kibosh on "West Side Story" as the annual high-school senior musical after a handful of complaints claiming that the work was racist in its portrayal of Puerto Ricans. (In fact, this modern-day Romeo-and-Juliet story is the most beautiful anti-racism work in American musical theater.) "Political correctness," writes Mr. Keller, "is the signature cultural statement of the ruling elites, undermining their moral authority and driving a wedge between them and the working class far more effectively than any right-wing demagogue could hope for."

Ironically though, when PC in America was in its infancy, Bernstein was perfectly willing to dynamite traditional mass culture, when it suited the political fashion of the time.

Sometimes irony really can be ironic, as MSNBC falls for a quote on an Al Sharpton parody blog (which is only fair, as long ago, they fell for the "real" Sharpton). Tawana Brawley, not to mention Georges Sorel, could not be reached for comment. And as the Gawker blog notes, "The next time someone trots out the adage about bloggers not being reporters, we're going to note that reporters aren't exactly reporters these days either."

But hey, they do get to decide "what is news and what isn't", and much more importantly, what's haiku-worthy.

Dan Gainor writes that "The call from the Ivory Tower just wasn't strong enough to stop media mogul Rupert Murdoch from buying Dow Jones & Company. But, it came really close":

"Murdoch also said the media's harsh coverage of him during negotiations with the Bancroft family, which controls Dow Jones, almost squashed the deal," wrote New York Post reporter Peter Lauria in the August 9 New York Post.

From the time negotiations were made public in April until the time the deal was announced on August 1, Murdoch took cheap shot after cheap shot by many of the talking heads in the media.

"I spent the better part of the past three months enduring criticism normally leveled at a genocidal tyrant," Murdoch said.

Murdoch could have avoided all of this if he simply had hired Ramsey Clark as his lead attorney and spokesman.

Chauncey Bailey, the Oakland Post editor shot by a "handyman" (as the media have dubbed his accused killer) associated with the Oakland-based "Your Black Muslim Bakery" franchise, was laid to rest today.

Beginning with its loaded metatag title of "The faith-based thugs of Oakland's Your Black Muslim Bakery", the pox on all their houses tone to this Slate piece by Christopher Hitchens is unmistakable, especially since Hitchens has a new book out titled, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. But his article is still a must-read:

Now, I'm just asking, but: rape, polygamy, intimidation, torture, murder, all these actions emanating from one address and some of them performed in the name of a fanatical ideology. What does it take before the police decide to raid the premises? Should we wait until unveiled women are attacked on the street or until honor killings or female circumcision take hold? (There is no official connection between YBMB and Louis Farrakhan's racist and cultish Nation of Islam, though it seems that Yusuf Bey Sr. did convert to some form of Islam under that sinister organization's auspices.)

My question was answered last Friday, when the Oakland Police Department finally did storm the premises, along with three neighboring homes, and arrested seven people, including Yusuf Bey IV. This, however, was too late to save the life of Chauncey Bailey, the well-liked editor of the black-owned Oakland Post, who had decided to take up where the East Bay Express had left off and to investigate the finances of YBMB. He was shot dead last Thursday in broad daylight on an Oakland street. A young handyman from YBMB named Devaughndre Broussard has been charged in the Bailey case, and other members of the group are being investigated for involvement in the earlier crimes. The "bakery" itself owes more than $200,000 in back taxes and filed for bankruptcy protection last October.

Now, again, I am just asking, but what if this racket had been named the White Christian or Aryan Nations Cookie Parlor? (Motto and mission statement: "Don't F*** With Us.") I think that Oakland's mayor, Ron Dellums—who I was startled to find was still alive—would have joined a picket line around the store (as would I). The same would doubtless have been true of Rep. Barbara Lee, in whose district the YBMB was situated. But instead, in its role as a "community business," the YBMB enjoyed warm support and endorsement from both the mayor and the congresswoman. And the guns for past and future slayings were inside the store.

As Hitchens writes, "If this isn't softness on crime, then the term is meaningless."

In the New York Post, David French writes:

For more than 25 years, conservative writers have been telling anyone who would listen that our higher education system was broken - that indoctrination was trumping education and our kids were throwing away their tuition dollars propping up vicious relics of the '60s and supporting universities that were increasingly repressive. These words, coming from such luminaries as Allan Bloom, Dinesh D'Souza, Alan Charles Kors and David Horowitz, persuaded much of the conservative chattering class that something was wrong. But mainstream Americans seemed unconcerned, with their own (often fond) college memories drowning out even the most eloquent cries for reform.

Enter Ward Churchill.

French writes that Churchill was "the tipping point":

That will be Ward Churchill's lasting legacy. He was the tipping point. Now, it's not just leading conservatives who view the academy as an out-of-control, disconnected bastion of petulant entitlement. In a recent Zogby poll, 58 percent of Americans reported that they now believe that political bias of professors is a "serious problem." Even more, 65 percent, viewed non-tenured professors as more motivated to do a good job in the classroom.

These are not isolated findings. A survey by the American Association of University Professors found that 58.4 percent of Americans had only some or no confidence in our colleges and that 82 percent want to modify or eliminate tenure.

Related thoughts from Stanley Kurtz.

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.

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.

Or as Michelle Malkin puts it on her newly spiffed-up site, "Jimmy Carter said what? Part 999".

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.

"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".

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.

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!

Of course, they wouldn't--which in an odd sense makes Israel the enemy in the eyes of most European leftists (not the least of which are the bulk of the employees at the BBC, of course).

Related: "Syria's Useful Idiots--Why are so many commentators denying the obvious about Lebanon?"

Execupundit's Michael Wade notes that no corner of academia is immune from radical politicization. Meanwhile, Roger Simon explores an exceptional way to "Mau-Mau the Multiculturalists".

(And I'll second that emotion.)

Jonah Goldberg writes that the old days of Marxist-tinted Radical Chic are sooooo 1960s and as passé as a Joni Mitchell 8-track. Unfortunately, Radical Chic is still around, but it now comes in an X-Treme new 21^st Century Schizoid Man flavor:

In the 1960s, every would-be revolutionary called himself a Marxist, usually without any serious regard to what Marx wrote, said or believed. The specifics of the ideology didn’t matter, because Marxism was the oogah-boogah word radicals used to scare the fat, lazy bourgeoisie. In 1969, Stuart Schram, a specialist on Chinese Communism, wrote that “never in the course of the past century has the name Marx been so widely invoked; never has this name served to justify so many ideas and actions totally foreign to the genius of Marx.”

Today, Marxism has lost its oomph. Yuppies drinking five-dollar lattes put Che Guevara t-shirts on their private-school toddlers.

And because nobody thinks Marxists are scary anymore, radicals consumed with hatred for the status quo — for America, for Western civilization or for the plain old dreariness of their boring lives — don’t bother calling themselves Marxists anymore. It’s not that they’re any more or less Marxist then they were before. It’s just that Marxism won’t get a rise out of your in-laws the way it used to.

But Islamic radicalism? Hooboy, that’s where the action is. Of course, not everybody follows the John Walker Lindh route and actually converts to Islam, just as not every Black Panther supporter became a bank robber. But who can deny that this post-colonial, anti-imperialism, indigenous-peoples-and-the-suburban-revolutionaries-who-love-them-unite! stuff is in many respects just a magnet for the same riffraff and rabble rouses of yesteryear?

Sure, there’s much to fear in Jihadism. But there’s also something deeply pathetic about it, too. And that’s worth pointing out.

The connection between the left and Islamic radicalism is explored further in this recent piece by Theodore Dalrymple. And as Mackubin Thomas Owens wrote a year after 9/11, that tragic day "revealed an emerging geopolitical reality: that the world's most important fault line is not between the rich and the poor, but between those who accept modernity and those who reject it."

Which also helps to explain the displacement amongst the left that Julia Gorin wrote of last year: for those who don't believe that either side of the War On Terror is worth their time, and yet still feel a hankering to fight modernity, there's a kinder, gentler war on progress now available.

The Gipper liked to refer to America as a Shining City on a Hill, but not everybody views it in such a favorable light, of course.

Over the weekend, I mentioned this item from Peggy Noonan:

This week saw a small and telling controversy involving a mural on the walls of Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles. The mural is big--400 feet long, 18 feet high at its peak--and eye-catching, as would be anything that "presents a colorful depiction of the rape, slaughter and enslavement of North America's indigenous people by genocidal Europeans." Those are the words of the Los Angeles Times's Bob Sipchen, who noted "the churning stream of skulls in the wake of Columbus's Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria."

What is telling is not that some are asking if the mural portrays the Conquistadors as bloodthirsty monsters, or if it is sufficiently respectful to the indigenous Indians of Mexico. What is telling is that those questions completely miss the point and ignore the obvious. Here is the obvious:

The mural is on the wall of a public school. It is on a public street. Children walk by.

Today, Jonah Goldberg writes of his recent visit to England:

Last week, I appeared at the Oxford Union to debate the proposition: “This House regrets the founding of The United States of America.” Such is the extent of anti-Americanism out there that this was considered to be a reasonable debate topic by Britain’s best and brightest.

And only a half an hour ago, this moment occurred at the first GOP presidential debate of the campaign season at the Reagan Library:

OK, my jaw has now officially dropped. The guy from Politico.com just asked Mitt Romney, “What do you dislike most about America?”

Too bad Mitt probably didn't reply to Mr. Politico, "You go first".

In ancient times, all roads led to Rome. Today, all roads for Democrats seeking the White House lead to Al Sharpton.

I wonder what someone whose worldview is similar to Ward "little Eichmanns" Churchill or Oliver Stone, who compared Al Qaeda terrorists to Einstein(!) shortly after 9/11 would think about the Virginia Tech massacre, given both men's sixties-minted love of terrorism and all things radical chic.

Chances are his thoughts would read very much like this.

Update: Just listening to the first few minutes of this week's Sanity Squad podcast, which touches upon some of these themes.

"MSNBC Cancelling Imus", according to Media Bistro.

Via Hot Air, which also linked earlier today to this terrific op-ed by Jason Whitlock in the Kansas City Star, "Instead of wasting time on irrelevant shock jock, black leaders need to be fighting a growing gangster culture".

Indeed. Hasn't Stanley Crouch been writing on this topic this for years?

Update: This was inevitable--I guess it's the 2007 Play-Doh Fun Factory remix version of Al Gore's "conservative media" mantra from November of 2002.

Don Imus is suspended from broadcasting for two weeks, which, depending upon your perspective is either a bitter pill to swallow, or remarkably light punishment when compared to others who've uttered racial obscenities and seen their careers banished down the pop culture memory hole. (My money's on the latter, for what it's worth.)

Speaking of the memory hole, David Bernstein writes:

I am somewhat overwhelmed by the absurdity of someone apologizing to Al Sharpton for making a bigoted remark, and then Sharpton not accepting the apology. Talk about glass houses! Imus should certainly have apologized for his remark, but not to someone with Sharpton's history.

But to the media, Al Sharpton's history begins with his meeting Democratic presidential candidates Al Gore and Bill Bradley during the 2000 election. Like the Democrats' pre-2003 stance on Iraq, or more radically, John Kerry's Winter Soldier phase, and Robert Byrd's stint in the KKK, Al Sharpton's past doesn't exist.

In other words, if it's not mentioned on CNN or a recent issue of the New York Times, it simply hasn't happened, as far the legacy media--especially the television media--is concerned. Therefore, Al Sharpton, recent Democrat advisor and presidential candidate, is the perfect person for media celebrities who have transgressed, such as Michael Richards and Imus, to go for contrition. I wonder if even they know his background, or if they've somehow personally deleted it from their cranial wetware?

(This also explains the repeated usage in the MSM of the words Swift, Boat, and Vets as a pejorative. Since Kerry has no past prior to 2004, then any unauthorized discussion of that past must be a smear!)

Since the 1960s, academia and the arts have gone in one direction, while the masses another. It was in the 1960s that liberalism took its seemingly permanent hard left turn away from the relatively moderate New Deal that tied together the eras of FDR, Harry Truman and JFK, and simultaneously, Bill Buckley's brand of post-WWII modern conservatism was just beginning to reach fruition.

You can see one aspect of this juncture in Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic from 1969: Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, Barbara Walters, Ingo Preminger, and host of other media and New York society figures gathered in the Bernstein’s stunning Park Avenue duplex, paid for via Bernstein’s role as conductor of the New York Philharmonic, to hear the Black Panthers essentially tell them that they'd slaughter them all if they ever came to power. Pass the hor d'oeuvres, and please give generously to the cause! Three years later, Democrats nominated George McGovern, who compared Ho Che Minh to George Washington and whose staffers took to wearing American flag pins upside down. Manhattan's crime rate was soaring, the stock market merely treading water, and the economy was heading towards an iceberg.

The American public saw repeated gestures such as those, and happily voted over the years for law & order presidents such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. And Bill Clinton's two terms only happened because of his (often grudging) efforts to steer liberalism back towards the center.

That's the duality that's explored (amongst many other topics) in Counterpoints: 25 Years of The New Criterion on Culture & the Arts, the review copy of which arrived in my mailbox today. There are loads of heavy hitters in here; their essays over the years in The New Criterion are anthologized:

Mark Steyn

David Frum

Mordecai Richler

Robert Bork

Heather MacDonald

James Panero

Gertrude Himmelfarb

John Derbyshire

Theodore Dalrymple

John Simon

And many more, along with, of course, The New Criterion’s co-editors and publishers, Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer, who have attempted to steer culture back on course, and provide the necessary counterpoint when it resists their efforts.

I haven't been following the review of Shooter, simply because it looked like a typical big dumb post-9/11 Hollywood movie, but Ace of Spades notes that it's essentially a Dick Cheney assassination fantasy:

I checked for confirmation by seeing if Dana Stevens of the amateur leftist webzine Slate liked it. After all, she views movies almost exclusively through the prism of whether or not they flatter her leftist politics.

Surprise! She loves it! And if you listen to the audio commentary, she's giggling like a schoolgirl over the Cheney-figure (actually a corrupt Senator from Montana, who looks like Cheney and hunts) getting killed in the end.

She soft-sells the movie's politics in her headline ("The Political Revenge Fantasy," no particular politics specified) and in this opening paragraph:

The hero of Shooter, Antoine Fuqua's libertarian action thriller, is the marvelously named Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg).

Libertarian? Really?

But she gives the game away in the audio commentary, gushing (when she doesn't have time to consider her remarks and edit them) that this is in fact a hard left-liberal assassination fantasy.

Why is she dishonest in her written review? Why does someone have to endure her giggling at the thought of the Vice President being assassinated in the audio commentary to get a real take on this film's politics?

The movie's final, bloody coda hammers home its strangely powerful and absolutely nihilistic political message: Everything sucks as much as it possibly can, and even if you're named something as awesome as Bob Lee Swagger, there's not much you can do about it. Swagger's one-man attempt to clean up the streets of Washington is presented as a futile, almost symbolic gesture. The most he (and we) can expect is to satisfy our basest anti-establishment fantasy: to track down the bastards who got us into this mess and blow them the f*** away (to be replaced, presumably, by other bastards).

There's no apparatus of justice in place at the end of this movie, no public stockade in which to shame the perpetrators of all the war crimes, cover-ups, and lies. There's just a lone dude with his girl in a getaway car, leaving behind a pile of bodies. Swagger may be our hero, but he's no savior. Challenged with the rhetorical question, "Do we allow America to be ruled by thugs?" he can only shrug: "Sure, some years we do."

Note that she's not at all displeased by the message of this movie -- sometimes political justice can only come via a sniper's bullet to the head -- but was much exercised indeed about the "war propaganda" in a movie about a battle that occurred over 2000 years ago.

Would Dana Stevens enjoy a film in which a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton analogue was plugged in the face in the interest of true political justice? I doubt it -- in that case, she'd understand the pro-assassination message of the movie was profoundly dangerous. (And undemocratic -- do we all have a vote in who our president is, or does a sniper get a one-bullet-one-vote veto over our elections?) If such a film was released, stating, flat-out, that the only way to get this country back on track was to kill Barack Obama, she'd excortiate it.

The left hates The Turner Diaries. They understand that bad books can give bad people bad ideas. And yet when the leftist equivalent of The Turner Diaries is relased, they get positively gushy. It's all part and parcel of the left's highly nuanced take on political violence: It's either disgusting or it's an, um, interesting idea. It all depends on whether the right people are being assassinated.

In the 1950s and up until the mid-1960s, it was possible to sneak all sorts of leftwing ideas into films by burying them deep into the subtext of the shooting script. Did you think that The Hustler was merely a film about a down-on-his-luck pool bum brilliantly played by Paul Newman? So did I--until I listened to the audio commentary on the DVD, and discovered that it was a film about the Blacklist. (Hey, if you say so, guys.) Similarly, on one level, it’s possible to argue that The Manchurian Candidate is a leftwing fantasy concerning the assassination of Joseph McCarthy, but the film’s incredible pacing, plot twists, and eye-popping cinematography help to soft-sell that it’s yet another anti-McCarthy movie. And from the same era, while Dr. Strangelove is obviously an anti-military/anti-Cold War film, its Swiftian absurdity and brilliant screenwriting, and pox-on-both-sides message makes it all go down remarkably smooth.

The need to bury these themes to get them past the censors in the Hays Office made for brilliant writing and great moviemaking. As did the need to use innuendo rather than overt sexuality (see: Hitchcock, Alfred). That period ended when--talk about unintended consequences--the demise of the Hays office depressed Hollywood’s box office by removing restrictions upon its writers and directors. Thus subtext and innuendo went out the window, ultimately leading to today’s Hollywood and "liberal revenge fantasies". And its not like Shooter is the first film to praise a would-be assassin. Or worse, attempting to make a successful one into a tragic, sympathetic, innocent figure.

Recently, James Lileks shared some thoughts on HBO with readers of NRO's Corner blog:

Ah, the vulgar, vulgar language of “Rome.” I’ll never recover from hearing Cicero shout “You Svck!” in the Senate.

For the Sopranos, it may have disabused people of the notion that mobsters wear bespoke suits and talk in hushed, careful voices in elegant, dimly-lit rooms while weddings take place on the lawn outside. Until the Sopranos, I thought all mobsters were either elegant figures who held power with calm repose, or colorful figures who spoke like Damon Runyan characters. Why, Gotti couldn’t have been a mobster – he used contractions!

The Sopranos’ revelation that mobsters dress poorly, cuss a lot and probably reek of cigarettes was hard to take, but I’m starting to believe it might be right.

In City Journal, Steven Malanga writes that the real New Jersey mob that inspired The Sopranos were even cruder, after watching "The now-forgotten Confessions of an Undercover Cop, a fascinating 1988 documentary, [which] traced the decline and fall of the very Jersey crew that inspired The Sopranos":

Read More »

Once again, proof that no satirist can improve upon the folly of man, as Germany releases convicted Baader-Meinhof terrorist Brigitte Mohnhaupt from her sentence two days early so that she doesn't have to face the indignity of--wait for it--talking to reporters.

As Ed Morrissey writes:

This has to be a joke. They wanted to protect a hardened murderer from getting hassled by reporters? How awful! We wouldn't want to have Mohnhaupt experience that kind of inhumanity!

Besides, what exactly do the Germans expect Mohnhaupt to do? She may disappear long enough to write her autobiography, or perhaps to market the one she probably wrote in prison. Afterwards, she will hit the lecture circuit, talking about the grand old days of revolution, when radical leftists like Mohnhaupt and her friends murdered bankers and abducted law-abiding citizens for fun and profit. She'll want to hold press conferences wherever she goes.

The Germans have to have a holes in their heads for ever letting Mohnhaupt out of prison. This latest concern over the inconvenience of answering for herself to a free press shows what a joke this process was from the start.

Who's Germany's equivalent of Leonard Bernstein? She'll be a huge hit at his cocktail parties.

(Via Betsy Newmark. Incidentally, does anyone have Margaret Cho's take on this development?)

Warner Todd Huston of Newsbusters writes:

I wonder if the MSM ever gets tired of trying to make evil look good? And if they aren't trying to make evil look like good, they are trying to soft pedal evil with a they-are-really-just-like-us analysis of evil’s actions. Such is the case today in the Boston Globe wherein writer H.D.S. Greenway equates Iraqi insurgents to being just like America's founding revolutionary generation.

In 'Surge' doomed to final failure, a badly garbled reading of history is foisted upon an unsuspecting reading public that culminates with H.D.S. Greenway boiling down the entire American Revolution to the claim that British soldiers were a "conquering force" in the Colonies and the Colonists were mad at them for it.

Haven't Michael Moore and Brian Williams improvised enough on that riff, two and three years ago?

(And if America's founding fathers really were as radical chic as these inferences make them out to be, the left wouldn't be so busy rewriting their history or erasing them from history, of course.)

"GMA's Diane Sawyer Allows Iranian President’s Wild Statements to Go Unchallenged".

For yesterday's post regarding the previous stop of Diane's tour, click here.

Update: Mark Steyn and Hugh Hewitt discussed an earlier stop on Diane's tour last week:

HH: Now that brings me around to Bashar Assad’s iPod. Now Diane Sawyer went to interview Bashar Assad, and ended up talking to him about his iPod, and not raising the Hama massacre, or the assassination of Gemayel. And I like Diane Sawyer. She was, I actually took her office over. She was a ghost writer for Nixon, and I followed in her place. She’s always been a very serious journalist. What happens, Mark Steyn, to American journalists, even good ones, in the presence of killers?

MS: Well you know, this is why I loved Oriana Fallaci, because whatever people…a lot of people have different view of her, but she was the one celebrity interviewer who used to just go to these big shots, these dictators, she interviewed Castro, she interviewed Arafat, she interviewed the Ayatollah Khomenei, and she was the one who never fell for them. And this thing where they somehow think you’re getting to the real guy when you ask him about his iPod, this isn’t a new thing. When Yuri Andropov became the leader of the Soviet Union after Brezhnev died, the Soviets tried to promote him as a new face of Soviet communism, and went on about how much he liked Glenn Miller. And this idea…I mean, this was a guy who was the KGB hard man.

HH: Right.

MS: That is not changed by the fact that he likes to go home, put his feet up, and listen to Chattanooga Choo Choo. I mean, it’s an absurd, and it’s actually quite disgusting the way these people think, these interviewers think that somehow it’s getting us a clue to the real man. I’ve mentioned before that Saddam Hussein liked Sinatra. He liked to play Sinatra CD’s. He liked Quality Street Toffees from England, which happen to be my favorite kind of toffees, too. So if I was dating Saddam Hussein, we’d sit there listening to Songs for Swinging Lovers, and eating our Quality Street Toffees, and we’d have a grand old date. But it doesn’t change the fact that he’s a mass murderer.

James Lileks once wrote, "Maybe [film] directors like dictators because they understand the desire to have final cut". I'm not at all sure why those who fancy themselves as cynical world-weary journalists melt in their presence, however.

Update: "Compare Diane Sawyer, subservient in her headdress, with Oriana Fallaci interviewing the Ayatollah Khomeini".

More: Lawhawk adds, "And as I expected, not a single mention of Iran's relationship to Hizbullah. Curious how that happens".

As the old proverb says: Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Give a man a fish recipe named after a murderous communist revolutionary who bizarrely wound up a pop culture T-shirt icon, and he'll post it on Allrecipes.com.

As Glenn Reynolds notes, "It's still 1968. And always will be, apparently." Hey, I understand--my dad hung on to the past with his Crosby records; the geriatric left clings to the past via its Crosby, Stills & Nash records.

In Human Events, Jack Langer writes:

“Hey hey, Uncle Sam! We remember Vietnam!” chanted one former flower child from the stage. The problem is, the youth don’t remember Vietnam. The old radicals are thus trying to entice the young into a movement that revolves around the sacred memory of events in which today’s young people played no part. The youth are essentially being asked to become second-class citizens in this movement, having to bow to the superior wisdom of those who fought the reactionary opposition back when it really mattered.

But the attempt to make the current war into a replay of Vietnam is failing quite dramatically. What’s missing is the key element that provoked many of the old radicals to oppose the Vietnam War in the first place: the draft. It wasn’t really the war per say that a lot of them opposed; it was the prospect of themselves actually having to go fight it. Lacking that impetus, the younger generation seems distinctly unimpressed by the urgency of ending a war fought so soon after the 9/11 attacks.

What do the old radicals have left to offer the youth? Socialism. One can understand the attraction of this credo back in the 1960s, when its American adherents only had the millions of victims of the Soviet regime to contradict their assertion that socialism would provide a positive alternative to capitalism.

But now, we know of the atrocities of a whole new set of postwar socialist regimes in China, Cambodia, Romania, and countless other places -- including Vietnam -- as well as the final collapse of most socialist governments and the turn toward capitalism of nearly all the remaining socialist regimes. Younger activists may have the Iraq War to fight against, but they need something to fight for -- and with socialism, their older role models are not offering them anything appealing.

The '60s radicals say they want a revolution, but how often are revolutions successful without any young people? Trotting out a nervous-looking Jane Fonda -- as the Washington rally organizers did -- may excite the old radicals, but the few younger ones on hand seemed distinctly unimpressed. The attraction of spending hours sculpting giant paper mache puppets and creating makeshift bongos out of water jugs for use in antiwar rallies will only go so far. Without a more creative goal than socialism, the youth are unlikely to follow their aging forebears to the barricades any time soon.

Language such as this is a reminder that there's a whole new way to P.O. dad these days.

Allah writes, "Report: Castro’s life endangered by … shoddy Cuban health care. The irony, so sweet. So syrupy sweet".

But not entirely surprising.

More strange doings on the campuses of my home state. In 2006, I wrote:

What is it with colleges in the state I grew up in and The Reich Stuff, anyhow? Last year, Farleigh Dickinson had on its staff an admitted Neo-Nazi. Now Mahwah's Ramapo College is running an art exhibition featuring paintings that look like they're straight out of Joseph Goebbels' private collection.

Then there's this fellow, with a remarkably similar totalitarian bent and heads-is-tails worldview:

For twenty years, Grover Furr has been an English professor at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey, where he educates students in his peculiar worldview, which is an updated Stalinism and in which America is the world’s biggest oppressor and greatest terrorist state. While his academic expertise is English literature, he presents himself as an expert on communism, and scours academic forums like the Historians of American Communism net, defending Joseph Stalin and calling America’s role in bringing down the Soviet Empire a moral outrage. “Was there something morally wrong in trying to bring down the Soviet Union? I think the only honest answer possible is: Yes, it was wrong,” says Furr.

Not at all surprisingly, he has rather different opinions concerning Israel and those who seek to bring it down.

According to AP, "Fourteen members of an advisory board to Jimmy Carter's human rights organization resigned on Thursday to protest his new book, which criticizes Israeli policy in the Palestinian territories." That's in addition to Professor Kenneth Stein, who resigned from the Carter Center early last month.

A quarter century out of office, and Jimmy's still causing unemployment numbers to increase.

Update: Charles Johnson has more.

More: Here's the Carter Center councilors' letter of resignation.

Reuters can't win from losing--this time they're accused of faking the news by--wait for it!--Hamas.

When a news service begins to lose the trust of its target demographic, it's definitely time reevaluate.

In my post back in August summing up Reuters' infamous "Picture Kill" moment and how they arrived at that point, I mentioned a 2005 Y Net News.com article which reported that terrorist Zakaria Zubeidi, the head of Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Jenin, who was both named as a key figure in organizing terror attacks on Israeli civilians, and also appeared--amazingly--in joke videos for Reuters' in-house consumption. But that's not the only terrorist that Reuters is close contact with:

"PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) - Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar has added to the mystery over Osama bin Laden, saying he hasn't seen his ally and fellow fugitive since U.S.-backed forces ousted the Taliban from Afghanistan in late 2001.

"No, I have neither seen him, nor have I made any effort to do so, but I pray for his health and safety," Omar said in an e-mailed response to questions sent by Reuters.

The questions were relayed to Omar through his spokesman Mohammad Hanif, and a reply was received late on Wednesday."

As Newsbusters writes:

Okay - Reuters has email contact with Mullah Omar, Taliban chief, fugitive, terrorist, etc. and reports it as if it is no big deal. What the heck is wrong with this picture? Where did Reuters get the email address from - Omar's MySpace page? Has Reuters shared this email address with the authorities - i.e. the military hunting for terrorists? Or is the email addy for personal communication only. Which Reuters' employee was involved with the email communication?

Why do we continue to tolerate this blatant terrorist enabling so-called media organization? These journalists are responsible for "telling us the story" from the front of the war on terror. I just didn't realize it was only the terrorists' story they were interested in promoting.

After 9/11, and repeated incidents such as this one and with Zakaria Zubeidi, I'm not at all sure what other conclusion it's possible to come to. As I also mentioned in the long "Picture Kill" post, immediately after 9/11, it was Stephen Jukes, Reuters' global news editor, who infamously refused to label Osama bin Laden as a terrorist and uttered the now famous cliche (since adopted by CNN's senior editor for Arab affairs), "We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter"--which itself is the Big Lie. Attempting to replace Israel’s liberal democracy with Sharia (for but one very simple example) isn't exactly my idea of freedom fighting.

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

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

Hugh Hewitt interviewed Victor Davis Hanson today, and asked him about these photos of University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann's Halloween party, which Democracy Project describes thusly:

University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann threw her annual Halloween costume party at her home Tuesday night. Among the guests was Saad Saadi, who came dressed as a suicide bomber, complete with plastic dynamite strapped to his chest and a toy automatic rifle. Worse, Gutmann posed with Saadi!

An obvious question: would Gutmann have posed with a guest--or even allowed him into her house--if he'd dressed as Adolf Hitler or a Nazi SS officer? A KKK member?

But in modern liberal circles, posing as a Palestinian suicide bomber (see his kefiya) is just fine. After all, he mainly tries to kill innocent Jews.

Hanson replied to Hewitt:

Well, I saw that, and again, I think it's emblematic of this endemic problem on the left, that they don't really see that we're in a war, they don't really see that there's a moral difference between suicide bombers and people who try to deliberately kill people, and people in the war who have collatoral damage by accident, when they try to target terrorists. So I mean, it's a problem we're having, these Fraudian slips. John Kerry didn't mean to slur soldiers, but he has a problem. And when he makes a mistake, and he makes a gaffe, that's the type of things that comes out. It reveals a deep-seated distrust, just like Kennedy, just like Jay Rockefeller, just like Senator Durbin, just like all of these people when they have these outbursts, and they lapse into sort of a stream of consciousness. What you expect to come from them is a 1960's deep distrust of the United States socio-economic and military system. And then they do silly things, such as President Gutmann, who was provost at Princeton University, allowing a picture of her with a suicide bomber. They just don't have the same antenna that most of us do.

As Hugh writes on his blog, "As reaction to these photos builds, please reserve your anger for the adults, not the stupid kid". (And he has since apologized for his actions; see the end of the Democracy Project post.)

This wasn't an isolated incident on Halloween, though. As I noted yesterday:

Karl Rove's mind control rays somehow caused the attorney and former Democratic candidate for governor of Maine who was behind the November Surprise of 2000 to wear an Osama bin Laden mask and toy guns and hand grenades on the side of the road in Maine, where he was promptly arrested.

For a sense of a decadent, dissipated culture which turned a blind eye to the horrors happening even then in their own backyard, it's worth re-reading this superb article by Jonathan Last which compared liberal elites in English universities in the 1930s with today's left in America.

I was only mildly surprised yesterday that Senator Kerry expresses no remorse over his Radical Chic phase in the early 1970s; I wonder if those who've professed admiration for today's terrorists will be any better able to genuflect on their own allegiances in a decade or two.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, I often wondered what Senator Kerry thought of his Winter Soldier days, and the infamous speech to the Senate Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in April 1971 in which he said American troops "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan".

Did he look back on those statements and the pain they caused both soldiers who were still fighting in Vietnam, and those returning home in the early to mid-1970s as a horrible mistake? A byproduct of a misbegotten Radical Chic past, in much the same way that someone like David Horowitz now views his own misadventures of the same period? As I suspected back then, the answer is, of course not:

On Imus this morning, Senator Kerry resurrected his 35 year old slander on Vietnam era veterans:

Incidentally, when you say I have done something in the past I have told the truth in the past. I have never done anything except tell the truth. And I'm not going to take anybody's comment to suggest that somehow my telling the truth was a mistake. The American people rely on the truth, and when I came back from southeast Asia, I told the truth, and I am proud that I stood up and told the truth then, and I have told the truth about Iraq every single step along the way.

And in an attempt to apologize for his remarks on Monday, Kerry issues the classic "I'm sorry if you misinterpreted remarks" style non-aplogy apology, and then sticks the shiv in--once again--at the end:

As a combat veteran, I want to make it clear to anyone in uniform and to their loved ones: my poorly stated joke at a rally was not about, and never intended to refer to any troop.

I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform, and I personally apologize to any service member, family member, or American who was offended.

It is clear the Republican Party would rather talk about anything but their failed security policy. I don’t want my verbal slip to be a diversion from the real issues. I will continue to fight for a change of course to provide real security for our country, and a winning strategy for our troops.

If I was the president, or a Republican House or Senate candidate running for election next week, I'd love to know what Senator Kerry feels is failed about America's security policy: considering the fears of the nation immediately after 9/11, our ability to avoid another attack of that size on our soil is far from purely a matter of luck.

UPI reports, "Communist Party eyes '08 Russian elections":

Moscow, Oct. 26 (UPI) — Russia's Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov wants to replace Vladimir Putin as president.

Although elections won't be until 2008 and the party has not selected its candidate, Zyuganov says he has 100 percent support in the party.

Zyuganov said the Communist Party was gearing up now because if support, and the political apparatus, weren't secured now, "it would be difficult to count on success in the presidential election," ITAR-Tass said.

The Communist Party said it hoped for 20 percent support in next year's parliamentary election, the Russian government news agency said. Zyuganov said party leaders hoped for results that would change "the voting configuration in parliament," ITAR-Tass said.

The Communists will rally and march in Moscow Nov. 7, ITAR-Tass said. That date marks the October Revolution (under the old calendar) that brought down the tsar in 1917. Officially it has been replaced by a Day of National Unity Nov. 4. The party also will participate in events marking the 100th anniversary of Leonid Brezhnev's birth on Dec. 19.

Hey, they only killed tens of million people the first time around. But they'll get it right this time!

When Nancy Pelosi was quoted over the weekend as saying, "Impeachment is off the table", my immediate thought was: not if John Conyers is still in Congress. He and others on the left proposed impeaching President Reagan seemingly every year of his administration. Byron York writes:

At the very least, Conyers’s well-laid groundwork points to a potential conflict between him and Pelosi. She might say impeachment is off the table if Democrats are elected, but we haven’t heard any such declaration from Conyers himself. And what would he say? After all, impeachment is something he’s had in mind for a very long time.

Read the rest.

Back in June, Carl Azuz, CNN's senior editor for Arab affairs said, " Well, I think for one, terrorism for one person is a freedom fight for another", echoing the famous quote of Stephen Jukes, global news editor for Reuters shortly after 9/11.

Michelle Malkin explains why CNN is terrorism's favorite PR contact in its Rolodex, in her latest Vent.

Madeleine Bunting, writing in England's Guardian believes that the Pope should not have spoken out about Islam because he knew it would lead to violence--in fact, she dubbed it, "papal stupidty". In an exceptional TCS column, Lee Harris writes:

"Papal stupidity" is strong language. But a few paragraphs before this harsh phrase, Madeleine Bunting has prepared us for it by arguing that "even the most cursory knowledge of dialogue with Islam teaches...that reverence for the Prophet is non-negotiable. What unites all Muslims is a passionate devotion and commitment to protecting the honor of Mohammed." A Pope who did not know that "reverence for the Prophet is non-negotiable" must, therefore, be guilty of egregious stupidity.

Harris writes, "This leads me to the question that I would like to pose to Madeleine Bunting and all those who have attacked Benedict for his lack of moral responsibility in making the Regensburg address":

Suppose that the eminent English biologist Richard Dawkins delivered a speech at the University of Regensburg in which he attacked supporters of Creationism and Intelligent Design theory as "ignorant boobs" -- words that he has already applied in them in a written article. Now, let us imagine that Christian fundamentalists all over the United States, outraged by this inflammatory language, went on a violent rampage. Suppose that they lynched an elderly professor of biology, and attacked biology departments at several universities. Suppose that teachers of high school biology went about in fear of their lives, while many simply quit their jobs.

What kind of article would Madeleine Bunting write about such a hypothetical incident? Do you think she would violently condemn Richard Dawkins, writing something along the lines of:

"Even the most cursory knowledge of dialogue with Creationists teaches...that reverence for the Biblical account of man's creation is non-negotiable. What unites all Christian fundamentalists is a passionate devotion and commitment to the inerrancy of the Holy Bible."

Would Madeleine Bunting refer to Dawkins' speech as illustrating professorial stupidity? Would she imply that he was personally responsible for the death of the elderly American professor of biology, and describe the brutal murder as having been done "in retaliation" for Dawkins' remarks?

What fools the American Creationists have been to write books, give speeches, and attend the tedious meetings of School Boards, when by rioting, murdering, and running amok, they could have earned the sympathy and respect of enlightened intellectuals like Madeleine Bunting. Instead of being ridiculed as "ignorant boobs," even such prestigious left-leaning papers as The Guardian would rally to their defense reminding us all that for Christian fundamentalists the teaching of creationism is "non-negotiable."

Of course, it was only a year ago, that the Guardian was running columns written by an Islamic journalist trainee who praised the 7/7 London bombers as "sassy". And only a year before that, when the Guardian gave another budding trainee journalist a crack at the op-ed page...

Tim Blair writes:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad explains things to Time magazine:

TIME: Why do your supporters chant “Death to America”?

Ahmadinejad: When they chanted that slogan, it means they hate aggression ...

And the Time reporter just mindlessly takes it all down, like a stenographer, even down to Ahmadinejad's tacit praise of incarcerated Holocaust denier David Irving.

"Wherein our Special Pajamas Correspondent … that scion of the superfabulous, that crosschecker of chic … The Manolo (He of “The Manolo Loves The Shoes”) deigns to glance at the wardrobe Iran’s Man of the Moment… and finds it is not to die for."

Which The Manolo finds is true of most brutal dictators, with one exception--who comes complete with vicious killer fembots!

As Perry de Havilland of Samizdata writes, "take a look at this and make of it what you will", adding, "Truth is all in the editing it would seem".

When Haskell Wexler shot Medium Cool, he had no idea how just interchangeable fact and fiction could be in front of a camera, and behind an editing table.

Update: Could this be an example of Pallywood's equivalent of Industrial Light & Magic's post-production department at work? Maybe it's just my aging eyeballs, but I'd like further proof, if possible. However, it's certainly not looking good for Reuters (terrorism's favorite wire service!) in the early going.

Another Update: OK, I think I'm convinced. In this blinking close-up gif, in addition to the square white concrete building being reproduced identically, the building next to it, which has a much more complex roofline (notice the angular cupola or whatever that structure on the roof is) is also reproduced identically. That looks very much like a Photoshop copy & paste job to me--and these pro photographers agree.

Michelle Malkin examines the Reuters "photo" (sorry, just borrowing a pair of Reuters' quotation marks--they've got lots of 'em), and looks at additional Big Media Photoshoppery.

Note (8:52 PM): This post began at 1:40 PM PDT with the Pallywood video clip; I'm bumping it to the top of the Webpage because of the updates on the doctored Reuters photo, which is the much more timely news here.

Update (9:19 PM): Scroll halfway down to post #217 in this Free Republic thread, where a "Freeper" created a negative image version of the photo. It really makes the copy & paste duplication in the apex of the two clouds of "smoke" that much more obvious.

Update (9:36 PM): Ed Morrissey (as usual) makes a great observation here:

This isn't just one reporter and a producer going nuts at a network news division. This shows that Reuters has either complete incompetents as editors or that the entire British wire service has chosen one particular side in this war. Check all the links in Charles' post, and try to keep from laughing out loud at how utterly stupid Reuters considers its customers to be.

Like New Shimmer, why can't both options be equally possible? Clearly, Reuters' photo editors, whom one assumes would be up on the latest Photoshop tricks and tweaks, are incompetent on some level if they let a photo like that onto the 'Net. And personally, I'd say that these two items indicate rather clearly which side the entire British wire service has chosen.

Update (10:56 PM): Publius Pundit writes, "A special correspondent who works for Reuters sent me this photo from the series, which I believes corroborates Reuters’ story. Judge for yourself"...

Late Update (2:08 AM 8/6/06): Rightwinged.com also goes negative--that is, inverts the colors of the photo for some interesting results.

Last Update (8:18 AM 8/6/06): Picture Kill!

Details of the above dispatch from Reuters here and here. Much more coming later, in this post.

Note (4:47 PM 8/6/06): Huge detailed update now online.

Ann Althouse has some thoughts on Kevin Barrett, the 9/11 conspiracy theorist who is a part-time instructor at the University of Wisconsin's Madison campus. Patrick Farrell, the campus provost, won't fire Barrett, but he doesn't want him to take advantage of the enormous PR platform his incendiary views are creating. She quotes this excerpt from the Chicago Tribune:

"[I]f you continue to identify yourself with UW-Madison in your personal political messages or illustrate an inability to control your interest in publicity for your ideas, I would lose confidence ... ,"...

Announcing his decision on July 10, Farrell declared, "We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas."

Farrell said he wanted Barrett to know that he could reconsider his decision if he did not meet expectations. He said Barrett has "modestly made some efforts" to cut down on publicity.

"I was trying to be fairly careful to not inhibit his privilege of speaking freely," he said. "My point was that he should be aware as he exercises those rights there may be a time when I have to rethink the assurances he has given me about his ability to separate his opinions from what happens in the classroom."...

Farrell scolded Barrett for identifying himself as a UW-Madison instructor in e-mails in which he challenged others to debate his theories. The provost said the challenges suggest "that you speak for the university -- precisely what I told you was inappropriate in that context."

Ann replies:

When I go on radio or TV, I am introduced as a professor at the University of Wisconsin, whether I'm talking about law or politics or culture or some other topic I presume to blab about. It's never even occurred to me that stating this true fact -- where I work -- means that I "speak for the university" or that listeners might be confused into thinking that I do. You'd have to think ordinary people are idiots to believe that they think Kevin Barrett is speaking for the university when he spews his offensive theory. The problem is not confusion about whom he speaks for, but the embarrassment to the university that he thinks what he thinks and he teaches here. How can you justify suppressing this factual information of great public interest?

I don't think it's that unreasonable for the public to presume that Barrett is speaking on behalf of the university, in the sense that his statements imply that they're within the accepted bounds of discourse allowed by the university. As Roger Kimball of The New Criterion wrote last year:

Academic life, like the rest of social life, unfolds within a frame of rules and permissions. At one end, there are things that one must (or must not) do; at the other end, there is rule of whim. The middle range, in which behavior is neither explicitly governed by rules but is not entirely free, is that realm governed by what the British jurist John Fletcher Moulton, writing in the early 1920s, called “Obedience to the Unenforceable.” It is a realm in which not law, not caprice, but virtues such as duty, fairness, judgment, and taste hold sway. In a word, it is the “domain of Manners,” which “covers all cases of right doing where there is no one to make you do it but yourself.” A good index of the health of any social institution is its allegiance to the strictures that define this middle realm. “In the changes that are taking place in the world around us,” Moulton wrote, “one of those which is fraught with grave peril is the discredit into which this idea of the middle land is falling.” One example was the abuse of free speech in political debate: “We have unrestricted freedom of debate,” say the radicals: “We will use it so as to destroy debate.”

The repudiation of obedience to the unenforceable is at the center of what makes academic life (and not only academic life) today so noxious. The contraction of the “domain of Manners” creates a vacuum that is filled on one side by increasing regulation—speech codes, rules for all aspects of social life, efforts to determine by legislation (from the right as well as from the left) what should follow freely from responsible behavior—and on the other side by increased license. More and more, it seems, academia (like other aspects of elite cultural life) has reneged on its compact with society. What, as Lenin memorably asked, is to be done?

* * *

The bright side of the Ward Churchill affair was the fact that public scrutiny brought dramatic, if local, changes. The melancholy side of the affair lay in the fact that the scrutiny had to be enormous and unremitting and that, as the media’s attention wandered so did the public’s interest. If real change is going to come to academic culture, criticism must be ceaseless, pointed, and deep. It is not enough to expose Ward Churchill. The academic culture that breeds and rewards such figures—and their name is legion—must be exposed for what it is: a thoroughly politicized rejection of the principles that inform liberal learning.

Provost Farrell has clearly identified that he's got a problem on his hands. But he's made precisely the wrong judgement, of course. As Althouse writes, if it's acceptable to inflict Barrett's conspiracy theories on UW's students, why isn't it acceptable to allow him to speak to the world at large, via the media? And if that latter is unacceptable because it puts the university in a bad light, what does it say about Barrett's classes, themselves?

EU Referendum looks at the propaganda techniques involved to frame a tragedy for maximum western sympathy and positive spin for Hezbollah.

Update: Much more at Pajamas HQ; meanwhile, Power Line notes:

The Jerusalem Post reports that the IDF is looking into allegations, first raised by bloggers, that the alleged civilian deaths at Qana may have been, at least in part, staged.

* * *

Some of the suggestions made by bloggers seem far-fetched; on the other hand, as we have noted several times, there are a number of distinctly odd aspects to the events as presented by Hezbollah and the press. Hopefully, between the IDF and the Red Cross, the truth will emerge.

Good to see.

Cliff May looks at the unseen villains in Oliver Stone's upcoming World Trade Center:

The WSJ’s Brian Carney disagrees with KLo, me and several others writing in this space regarding Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center.

He argues that it “is the story of 9/11 as experienced by the men on the ground as it occurred. As far as it goes, it does ample justice to the rescue and emergency workers who were present on that day. They did not know, could not know, who brought down the towers or why. The question is whether ‘World Trade Center’ goes far enough when it comes to shaping our understanding of what happened.”

It does not, Carney believes, because “there are no villains in Mr. Stone's movie. Nicolas Cage's John McLoughlin and Michael Pena's Will Jimeno could have been trapped by an earthquake or an accident. … ‘World Trade Center’ tells a powerful story about the basic goodness so many people felt and acted on in the wake of a heinous act. But to the extent that it omits any direct reference to the crimes that made those good deeds necessary, its version of the truth is incomplete.”

Here’s where we differ: Stone’s film does contain reference to those villains and those crimes. The references are few and they are subtle but they are there. And they struck me as powerful and persuasive

There is the fireman in Wisconsin who makes clear that what happened was not an earthquake or other natural disaster but the work of “bastards.” Another character says that this crime must be “avenged.” (Not understood, not prevented from happening again but “avenged.” You don’t avenge a typhoon.)

And finally there is the marvelous character of David Karnes. When he hears about what has happened in lower Manhattan, he puts on his old Marine uniform. His first mission is to rescue those still trapped in the rubble. After that, he will take up arms. He knows a war has begun and that he has a duty to fight it. The audience now knows this, too.

At the end of the film, we learn that Karnes went on to serve two tours in Iraq.

Does that tell us all we need to know about the enemy? Of course not. But it’s a good start – without any misguided attempt to “humanize” the barbarians, without any self-flagellation about why they hate us.

No, the film doesn’t tell us much about this enemy, who he is, how he thinks, what we wants and what will be necessary if we seriously intend to defend ourselves from him.

As soon as I read that, I flashed back to James Bowman's review of Francis Ford Coppola's extended director's cut reissue of his late-1970s opus, Apocalypse Now Redux from 2001:

We never meet a single Vietnamese, for instance, who is not a victim of the Americans. Whom does [Coppola] suppose was shooting back? He keeps the enemy out of sight in order to make the American military effort—which seems to consist mainly of blazing away at the forest or the tall reeds along the banks of the river, or else innocent civilians—look not only futile but crazy. Like the phantasmagoria of the trip upriver, like everything else in the movie, the phantom enemy is designed to show us the futility, the insanity of the war. The enemy is everywhere and nowhere. It is insane to try to fight him.

Coppola kept the enemy largely off-screen because he was, on some level, highly sympathetic to them. (He wasn't alone in Hollywood: while Coppola was shooting Apocalypse, his protégé, George Lucas, was transforming the Vietcong into Luke Skywalker and the rest of the good guy heroes in Star Wars.)

Certainly for Oliver Stone, keeping the terrorists off-screen in World Trade Center helps to hide, shall we say, an inconvenient truth or two--not the least of which are his own sympathetic views of terrorism's heart of darkness.

Update: Betsy Newmark asks a related question:

It's always been somewhat of a mystery why so many on the left just loooooove their man in Havana.

Fortunately, of course, Stone could never be accused of that...

Cathy Young writes that Israel is the unfair target of selective academic outrage:

In the 1980s, there was a concerted movement to make South Africa a pariah state because of its policy of racial apartheid. Today, a similar effort is directed at the state of Israel. A week ago, the anti-Israel campaign achieved two significant victories. Britain's National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education, one of the country's two leading educators' associations, voted for a boycott of Israeli academics and colleges unless they take a stand against Israel's "apartheid policy." On the same day, the Ontario division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the largest labor union in Canada, voted for a boycott of Israel because of its treatment of Palestinians.

The British Foreign Office condemned the teachers' boycott as "counterproductive and retrograde." The reaction from Israel was even stronger. The chairman of the Knesset Committee for Science and Technology, Zevulun Orlev, asked the British parliament to "decry the anti-Semitic and racist decision."

Anti-Semitic or not, the movement to boycott Israel is hypocritical, sanctimonious, and quite simply wrong. It is a shocking example of selective outrage. Yes, Israeli policies are a legitimate target for criticism, and even most of Israel's supporters will admit there has been ill-treatment of Palestinians. Yet no one is demanding a boycott of Russian academics over Russia's occupation of Chechnya, and the accompanying atrocities (which dwarf Israel's human rights abuses in the occupied territories). No one wants to boycott China because of the occupation of Tibet, the persecution of religious minorities, and other abuses by the Chinese regime. No one wants to boycott Saudi Arabia because of its misogyny and religious intolerance.

Partly, this double standard is rooted in the familiar leftist mentality that strenuously condemns bad behavior by Western or pro-Western governments while turning a blind eye to the far worse misdeeds of communist and Third World regimes. But the movement to boycott Israel is especially repulsive for several reasons.

Apartheid-era South Africa, whose pariah status also reflected a double standard, was at least a truly repugnant regime intent on preserving white supremacy. Israel is a flawed democracy intent on preserving itself in the face of forces intent on its destruction.

What's more, the anti-Israel boycott combines this anti-Western, anti-democracy bias with an element of "picking on the little guy." The British professors and the Canadian public employees are not boycotting American institutions because of the occupation of Iraq. Obviously, such a boycott would cripple any institution's ability to function. But lashing out at Israel as a proxy for America is something that can be done with minimal inconvenience.

Nor should anti-Semitism be discounted. British scholar Mona Baker, a leading champion of the boycott, has written that while other countries are guilty of abuses, singling out Israel is appropriate because "Zionist influence [that is, Israeli influence] spreads far beyond its own immediate areas of dominion, and now widely influences many key domestic agendas in the West... This is particularly obvious in the case of the United States, where Zionist lobbies are extremely powerful with both Congress and the media." An international Jewish conspiracy: a sadly familiar tune.

Read the rest.

Three really interesting podcasts went online over the past couple of days:

Gerard Vanderleun of Pajamas has an interview with Mary Cheney, daughter of Vice President Dicky Cheney, on her role in the 2000 and 2004 elections. She was also on Hugh Hewitt's show yesterday (Radio Blogger has clips and a transcription), and is a great interviewee.

Glenn and Helen Reynolds interview James Lileks and Cathy Seipp on parenting then and now. (I interviewed James in the fall of last year; which makes for fun simul-reading while The Glenn & Helen Show runs.)

And finally, Michelle Malkin has a slickly produced video podcast documenting with chromakeyed photos BDS amongst the fashionistas, from Marc Jacobs' San Francisco storefront, to Johnny Depp's Che necklace on the cover of Rolling Stone. Then there's the Arafat-style kaffiyeh that Howard Dean was once spotted wearing on the 2004 presidential campaign trail. As Michelle mentions, the radical chic of thse fashion accessories unknowingly--or worse, knowingly--ties their wearers in with the very people who would put fashion models in burkas, and do far worse to someone openly gay such as Jacobs.

Just to tie it all together (though not with a kaffiyeh), as Cathy Seipp once said:

“one of the great paradoxes of our time is that two groups most endangered by political Islam, gays and women, somehow still find ways to defend it”

Not all do--as Mary Cheney herself illustrates. But anarcho-authoritarianism certainly runs deep.

In 1973, Daniel Patrick Moynihan looked back on the decade which had recently concluded and said, "Most liberals had ended the 1960s rather ashamed of the beliefs they had held at the beginning of the decade". Back in January of 2005, I attempted to use Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic as a signpost on the road between the traditional liberalism of FDR, Truman and JFK and the more radical, punitive version that followed and exists to this day. But in Commentary, James Piereson argues that it was Kennedy's assassination and its immediate aftermath, that would cause the momentous shift that would ultimately consign New Deal-style American liberalism to the ash heap:

Liberalism entered the 1960’s as the vital force in American politics, riding a wave of accomplishment running from the Progressive era through the New Deal and beyond. A handsome young president, John F. Kennedy, had just been elected on the promise to extend the unfinished agenda of reform. Liberalism owned the future, as Orwell might have said. Yet by the end of the decade, liberal doctrine was in disarray, with some of its central assumptions broken by the experience of the immediately preceding years. It has yet to recover.

What happened? There is, of course, a litany of standard answers, from the political to the cultural to the psychological, each seeking to explain the great upheaval summed up in that all-purpose phrase, “the 60’s.” To some, the relevant factor was a long overdue reaction to the repressions and pieties of 1950’s conformism. To others, the watershed event was the escalating war in Vietnam, sparking an opposition movement that itself escalated into widespread disaffection from received political ideas and indeed from larger American purposes. Still others have pointed to the simmering racial tensions that would burst into the open in riots and looting, calling into question underlying assumptions about the course of integration if not the very possibility of social harmony.

No doubt, the combination of these and other events had much to do with driving the nation’s political culture to the Left in the latter half of the decade. But there can be no doubt, either, that an event from the early 1960’s—namely, the assassination of Kennedy himself—contributed heavily. As many observers have noted, Kennedy’s death seemed somehow to give new energy to the more extreme impulses of the Left, as not only left-wing ideas but revolutionary leftist leaders—Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Castro among them—came in the aftermath to enjoy a greater vogue in the United States than at any other time in our history. By 1968, student radicals were taking over campuses and joining protest demonstrations in support of a host of extreme causes.

It is one of the ironies of the era that many young people who in 1963 reacted with profound grief to Kennedy’s death would, just a few years later, come to champion a version of the left-wing doctrines that had motivated his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. But why should this have been so? What was it about mid-century liberalism that allowed it to be knocked so badly off balance by a single blow?

Hugh Hewitt once said:

There is a Kennedy dynasty in Massachusetts and vast Kennedy affection in the Democratic Party and among liberal media. But there is no Kennedy dynasty in America, just an interesting family that wished for a dynasty and could never figure out that Jack's politics might have pulled it off, but never Teddy's.

Read the whole essay by Piereson, which is tremendous; he brilliantly diagrams the transformation from one era to the next.

Update: Dr. Sanity has some further thoughts; Jonah Goldberg writes that he'll be exploring some of the same territory in his upcoming book.

Another Update: I shouted out who killed the Kennedys, but after all, it was you and me.

Glenn Reynolds has a lengthy update on Yale's favorite Big Terrorist On Campus, Rahmatullah Hashemi.

In The Vision of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell wrote of the "mascots of the anointed", of which Hashemi surely must be--along with Mumia Abu Jamal--among the most wretched.

Update: Compare and contrast Yale's fawning treatment of Hashemi with Ohio State's treatment of another man who is also from a less modernized culture.

I guess Burlington Coat Factory is finally out of Che T-shirts: Brent Baker of NewsBusters spots a New York-based correspondent for NBC displaying a serious case of Communist Chic. And note that his producers apparently didn't mind him going on the air in this rig:

Tim Vincent, the Britain-born New York correspondent for Access Hollywood, sported a hammer and sickle T-shirt on Friday's show as he stood in front of NBC's Rockefeller Plaza complex and introduced a piece on American Dreamz, the movie takeoff of American Idol. Though he wore a jacket over the red shirt with the symbol of the regime which murdered tens of millions and oppressed hundreds of millions more for decades, a gold hammer and sickle was clearly visible inside a red star. The gold-outlined red star, sans the hammer and sickle, matches the Soviet's Red Army emblem. I don't get it. Is this some kind of cool statement with thirtysomethings, elite New Yorkers or Brits? Or is it just part of some promotion for an upcoming movie?

As Baker writes, "Imagine the proper outrage that would explode if he had worn a Nazi swastika".

Well, it would certainly sell in the Hong Kong market. But if Vincent really wanted to get a rise out of viewers in Manhattan and Hollywood, he'd wear one of these shirts.

Update: Reporters--even Hollywood gossip reporters--with lingering cases of Communist Chic should read about Hao Wu or Charles Lee.

Another Update: Noting that Steven Spielberg will be an official consultant “in culture and art for the creation of the spectacular ceremonies” for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, Jason Apuzzo writes:

Imagine for a moment if back in 1936 Joseph Goebbels had called up director John Ford for a little help stage-managing the Berlin Olympics. Ford, of course, would’ve turned such an overture down - but seventy years later, well, Hollywood’s a lot more accommodating toward tyrannical dictatorships!

Indeed they are.

In his latest Impromptu, Jay Nordlinger writes:

The CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, is defending his decision to kowtow to the Red Chinese. According to this article, he said, "We believe that the decision that we made to follow the law in China was absolutely the right one."

A nice line: "to follow the law." I wonder whether Schmidt considers some laws too brutal or unjust to be worth the trouble. And I wonder whether he considers any lawmaking body — e.g., the PRC — unworthy of respect.

Schmidt also said, "I think it's arrogant for us to walk into a country where we are just beginning to operate and tell that country how to operate."

Oh, is that it? It's arrogant not to bless the oppression by some people of other people? Is there any regime Schmidt would feel unarrogant about criticizing? And even if you can't do anything about oppression — do you have to cooperate with it?

I also love these particular words: "tell that country how to operate." We're not talking about a "country"; we're talking about a Communist dictatorship that seized power 60 years ago and has hung on ruthlessly.

Finally, Schmidt said, "There are many cases where certain information is not available due to local law or local custom."

I really love that "local law or local custom." When I hear the words "local custom," I think of native dress or dancing, or perhaps arranged marriages. Schmidt is talking about a vicious police state!

Beautiful. Just beautiful. And here am I, a booster of business (and incessant user of Google).

Aren't we all?

In the early days of this blog, we looked at England's appalling crime rate and the PC sensibility that enables it. Mary Madigan of Dean's World writes today that little has changed there.

After the 7/7 bombings last year, we noted that British police were forced to stop random immigration checks on Tube passengers several months before the bombing and wrote, "So much for the London equivalent of the Broken Windows theory of crime prevention".

The American Spectator notes that the Broken Windows Theory has made all the difference in the world in England's soaring crime rates and the comparatively low rates in Manhattan:

American and British criminologists have long been puzzled and angered by the fact that Britain seems to have learnt nothing from the experience of New York in successfully reducing crime.

The big drop in virtually all types of crime in New York has generally been attributed to the zero-tolerance policy associated with Mayor Guiliani. Now Britain, far from adopting zero-tolerance, looks like it's adopting a policy of not prosecuting many serious crimes at all. This is the subject of an official Home Office directive to all British police forces. British police have now been told that instead of arresting a range of serious criminals, they can be let off with a caution.

The Home Office says offenses that may now be dealt with by a caution include burglary of a shop or office, threatening to kill, actual bodily harm, and possession of Class A drugs such as heroin or cocaine if police decide a caution would be the best approach.

Other crimes including common assault, threatening behavior, sex with an underage girl or boy, and car theft should normally be dealt with by a caution, if the offenders admit their guilt but have no criminal record.

London and British crime rates have been increasing for years. Recently total crime rates for London have been estimated at about seven times those of New York for a slightly smaller population and some authorities suggest these figures have been minimized. England and Wales are now accounted by some estimates as the most dangerous places for crime in the developed world.

New York and London have populations of 8 million and 7 million respectively and comparable police budgets, though New York has about 40 percent more police actually on the beat. British papers retail many incidents of British police, rather than preventing crime, being kept busy "celebrating diversity" and prosecuting politically incorrect remarks and behavior (large amounts of money and court time have been spent by the Crown Prosecution Service on cases of children who have made politically incorrect remarks in school playground fights, for instance).

If Rudy doesn't make a run for the White House in 2008, maybe he should go after Tony Blair or Ken Livingstone's jobs. God knows England needs him.

Jeff Harrell of The Shape of Days attended last night's Celebrity Death Match Struggle between David Horowitz and Ward "Little Eichmanns" Churchill, where Chutch was heard to utter, "There is no truth". Jeff begs to differ:

If Ward Churchill were charged with a crime and spouted that “There is no truth” stuff in front of a judge, he’d be found incompetent to stand trial. The guy is nuts.

Either that, or he actually knows better and he’s just talking to hear himself talk. Which is fine if he wants to do it on the radio or a talk show or on a blog. But in front of a room full of impressionable kids? That’s reckless endangerment of a minor, man.

There is objective truth and that truth is this: The best way to debate Ward Churchill is to give him a microphone and let him go.

Mary Catherine Ham has additional links, including to Cam Edwards, who has a very funny write-up of the event:

Random observation: you could ski off of Churchill’s chin. He’s a very handsome guy, in a 60’s-counterculture sort of way. I’m sure he got a lot of co-eds in his younger days. Horowitz, on the other hand, looks like a bearded Larry David (from Curb Your Enthusiasm). He’s funny, he’s not throwing bombs. He just makes the point that academics exist in a vacuum, and “in a democracy, academic freedom is important because the purpose of education is to open minds, not to indoctrinate them”. It’s about “how to think, not what to think”, which I absolutely agree with.

Churchill says he went to Elmwood Grade School in central Illinois! Quick blogosphere… someone find his report card! Churchill also just said he got a two weeks detention for voting socialist in a mock election. Okay, now I think we really DO need to find his report card.

“Ward seems to be very inquisitive, but he keeps poking Mary Sue with his ginormous chin and making her cry. Also, he voted socialist. I think you should send him to Red China. Sincerely, Mrs. Beasley”

8:40 p.m.- I am now reminded why I hated college. This, at least for now, is not a debate. It’s a lecture. And I hate being lectured to.

Maybe Jim Geraghty’s right. Maybe we’re all just so lowbrow now that I’m waiting for, hoping for the train wreck to occur. Someone throw a chair at Ward Churchill! Someone throw a tomato at David Horowitz! Food Fight!!!!

Hopefully the University of Colorado has Ward on Double-Secret Probation these days.

Update: Horowitz and Churchill appeared afterwards on Hannity & Colmes; Expose The Left has a video clip.

Another Update: Cam Edwards wrote about that Horowitz "looks like a bearded Larry David". Gregg Hanke provides the "Separated At Birth" for David's debating partner. Hey, hey; my, my!

Sitting in for Michelle Malkin, Allahpundit has some advice for America's youth:

if you're planning to have a youthful criminal indiscretion, and you're trying to decide between shoplifting and blowing up a skyscraper, think big.

Just remember, it's got to be radical and chic to look good on your Yale admission form.

On the flight out to New Jersey, I read Theodore Dalrymple's superb essay (that's a redundant phrase, isn't it?) on Virginia Woolf:

Mrs. Woolf’s ideal college—the kind that would prevent rather than promote wars—would not be in any way elitist. It would “not [be] parcelled out into the miserable distinctions of rich and poor, of clever and stupid.” It would, rather, be a place “where all the different degrees and kinds of mind, body and soul met and co-operated.” It would be entirely nonjudgmental, even as to intellect. For her, the urge to compete does not inhere in man’s nature, nor does it result in anything other than violent strife. Henceforth, there is to be no testing oneself against the best, with the possibility, even the likelihood, of failure: instead, one is perpetually to immerse oneself in the tepid bath of self-esteem, mutual congratulation, and benevolence toward all.

Of course, it is a mistake to suppose that a hypothetical future state of perfect toleration means toleration in or of the present: far from it. Mrs. Woolf would not let her opponents, or those who think differently, live in peace: on the page after the last marked by Michel Leiris, she gives full expression to her slash-and-burn concept of cultural renewal: “No guinea of earned money should go to rebuilding the college on the old plan. . . . [T]herefore the guinea should be earmarked ‘Rags. Petrol. Matches.’ And this note should be attached to it. ‘Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willows. And let the daughters of educated men dance round the fire and heap armful upon armful of dead leaves upon the flames. And let their mothers lean from the upper windows [before, presumably, being burned to death] and cry “Let it blaze! Let it blaze! For we have done with this education!”’”

This incendiary passage, Mrs. Woolf insists in her very next sentence, is not mere empty rhetoric: though she subsequently retreats a little from her incitement to arson by pointing out the self-defeating nature of that crime, insofar as the college she was proposing to burn down was necessary to train women to be able to earn the guinea of discretionary income with which to buy the materials to burn it down in the first place. What a dilemma! The passion, if not the logic, of her argument is clear and perhaps casts a new light on the deliberate destructiveness of the motives that lay behind her literary innovations. She was nothing if not a great hater of all that had gone before her.

But Woolf was far from alone in this; hating all that had gone on before was one the themes of the 20th century, as a Wolfe of an entirely different coat (white garbadine, typically) once wrote:

“Start from zero” was the slogan of the Bauhaus School, a tiny artists’ movement in Germany in the 1920s that swept aside the architectural styles of the past and created the glass-box face of the modern American city during the twentieth century. I should mention the soaring exuberance with which the movement began, the passionate conviction of the Bauhaus’s leader, Walter Gropius, that by starting from zero in architecture and design man could free himself from the dead hand of the past.

The hippies sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes of restraints of the past and start out from zero. Among the codes and restraints that people in the [hippie] communes swept aside—quite purposely—were those that said you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s mattresses without changing the sheets or, as was more likely, without using any sheets at all.

And in 1968 they were relearning…the laws of hygiene…by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. This process, namely the relearning—following a Promethean and unprecedented start from zero—seems to me to be the leitmotif of the 21st century.

In politics the 20th century’s great start from zero was one-party socialism, also known as Communism or Marxism-Leninism. Given that system’s bad reputation in the West today, it is instructive to read John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World—before turning to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Well before the sudden breaching of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the relearning had reached the point where even ruling circles in the Soviet Union and China had begun to wonder how best to conquer Communism into something other than, in Bernard Henri-Levy’s memorable phrase, “barbarians with a human face.”

The great American contribution to the 20th century’s start from zero was in the area of manners and mores, especially in what was rather primly called “the sexual revolution.” In every hamlet, even in the erstwhile Bible belt, may be found the village brothel, no longer hidden in a house of blue lights or red lights or behind a green door but openly advertised by the side of the road with a thousand-watt backlit plastic sign. But in the sexual revolution, too, a painful dawn broke in the 1980s, and the relearning, in the form of prophylaxis, began. All may be summed up in a single term requiring no amplifications: AIDS.

The Great Relearning—if anything so prosaic as remedial education can be called great—should be thought of not so much as the end point of the 20th century as the theme of the 21st. There is no law in history that says a new century must start 10 or 20 years beforehand, but two times in a row it has worked out that way.

Of course, western civilization isn't the only culture that could benefit from the Great Relearning.

Welcome to the Zen of Yale: Many eastern religions practice meditation as a way of emptying the mind's thoughts. Yale apparently believes that an empty mind is the sign of an elite education as well:

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

Don't miss the rest (via InstaPundit).

Elsewhere in the Ivy League, the New York Sun notes:

A paper recently co-authored by the academic dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government about the allegedly far-reaching influence of an “Israel lobby” is winning praise from white supremacist David Duke.

The Palestine Liberation Organization mission to Washington is distributing the paper, which also is being hailed by a senior member of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization.

But the paper,“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” by the Kennedy School’s Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, is meeting with a more critical reception from many of those it names as part of the lobby.The 83-page “working paper” claims a network of journalists, think tanks, lobbyists, and largely Jewish officials have seized the foreign policy debate and manipulated America to invade Iraq. Included in this network, the authors say, are the editors of the New YorkTimes, the scholars at the Brookings Institution, students at Columbia, “pro-Israel” senior officials in the executive branch, and “neoconservative gentiles” including columnist George Will.

Duke, a former Louisiana state legislator and one-time Ku Klux Klan leader, called the paper “a great step forward,” but he said he was “surprised” that the Kennedy School would publish the report.”

“I have read about the report and read one summary already, and I am surprised how excellent it is,”he said in an e-mail.“It is quite satisfying to see a body in the premier American University essentially come out and validate every major point I have been making since even before the war even started.” Duke added that “the task before us is to wrest control of America’s foreign policy and critical junctures of media from the Jewish extremist Neocons that seek to lead us into what they expectantly call World War IV.”

Mr.Walt said last night,“I have always found Mr. Duke’s views reprehensible, and I am sorry he sees this article as consistent with his view of the world.”

Why? Radical Chic invariably makes for strange bedfellows.

Update: Pamela of Atlas Shrugs has more.

John Fund in his latest update to the "God and Taliban at Yale" story, quotes Ben Stein on the admittance of ex-Taliban spokesterrorist Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi:

"It's extremely discouraging. It's as if Yale had admitted a largely unrepentant SS man after World War II on the theory he would help rebuild Germany." He told me. "Yale is being run by Froot Loops and is wacky."

It's hard to argue with that assessment after reading this:

Last Wednesday, Mr. Surovov sent an angry email from a Columbia University account to Clinton Taylor and Debbie Bookstaber, two young Yale grads who are so frustrated at their alma mater's refusal to answer questions about Mr. Rahmatullah that they've launched a protest. Called NailYale, it focuses on the Taliban's barbaric treatment of women, which extended to yanking out the fingernails of those who wore nail polish. In a column on TownHall.com, they urged alumni "not give one red cent this year, but instead send Yale a red press-on fingernail."

Mr. Surovov, a Yale alumnus who has worked in its development office for three years and is on the board of the Yale Club of New Haven, wrote Mr. Taylor and Ms. Bookstaber at their private email addresses with the subject heading: "Y [sic] do you hate Yale." Here is his email in its entirety: "What is wrong with you? Are you retarded? This is the most disgraceful alumni article that I have ever read in my life. You failed to mention that you've never contributed to the Yale Alumni Fund in your life. But to suggest that others follow your negative example is disgusting."

Intrigued that someone had looked up his wife's giving record, David Bookstaber, a Yale computer science graduate, used Columbia's publicly accessible IT account database to trace the anonymous email. The trail led straight to Mr. Surovov's Yale office. On Thursday Mr. Taylor phoned Mr. Suvarov, who told him he was angry because the furor over the Taliban official was hurting fund raising and could lower Yale's rankings in the next U.S. News & World Report college survey. He also accused Mr. Taylor and Ms. Bookstaber of "terrorist tactics," which when challenged he amended to "terror tactics."

Later in the article, Fund quotes Christina Bost Seaton, a former officer of the Yale College Democrats, as saying that the enrollment of Rahmatullah "is not diversity--this is a lapse in judgment. Diversity doesn't mean abandoning your sense of right and wrong."

But sadly that is the definition of multicultural diversity--and modern intellectualism in general, as Theodore Dalrymple noted in 1998 when reviewing what passes for high art in England:

modern sophistication demands a sensibility that nothing can offend or even surprise, that is ironclad against shock or moral objection. To be a man of artistic taste now requires that you have no standards at all to be violated: which, as Ortega y Gasset said, is the beginning of barbarism.

And what better way to define that barbarism can there be than finding a leader of the Taliban, the most radically chic person you can find, and making him the new big man on campus?

(Via National Review's new "Phi Beta Cons" blog, where Fund says he'd be happy to move onto other stories "if Yale would just start answering questions and stop acting like the Nixon White House and stonewalling".)

Update: Roger L. Simon and his readers have some thoughts on Mr. Suvorov's deep knowledge of post-9/11 Middle Eastern geopolitics.

At the top of his "Best of the Web" column today, James Taranto hypothesizes an interesting theory about media blowback:

Anti-Muslim sentiment is on the rise, a new poll suggests, the Washington Post reports:

As the war in Iraq grinds into its fourth year, a growing proportion of Americans are expressing unfavorable views of Islam, and a majority now say that Muslims are disproportionately prone to violence, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The poll found that nearly half of Americans--46 percent--have a negative view of Islam, seven percentage points higher than in the tense months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when Muslims were often targeted for violence.

"Muslims were often targeted for violence" is a drastic overstatement; "occasionally" would have been more accurate. But how could it be that Americans are more hostile to Islam today than they were in the immediate aftermath of an Islamist massacre in New York?

Our sense is that the media's antiwar bias is feeding the public's anti-Muslim bias. By relentlessly focusing on the bad news in Iraq and playing down the good, journalists perpetuate an image of the Muslim world as a hostile, uncivilized place.

Heh. Of course, you could make the same case for how the media distorted the world's view of Los Angeles in the early 1990s by egging on rioters, and the movie industry perpetuated similar stereotypes at the Oscars this past Sunday.

Update: Related thoughts from Jim Geraghty.

Back in 2002, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) infamously asked, "Why is this man (Osama bin Laden) so popular around the world? Why are people so supportive of him in many countries … that are riddled with poverty?"

Citizen Smash finds a former US Diplomat riffing from the same morally equivalent songbook:

ANN WRIGHT: ...Why is Bin Laden and al Qaeda [sic] intent on doing harm to the people of America? Is there a reason why they are after us? And, if there are some reasons... should we consider, perhaps, evaluating whether or not they may have a point on a few things?
(applause)

ANN WRIGHT: For example, one of the earlier things... I mean, if you go through the various tracts that he's given, there are quite a few items that he has a bone to pick with the United States. And quite honestly, I think, having been a diplomat for sixteen years, a lot of people of the world, not just Bin Laden and al Qaeda, have the same bones to pick with America. And a lot of them have to do with leaving, first, U.S. military... on the holy soil of Saudi Arabia -- that was a particular one for them, for al Qaeda and Bin Laden.

But the inordinate use of resources by the United States, our total dependency on oil, and our inability to decide that perhaps our lifestyles are a little bit over the top, and that maybe there is a way that we can have a very comfortable life, but not use up 25 percent of the world's resources for four percent of the population.

(applause)

ANN WRIGHT: And there are some things that we as Americans can do, that very quickly will show Bin Laden, al Qaeda, the rest of the world, that we aren't... We really do have to evaluate what we do in the world, and to the rest of the world, we are... we aren't good stewards of the Earth. That we are sucking up stuff. We're contributing inordinately to global warming, which means that many of the island populations of the world will disappear, as well as most of the coasts of the United States.

We have a lot to do. And hopefully, we can get an administration that will force us to do a few of these things, so that to those people who want to take violent actions against us for some of these things, that perhaps they will see, as the rest of the world will see very quickly and appreciate, the fact that we can change our ways. It's not that we're all bad. But, we've got a little bit of changing to do, I think, ourselves.

As Smash asks, "So, if we sign the Kyoto Treaty, will Bin Laden play nice?"

Well, about as nicely as Islamofascists have treated Europe since 9/11, I'd guess.

Michelle Malkin describes a novel protest over Yale's admission of former Taliban spokesterrorist, Rahmatullah Hashemi.

The Opinionated Bastard notes that Big Media's mindset has changed not one iota over the last 15 years:

Let me tell you a story.

I grew up in Simi Valley.

My wife grew up in LA.

My wife has been beat up by the LAPD. Simi Valley was where the Rodney King trial was held (though none of the jurors were from there, FYI).

Remember that.

I was in LA the day of the Rodney King verdict.

All day, I saw the media run retrospectives of the Watts riots. “Look, everyone! The darkies might riot!” Then, after the verdict came in, I same them, for 4 hours asking black people:

Are you going to riot?

Are you going to riot?

Are you going to riot?

Are you going to riot?

Are you going to riot?

Are you going to riot?

After goading for hours, they found something somewhere! Some people pulled Reginald Denny from his truck at the intersection of Florence and Normandie. Instantly, they broadcast the beating on all the channels. The message was:

The riot is on!

And sadly, it was.

Prior to the Iraq War coverage, the local television coverage was the most despicable thing I had ever seen the media do. Does the LAPD bear some blame for the riots? Yes. Does Rodney King? Yes.

But for me, the lion's share of the blame falls on the local television stations in LA. The behavior of both Rodney King and the LAPD was terrible, and the verdict, well, it was the verdict. But I truly don't think there would have been riots if the media hadn't intentionally fanned the flames. 50-60 people died in those riots. I lay those deaths to a large extent at the door of the LA media, yes.

Last week, I saw the media chant:

Is there going to be a civil war?

Is there going to be a civil war?

Is there going to be a civil war?

Is there going to be a civil war?

Is there going to be a civil war?

They could have just as easily asked:

So, when are you guys going to work it out?

Not changed in 15 years? More like a 100. You could make a pretty good case that in the course of a century, the media--especially the television media--have done little more than turn William Randolph Hearst's infamous quip to his photographer in Cuba (echoed in a slightly paraphrased form in Citizen Kane), on its head.

Update: Further thoughts, here.

Ed Morrissey writes:

Six animal-rights activists that ran a front group for pipe-bombers discovered that the nation has lost patience with violent protests, and now face as much as 23 years behind bars for their connections to vandalism, bombings, and death threats against medical researchers. The verdict is the first conviction under a law passed fourteen years ago to stop attacks on research facilities and their staffs.

* * *

Anyone who bombs, vandalizes, or issues death threats to achieve what they cannot win through the legislative process is a terrorist, regardless of the cause. It does not matter whether that cause is abortion, the environment, animal research, or eliminating the designated hitter rule. Ends do not justify means, and living in a democracy means accepting the legitimacy of a loss in the democratic process. For years, people who acted violently in support of political issues found too much sympathy from their peers. Those days appear over, and not a moment too soon.

Good to see.

Dennis Prager explores moral inversions:

If you wish to test the thesis that the Left blames those blown up for being blown up by Muslim terrorists, have your son or daughter at college ask some liberal arts professors who is to blame for 9-11 or Muslim suicide bombers in Israel, etc.

In fact, one way to describe the moral divide between conservatives and liberals is whom they blame for acts of evil committed against innocent people, especially when committed by non-whites and non-Westerners. Conservatives blame the perpetrators, and liberals blame either the victims' group or the circumstances.

We Americans are used to this. For decades, liberals have blamed violent crime in America on racism and poverty, i.e., on American society far more than on the murderers, rapists, arsonists and muggers themselves. Conservatives blame the criminals.

During the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, black mobs murdered innocent Korean shopkeepers and burned sections of the city. The liberal response in America was virtually universal: We must understand the anger of these people at American racism. The daily special section on the riots in the major local newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, was titled, "Understanding the Rage."

Though Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs correspondent, has been among the few prominent liberals to support the Iraq War, he regularly blames Islamic terror on unemployment in the Arab world.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

Pieter Dorsman of Peaktalk tries to break "The Silence of the Left":

Cathy Seipp - who also runs the excellent Cathy’s World blog - had an interesting column up in the LA Times yesterday built around the notion that:

“ … one of the great paradoxes of our time is that two groups most endangered by political Islam, gays and women, somehow still find ways to defend it”

While a somewhat sweeping generalization, it goes to the heart of the Fortuynist argument that the groups that benefited most from the liberalization of our society in the 1960s and 70s, probably are least aware of what they stand to lose if radical Muslims and their western appeasers are allowed to embrace and implement a new social agenda.

Seipp’s claims sparked a sharp rebuff from Gabriel Rotello on the Huffington Post where he countered by compiling a list of notable gays and women who have taken on the excesses of radicalism in our midst. That of course is a fairly superficial way of addressing the issue as anyone can come up with a list that contains Sullivan, Bawer, Manji, Hirsi Ali and the late Fortuyn. But it doesn’t address the core of the issue and therefore Rotello largely misses the point.

The fact that the focus is on these few brave individuals that speak up and who now in some cases have to live under police protection proves Seipp’s point: it is the left at large that has been silent. Where is that mass movement, where are the rallies, those concerted efforts that characterized women’s and gay movements from the 1960s onwards? And it is not just gays or women: there is a string of left-wing causes which always managed to find a joint umbrella under which it protested the free west’s accomplishments, think of the “women against nukes” or the various “animal rights” groups. I grew up in a country that was in the vanguard of this leftist revolution and which as a result spawned a political and media establishment that was firmly rooted in the values of this post-war social and cultural revolution.

This is certainly far from a new phenomenon: in his recent essay on H.L. Mencken, Fred Siegel dubbed Menck an "Anarcho-Authoritarian" for his pro-German attitudes World War I:

Part of the reason it's so hard to make sense of Mencken is that he was, paradoxically, an anarcho-authoritarian. He agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union on the importance of free speech. But while that organization, under the influence of principled men such as Felix Frankfurter, argued for such freedoms on the grounds that "a marketplace of ideas" (to use Justice Holmes's term) was the best method of arriving at the truth, Mencken supported it in order to shield superior men like himself from being hobbled by the little people. For the same reason, Mencken was a near anarchist when it came to America, but an authoritarian when it came to the iron rule of the Kaiser and General Ludendorff. We are more familiar with anarcho-Stalinists such as William Kunstler, who had a parallel attitude toward the United States and the Soviet empire, but it was Mencken who blazed the trail down which Kunstler and his ilk would travel.

More recently, the issues that Dorsman focuses on in his post, the "women’s and gay movements from the 1960s onwards", as he puts it, are, at least in the US, far more trends of the 1970s than they were of the sixties, which was dominated, at least until 1968, by a relatively benign FDR/Great Society liberalism, until it morphed into something far more punitive.

As a result, the anarcho-authoritarianism that Siegel described, while it may be a mouthful of an expression, was definitely at work in the 1970s, particularly in Hollywood. Tinseltown simultaneously celebrated liberal sexual mores in its 1970s movies, while simultaneously championing societies would happily through anyone caught committing such actions into the gulag. One of the peaks of this mental schism was the 1975 Oscars, as James Webb noted in 1997:

There is perhaps no greater testimony to the celebratory atmosphere that surrounded the Communist victory in Vietnam than the 1975 Academy Awards, which took place on April 8, just three weeks before the South’s final surrender. The award for Best Feature Documentary went to the film Hearts and Minds, a vicious piece of propaganda that assailed American cultural values as well as our effort to assist South Vietnam’s struggle for democracy. The producers, Peter Davis and Bert Schneider [who plays a role in David Horowitz’s story—see page 31], jointly accepted the Oscar. Schneider was frank in his support of the Communists. As he stepped to the mike he commented that "It is ironic that we are here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated." Then came one of the most stunning—if intentionally forgotten—moments in Hollywood history. As a struggling country many Americans had paid blood and tears to try to preserve was disappearing beneath a tank onslaught, Schneider pulled out a telegram from our enemy, the Vietnamese Communist delegation in Paris, and read aloud its congratulations to his film. Without hesitating, Hollywood’s most powerful people rewarded Schneider’s reading of the telegram with a standing ovation.

Scott Fitzgerald once said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function". Not entirely paradoxically, he expressed that thought in "The Crack-Up".

Lee Harris writes that President Bush's critics have manged to turn the old Soviet "show trial" concept on its head, turning Coretta Scott King's memorial into what Harris calls a "show funeral", in which, "instead of properly honoring the memory of the dead, the occasion is deliberately exploited for its propaganda value":

Carter, for example, used the opportunity to insinuate that Bush's "domestic spying" was like the spying done by the FBI on Dr. King. Carter commiserated with the King family for having been subjected to such an ordeal at the hands of their government, and, by implication, he also commiserated with those Americans who had been subjected to Bush's domestic surveillance. But does this analogy honor the memory of Dr. King and his movement?

Let's make a simple thought experiment to find out.

Suppose al-Qaeda had decided to air its grievances against the United States by holding a massive peaceful "sit in" at the Twin Towers on 9/11. Suppose Islamic terrorists, instead of blowing up innocent human beings, had vowed only to use civil disobedience. Suppose Osama bin Laden, like Dr. King, had struggled with all his might to keep his organization from turning to bloodshed and violence. Would Bush have felt the need to launch a domestic surveillance program on such a pacifistic movement? Maybe; maybe not. But the fact that al-Qaeda embraces violence and celebrates terrorism -- doesn't this small detail destroy the basis of Carter's analogy? If you can equate bin Laden with Martin Luther King, and al-Qaeda to King's non-violent movement, then, by all means, go ahead and draw the same analogy that Mr. Carter drew about Bush's domestic surveillance program. If, on the other hand, you cannot equate the two, then Carter's analogy becomes at best ridiculous and at worst obscene.

If it were actually possible to equate the two, Carter would be the man to do it: As Jay Nordlinger thoroughly documented in his great "Carterpalooza" piece in 2002, from Tito and Ceausescu to Yasser Arafat to Kim Il Sung to Daniel Ortega, Carter's never met a terrorist or dictator he didn't openly admire.

Blink! Did a Kentucky newspaper columnist really write:

Somebody named Elaine Shiber, the smartest person from Van Lear since Loretta Lynn, catalogued in a Herald-Leader commentary some of the terrorist acts committed as Zionists weary of genocide took up horrors on a lesser scale to have a place to alight.

It takes courage, as Shiber did, to inquire as to whether the outrage your enemy harbors is justified or not, and it takes courage to challenge the idea of Israel, with charges of anti-Semitism being the standard recompense for so doing.

But when you read what she reported and know that 40 times that much happened at the hands of Israel, you know why no Arab can have a nuclear weapon. They could be morally justified in using it.

Somewhere, Curtis LeMay just rolled over in his grave.

That's what Charlie Richards of BeyondtheNews.com writes about 2005, quoting from Steven Spielberg, who blames those movies on--who else--President Bush:

"These movies are asking sensitive questions about racial intolerance and Middle East politics," said Spielberg. "It's been an amazing year, very much like 1968, '69 and '70, when you suddenly see all of these political movies coming out at the same time, out of the watershed of politics. Some of it is due to our own insecurity about the voices representing us in government right now. We feel like our government has set us adrift, and we're trying to make our voices heard. We're telling them to be worried about these things."

Or as Richards writes, "Goodbye Schindler’s List, hello Munich".

Spielberg seems to be implying that films magically appear out of thin air as "the will of the epoch translated into celluloid", to paraphrase Mies van der Rohe's aphorism about architecture.

Which is pretty ironic, because who knows the reality of the process better than Spielberg does?

Novels can be crafted out of thin air and their manuscripts presented to editors and agents ready to be published. But with budgets running into a hundred million dollars--and occasionally double that--films need their concepts and budgets approved before shooting begins. Which means all of Hollywood's box office turkeys last year were probably debated in board meetings, or at a minimum, greenlighted by various studio executive mindful of both their companies' annual budgets, and what return, if any, these films would potentially bring, both in the US, and abroad. That so many studio chiefs would throw out all the rules about what sorts of films have the best chance of filling the coffers is pretty astonishing, however.

And note that with his line that "It's been an amazing year, very much like 1968, '69 and '70", Steve is yet another member of the left stuck in the late sixties/1970s mobius loop. All the more ironic and disappointing, since it was he and George Lucas, 30 years ago, who did the most to break Hollywood's cycle of dark, not-very-profitable political films during that period.

Update: John Scalzi ponders just how uncommercial this year's crop of Oscar nominees are:

Consider this: a nominee for Best Documentary -- March of the Penguins -- has made more money than any of the Best Picture nominees. I guarantee you that has never happened before, ever. When Hollywood's best films can't compete with chilled, aquatic birds, there's something going on.

Heh, Indeed^TM.

While the consensus is that Ariel Sharon is unlikely to recover sufficiently from his very severe stroke to re-enter politics, his legacy his secure: for better or worse, he's radically reshaped the Palestinians' relationship with Isreal.

First, as Mark Steyn wrote, Sharon's most important decision was giving the Palestinians the space to create their state:

It was my National Review colleague David Frum who came up with the clearest assessment to date of the Israeli strategy: “Could it be that Sharon is calling the bluff of Western governments and the Arab states? By creating the very Palestinian state that those governments and those states pretend to want but actually dread Sharon is forcing them to end their pretense and acknowledge the truth.”

The Frum thesis sounds right to me. In Britain since July 7th, political figures have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to explain how suicide bombers in London are somehow different from suicide bombers in Tel Aviv – unwilling, even as the double-deckers are exploding across Bloomsbury, to abandon their fetishization of the Palestinian cause, and unable to see that in an ever more Islamified continent the Europeans are the new Jews. Maybe an Islamist statelet on the Mediterranean will concentrate even European minds.

This then is the audacious gamble of the Gaza withdrawal: the best way to demonstrate that the Palestinians are undeserving of a state is to force one upon them. It’s a dangerous move, but in a tough neighborhood there aren’t any other kinds.

And did that gamble payoff? In one sense, absolutely perfectly, as Emanuele Ottolenghi explains:

What victory does to Hamas is to put the movement into an impossible position. As preliminary reports emerge, Hamas has already asked Fatah to form a coalition and got a negative response. Prime Minister Abu Ala has resigned with his cabinet, and president Abu Mazen will now appoint Hamas to form the next government. From the shadows of ambiguity, where Hamas could afford — thanks to the moral and intellectual hypocrisy of those in the Western world who dismissed its incendiary rhetoric as tactics — to have the cake and eat it too. Now, no more. Had they won 30-35 percent of the seats, they could have stayed out of power but put enormous limits on the Palestinian Authority’s room to maneuver. By winning, they have to govern, which means they have to tell the world, very soon, a number of things.

They will have to show their true face now: No more masks, no more veils, no more double-speak. If the cooptation theory — favored by the International Crisis Group and by the former British MI-6 turned talking head, Alistair Crooke — were true, this is the time for Hamas to show what hides behind its veil.

As the government of the Palestinian Authority, now they will have to say whether they accept the roadmap.

They will have to take control over security and decide whether they use it to uphold the roadmap or to wage war.

There will be no excuses or ambiguities when Hamas fires rockets on Israel and launches suicide attacks against civilian targets. Until Tuesday, the PA could hide behind the excuse that they were not directly responsible and they could not rein in the "militants." Now the "militants" are the militia of the ruling party. They are one and the same with the Palestinian Authority. If they bomb Israel from Gaza — not under occupation anymore, and is therefore, technically, part of the Palestinian state the PLO proclaimed in Algiers in 1988, but never bothered to take responsibility for — that is an act of war, which can be responded to in kind, under the full cover of the internationally recognized right of self-defense. No more excuses that the Palestinians live under occupation, that the PA is too weak to disarm Hamas, that violence is not the policy of the PA. Hamas and the PA will be the same: What Hamas does is what the PA will stand for.

And just as Jimmy Carter has already done, Europe will tie itself into knots trying to excuse and justify their actions.

There's a huge downside though: while Hamas's victory makes the Middle East situation much clearer, it's also gotten much, much more dangerous. Between the Hamas-led Palestinians and an Iran that's steaming rapidly towards The Bomb, (with a leader who makes Sterling Hayden's General Jack D. Ripper seem like a model of cool, logical reasoning), check your calendar: no matter what the date printed on it says, 1939 is getting closer.

(H/T: Roger L. Simon.)

Update: Neo-Neocon writes, "Hamas wins--and now we get to see if they can make anything run on time". Meanwhile, Tim Blair adds, "Elections in the US are sometimes won in the Bible belt. This may the first election on earth to be won by the suicide belt".

In his latest syndicated column, Jonah Goldberg writes:

A wave of pious indignation and table-thumping has spread across the nation's editorial pages over the freedom to search for Internet porn. Don't get me wrong: I think you do have the right to search for porn. But it is interesting to see what gets people's First Amendment gag reflex going. The Baltimore Sun, for example, warns that a "witch-hunt" for search-engine abusers might be around the corner if Google cooperates with the government.

Maureen Dowd, the reigning scribe of unthinking liberalism, recently wrote in the New York Times that Dick Cheney — whom she calls "The Grim Peeper" — is trying to turn America into a "police state." "I don't like the thought of Dick Cheney ogling my Googling," Dowd writes without rhyme or reason.

It was a silly column, even for Dowd, but it does capture a certain level of both the legitimate fear and the outright paranoia out there.

Partisanship is obviously part of the equation. For instance, the heretofore-unknown disease of Cheneyphobia seems to be reaching epidemic proportions. It seems to cause some people to believe that the vice president of the United States has superhuman powers and that he is capable of personally reading hundreds of millions of e-mails while listening to thousands of hours of phone conversations and — simultaneously — scanning trillions of web searches.

Robert Kuttner, writing about a different controversy in the Boston Globe, shows serious symptoms of the affliction when he writes, "Google plus Dick Cheney is a recipe for undoing the liberties for which the original patriots of the American Revolution bled and died."

On the narrow point about Dick Cheney, this is all a bunch of nonsense. The Department of Justice is in a lawsuit with the ACLU over the Child Online Protection Act, which is designed to help prevent kids from being exposed to online porn. The law ran afoul of the First Amendment, according to a lower court, and the Supreme Court asked for additional information pending its final decision on the matter. The Department of Justice asked Google, as well as MSN, Yahoo!, and Time Warner (AOL's parent), to provide data on their search engines from a one-week period. (The Associated Press scarily refers to the request as a "White House subpoena," as if the White House could actually issue subpoenas.) No personal information was asked for and none has been given. Everyone but Google complied, because there's really no reason not to. Google, however, sees itself in a very idealistic light and has decided to stand on principle against the government, prompting huzzahs from all the predictable sources.

But the same crowd celebrating Google's decision has generally been quiet about, for example, public health surveys that ask doctors to report all sorts of really private information (anonymous, of course) for epidemiological purposes. If you're going to consider it a grotesque infringement on personal liberty for the government to find out that some anonymous person Google-searched "lesbian love goats," [nice self-reference for us old school G-File fans--Ed] you'd think you'd also be upset by the National Institutes of Health cataloging how many people fitting your description have had prostate exams in the last year. The intrusion is at least as serious, but because no one imagines that Dick Cheney cares about your prostate — yet! — the First Amendment thumpers don't offer a peep.

But there is a larger issue here worth considering. It has become something of an article of faith that technology is always on the side of liberty. In the old Soviet Union, the Xerox machines were chained up at night in order to prevent unauthorized photocopying. (Of course, they weren't called "Xerox machines" but "Glorious People's Photostatic Replicator" or "Trabant Machine" or some such.) The Soviet authorities recognized that information technology was the enemy of totalitarianism. Freedom of the photocopier was not only freedom of the press, but freedom to communicate, which lies at the core of all liberty.

The Internet age has seemingly confirmed this. In China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other oppressive regimes, Internet usage is severely policed because the free-flow of information is seen as a threat to the regime.

And ironically, companies such as Google are more than willing to cooperate. Google's original corporate motto was famously "Don't Be Evil". But as Publius writes:

It looks as if there is a limit to that. Google will resist the U.S. government, but won’t stand up in any way to China? Judging by its actions at home, one would think Google to be a pioneer in bringing access to information and resisting attempts from governments to repress it or monitor it. This says that isn’t the case, and it makes me wonder — just a little — what its motivation is to resisting the U.S. government and giving in to the Chinese. Perhaps they should change their motto to, “It’s just business.”

As I wrote back in October, when Google was more than happy to shaft Taiwan on behalf of China:

Half the cars in Google's parking lots probably have the ubiquitous Silicon Valley "FREE TIBET!!" bumper stickers. Too bad that Google's current ozone layer of management doesn't seem to want to symbolically free Taiwan.

Or, most damning of all, China itself.

Much more, here, including a few contrarian views, as well.

Last March, when I reviewed Downfall, the superb German-produced film on the final days of the Third Reich, I wrote:

While Hitler and Goebbels are two of history's most evil men, their women were also warped in their own unqiue ways: Downfall depicts Eva Braun as being almost as manic-depressive as Hitler (although given to more subdued mood swings rather than Hitler's alternating boiling rage and zonked-out depression); and there is no more evil mother than Magda Goebbels.

(Somewhat astonishingly, this book, which I found at the top of a Google search when double-checking how Magda spelled her full name, claims that her fascination with Buddhism lead her to believe that killing her kids would be fine: they would all be reincarnated back to a better life.)

Neo-Neocon has written a two-part post analyzing Magda Goebbels' life spent in the circle of absolute evil, and her terrifying final decisions.

It's not a job I'd wish on anybody, but let's pretend for a moment that you're the editor of the Los Angeles Times. Your paper has a very bad image problem--it spent 2005 running articles on the joys of L.A. nursing homes for geriatric communists, and praising North(!) Korea. Needless to say, the paper is hemorrhaging red ink.

But it's a new year. Plenty of time to make a fresh start. So how do you jump-start things in 2006?

By running an op-ed smearing American soldiers, that's how! ("I think it's probably ok to question Joel Stein's patriotism", the Professor writes. And how.)

As one of Roger Simon's commenters notes, every day Karl Rove must wake up and thank God at how deranged his opponents are--it makes his life so much easier.

Update: Related thoughts from Neo-Neocon, who profiles Joan Baez, yet another member of the left permanently stuck in 1972:

The article quotes Baez during a recent Somerville, Massachusetts performance:

"When did we get so old?" she cried, to huge cheers.

Well, speak for yourself, Joan, I'm nowhere near as old as you. So there!

But on a more serious note, my answer to Joan might be: when we stopped changing and learning. When we got stuck in a 60s mentality that didn't take into account new information. When we placed on our cars bumper stickers such as yours, reading (according to the Guardian article): Iraq is the Arabic for Vietnam

Ah, Vietnam! Those were the days, my friend, we are determined that they'll never end. Here's Joan again:

If they're honest with themselves, says Baez, veterans of the peace movement, of the war itself or of any great struggle for social change must admit that for all the woes they suffered, there is a terrible anticlimax when it ends. "Afterwards looking back, it is inevitably the high point of your life. You know that from soldiers, who tell their story over and over. I've heard that even the Vietnamese were depressed."

Even the Vietnamese were depressed. But maybe, just maybe, they--unlike you, Joan--were/are depressed not because the glory days are over, but because the Communists won.

Indeed.

Update: In sharp contrast to the Joel Stein, Greyhawk of The Mudville Gazette looks at Kay Lebowitz of the Maine Troop Greeters:

Kay Lebowitz, 89, has such severe arthritis that she cannot shake hands. So she hugs every Marine and soldier she can. Some of the larger, more exuberant troops lift her off the ground.

"Many of them tell me they can't wait to see their grandmother," she said. "That's what I am: a substitute grandmother."
<...>
"When the flights are going over, it's heart-breaking," Lebowitz said. "But when they're coming home, it's heart-warming."

Read the rest.

In a post titled "Autos-da-fé", Theodore Dalrymple writes that when it comes to France's existential woes, no exit is in sight:

The more the rioters rioted, the more cars they burned and the more écoles maternelles they wrecked, the higher rose the stock of the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy. His characterization of les jeunes as racaille, scum, proved especially popular. Polls now suggest that 70 percent of French adults would vote for him in a presidential election. Whether he has any solution, other than fierce repression when necessary, to the intractable social problem created by mass immigration from North Africa and the welfare state (to which the French remain fiercely attached), is an open question.

Driving to the Netherlands, I was surprised by how much the political atmosphere there had changed. Not long ago, the Dutch seemed insufferably complacent, regarding the rest of the world de haut en bas, as if it had not yet reached Dutch levels of enlightenment and generosity. It is amazing what a couple of assassinations can do. The Dutch are now the only people in Europe who are thinking, and thinking hard. It is as if they had awakened from a pleasant but unrealistic daydream.

To my amazement, the Dutch Ministry of Justice asked me to give a talk. The audience proved intelligent, respectful, but not supinely uncritical. Such a thing had never happened to me in my native Britain. Of course, the French riots were on Dutch minds. Could such a thing happen there? Probably not. For one thing, the Dutch had presciently demolished their high-rise housing projects a few years ago.

In the audience was a young immigrant who told me that he had relatives in the banlieues of French cities. A cousin had his car burned by les jeunes, but told him over the phone that if losing his car helped improve conditions in the banlieues, it would have been worth it. I have no doubt that the young man reported accurately what his cousin said. In reply, however, I wondered whether the generous decision of French insurers to compensate the owners of the 9,000 burned cars, despite the fact that all policies exclude civil disturbance, had something to do with his cousin’s broad-mindedness over his loss.

The insurers’ decision amounts to a de facto tax on French drivers—unless the companies pay the compensation out of their profits, which seems unlikely.”

As Dalrymple adds, "The message to the rioters, therefore, is: 'You burn, they pay".

Update: Sigmund, Carl & Alfred have some related thoughts on Europe.

Last April (not on the 1st, thankfully), while Ward Churchill was first bursting onto the public scene, we linked to a Soxblog piece on what we described as "the strange case of Jacques Pluss, a former adjunct professor at Farleigh Dickinson University who sounds like he's been in the audience for 'Springtime for Hitler' long after its opening night".

After writing about Pluss, I had subtracted all thoughts of him from my mind, until reading a post by the Blogfather with the above title. Pluss is now claiming it was all for research:

Last March, Jacques Pluss was fired from his job as an adjunct professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University soon after it came to light that he was a prominent member of the National Socialist Movement of the United States. This weekend, in an online essay titled "Now It Can Be Told: Why I Pretended to Be a Neo-Nazi," Mr. Pluss purports to reveal his true intentions in joining the white supremacist group: He did it all for scholarship.

Well, that's better than saying you were just following orders, I guess.

Read the rest on Workplace Prof Blog, who writes, "I lack the necessary wit to come up with the trenchant quips crying out to be made for this entry. Suggestions in this regard are most welcome". Feel free to help him out in his comments section.

As with Ferguson and Steyn, a new column by Michael Barone is best read in conjunction with another piece--David Brooks' equally timely "Losing The Alitos". Both do a tremendous job describing the cultural environment of central New Jersey in the late 1960s as a microcosm of America as a whole during that tumultuous period. Barone writes:

In his opening statement to the Judiciary Committee, Judge Samuel Alito told the senators where he comes from. First, Hamilton Township, N.J., the modest-income suburb of Trenton, where he grew up.

"It was a warm, but definitely an unpretentious, down-to-earth community," he said. "Most of the adults in the neighborhood were not college graduates. I attended the public schools. In my spare time, I played baseball and other sports with my friends. And I have happy memories and strong memories of those days, and good memories of the good sense and the decency of my friends and my neighbors." All positive memories.

Then Alito described Princeton, "a full 12 miles down the road," where he attended college. "And this was a time of great intellectual excitement for me. Both college and law school opened up new worlds of ideas." Still all positive. But then he sounds a negative note: "But this was back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a time of turmoil at colleges and universities. And I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly. And I couldn't help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community."

To some of the senators, this must have seemed a jarring note. For them, universities like Princeton are places where young people are trained to renounce the racism, sexism and all the other evil -isms that are thought to be endemic in places like Hamilton Township. But Alito, a man of the highest intellectual ability and deep learning, sees the contrast another way. Witnessing radicals shut down a college and bomb university buildings, he saw the left-liberalism of the campus as an attack on one of civilization's highest institutions. And he did not think that campus radicals had higher moral standing than the middle-class people among whom he had grown up.

The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of cultural conflict, a battle between what I have called the beautiful people and the dutiful people. While Manhattan glitterati thronged Leonard Bernstein's apartment to celebrate the murderous Black Panthers, ordinary people in the outer boroughs and the far-flung suburbs of New Jersey like Hamilton Township were going to work, raising their families, and teaching their children to obey lawful authority and work their way up in the world.

The glitterati in the 1970s seized and still hold the cultural commanding heights of our society -- the universities, the media, the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the Westside of Los Angeles. But, as the success of Sam Alito shows, they have not entirely won the hearts and the minds of the people. [That may be the understatement of a still quite young century. And God help the country if they ever do--Ed]

I recently traveled through both Hamilton Township and Princeton. The contrast between the million-dollar-plus homes and fancy shops of Princeton and the modest-to-downright- depressing neighborhoods and strip malls of Hamilton Township was stunning. So, too, are the voting figures. Princeton voted 76 percent for John Kerry in 2004. Hamilton Township voted 49.3 percent for George W. Bush and 49.8 percent for Kerry.

Power Line has already highlighted just how damning the next paragraph is, though naturally, few who it is aimed at will be ready to accept its message:

Our universities today have become our most intellectually corrupt institutions. University administrators must lie and deny that they use racial quotas and preferences in admissions, when they devote much of their energy to doing just that. They must pledge allegiance to diversity, when their campuses are among the least politically diverse parts of our society, with speech codes that penalize dissent and sometimes violent suppression of conservative opinion. You can go door-to-door in Hamilton Township and find people feeling free to voice every opinion across the political spectrum. At Princeton, you will not find many feeling free to dissent from the Bush-equals-Hitler orthodoxy.

It's interesting that Sen. Edward Kennedy tried to charge Alito with racism and sexism because he once belonged to an alumni group critical of Princeton. Evidently in Kennedy's mind, dissent from campus orthodoxy is prima facie evidence of bigotry.

Are there many Ivy League professors who would disagree with him?

Update: Joe Gandelman (found via Steve Green) has some very much related thoughts.

The Anchoress has a good post on the recent announcement that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty, and that Upton Sinclair hid his knowledge of their crimes in order to do his antediluvian Free Mumia!!!/Free Tookie!!! impersonation. The announcement of Sinclair's letter prompts Jonah Goldberg to add:

So which leftwing martyr/icon is left? Sacco & Vanzetti were guilty. The Rosenbergs: guilty. Hiss: guilty. Margaret Mead: liar. Rigoberta Menchu: liar. Duranty: liar. Kinsey: liar. Upton Sinclair: liar. I.F. Stone isn’t looking too hot (lied about America often, loved totalitarians, might have taken KGB money).

Martin Luther King Jr. — small flaws aside — is still looking good. But Bobby Kennedy is only a useful leftwing hero if you don’t look too closely. Ditto JFK. Jesse Jackson’s going to look awful to historians.

Who’s left?

Well, we'll always have Al Sharpton.

But seriously, the Anchoress adds one more name to Jonah Goldberg's list:

There’s always John Kerry, greatest war hero, ever. Still waiting for the general, free release of those military records, aren’t we? Why yes, yes we are.

Of course, for a few of their admirers, the fact that many of these "icons" were actually guility, or had definitions of the truth more elastic than Reed Richards, simply adds to their radical chic hip cache.

Betsy Newmark writes:

As you might remember from your history books, Sacco and Vanzetti were two Italian anarchists who got caught up in the Red Scare of the 1920s and were accused of the murder of a paymaster and security guard for a warehouse. At the height of the Red Scare, they were convicted in a very questionable trial. After much hoopla with lots of support for the two men from the intelligentsia of the day, they were executed in 1927. This incident is always cited in the history books as evidence of what unreasoning fear and injustice stalked the land during the Red Scare after WWI and during the twenties. Two innocent men were executed simply because they were immigrants and endorsed an unpopular ideology. One of their most vigorous supporters was the muckraking novelist, Upton Sinclair.

Well, a California collector has found a 1929 letter written by Upton Sinclair proclaiming his knowledge that the two men he so strongly defended were actually guilty.

Betsy adds:

So, of course [Sinclair] decided to stay silent and let his public and allies all go on thinking that two innocent men had been put to death. Apparently, his position among other like-thinking leftists and his readers was more important.

This isn't the last time that leftist intellectuals have rallied to the cause of someone they feel has been unjustly sentenced by the government. Think of Alger Hiss. Jim Bass is thinking about the Free Mumia movement. And, of course, witness the latest brouhaha over Tookie Williams. The pattern of guilt being secondary to the political outcry and demagoguery continues.

AKA, "differently authentic", or whatever the folks who practice moral relativism are calling "fake but accurate" these days.

Baldilocks is angry. You'll like her when she's angry.

Found via Pajamas Media, which notes:

Breathless media suggestions, such as one by NBC 4, that Los Angeles and California officials had a "credible" reason to prepare for riots if Stanley Tookie Williams was executed fizzled fast, raising a question among bloggers as to why journalists kept suggesting riots were any more possible than, say, an anti-crime rally.

Because it's an otherwise a slow news period and L.A. stations were hoping for some really juicy visuals to liven up the ratings?

Update: Speaking of visuals, Zombietime (who's seemingly everywhere in the Bay Area) infiltrated the mob scene outside San Quentin. "Before arriving at San Quentin", Zombie writes, "I had been under the naive impression that the crowd in front would be evenly split between anti-death penalty protesters and pro-death penalty protesters. I was sorely mistaken. I quickly learned that the crowd was 99% anti-death penalty. And a substantial proportion of them were avowed socialists, since several radical groups showed up en masse."

To be fair, the local Bay Area TV news definitely let their viewers know that everybody they interviewed was anti-death penalty. But as Zombie also notes, any mention of the crowd's radical politics was sanitized for the protection of the delicate viewers at home.

...You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow. Salon's Cary Tennis goes from proffering sex advice to sedition in his latest column.

Gay Patriot dubbed such folks 12/12 Democrats, but as I wrote in 2002, I remember one television commentator on election night in 2000 who blew a gasket at the initial results:

I'll never forget the last presidential election, watching [Jonathan Alter of Newsweek's] tirade on NBC at about 1:30 in the morning Pacific Time when Alter demanded that Gore be handed the election, despite the outcome in Florida. (When Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert lecture you on the Constitution, as they did to Alter afterwards on the air, you know you're really out there.)

Tennis simply takes such anger to the "logical" conclusion of its illogic. Or as Anne Applebaum once wrote about another terminal run of illogic, "Sometimes in the course of a great American debate there comes a moment when the big battle guns fall silent, the pundits run out of breath, and -- unexpectedly -- the long, bitter argument suddenly turns into farce".

Update: Related thoughts, here

Stanley "Tookie" Williams was executed last night, expiring at 12:36 AM Pacific Time according to the TV news. Pajamas has a big round-up, with lots of links.

Update: Michelle Malkin has a detailed post with photos of the mayhem outside San Quentin. She writes:

An estimated 2,000 gathered outside, shouting and obstructing a FOX News analyst doing a live shot.

If she's referring to what I watched around 12:20 last night on FNC, it's just utterly bizarre to see two women wearing "SAVE TOOKIE!" T-shirts chatting on cell phones, shooting off flash bulbs from a digital camera and literally dancing and cavorting in the background, grinning and waving into the minicam that's documenting a reporter talking on the air, as the rest of the crowd awaits word that a condemned man has been killed.

In a previous post, Michelle documented the Hollywood celebrities who lobbied for Tookie's clemency.

Another Update: Grimly amusing unintentionally ironic headline from CNN: "Warden: Williams frustrated at end".

I'll bet he was.

Last night, Orrin Judd linked to an exceptional--and exceptionally prescient article by James Webb from the online edition of the May/June 1997 American Enterprise magazine.

Give it a quick read--I'll hang out here until you're done.

Back? Great. Is there anyone who doubts that the scenario it describes would be repeated in some form right now, if there was a President Kerry--or heck, even President Bush--and a Congress whose both halves were controlled by Democrats?

A couple of days ago, Glenn Reynolds wrote:

The Republicans have a lot of problems. Given a halfway palatable alternative, I would have supported a Democrat last time. But the Democrats are far too incoherent, if not outright irresponsible, on national security to trust. And every time they seem to have their act together, it falls apart again. Too bad.

To see that fallback position, and how we arrived there, click through the rest of the articles in that issue, which was devoted to analyzing the 1960s and how the mindset that it begat dominated the 1970s like worn-out shag carpeting, and will continue to linger on, apparently until the last baby boomer retires to the Carlos Santana Memorial Nursing Home.

Update: Roger L. Simon (who knows of whence he speaks) writes, "my suggestion to the fuddy-duddy progressives mourning 1968 is to live in 2005. Remember what your shrinks told you - live in the now".

Indeed^TM.

Another Update: California Conservative reminds us that radical boomers long ago lost their sense of humor. As I've written before, political correctness kills comedy.

Last week, we linked to essays by Mark Steyn and Brian Anderson on Hollywood's ever-shrinking ability tell stories that don't involve stock baddies such as Neo-Nazis and eeeeeevil businessmen.

With a few notable exceptions, Hollywood has been making businessmen and corporations villains since the leftwing Young Turks took over in the late '60s. Those young turks are now establishment old men themselves these days (Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, Coppola, et al), but that doesn't mean that their thinking has changed in any way shape or form since those Medium Cool radical chic days.

Edward Jay Epstein writes that these days, there's another reason why businessmen are typically Hollywood badies:

Why don't the movies have plausible, real-world villains anymore? One reason is that a plethora of stereotype-sensitive advocacy groups, representing everyone from hyphenated ethnic minorities and the physically handicapped to Army and CIA veterans, now maintain liaisons in Hollywood to protect their images. The studios themselves often have "outreach programs" in which executives review scripts and characters with representatives from these groups, evaluate their complaints, and attempt to avoid potential brouhahas.

Finding evil villains is not as easy as it was in the days when a director could choose among Nazis, Communists, KGB, and Mafiosi. Still, in a pinch, these old enemies will serve. For example, the 2002 apocalyptic thriller Sum of All Fears, based on the Tom Clancy novel, originally had Muslim extremists exploding a nuclear bomb in Baltimore. Paramount decided, however, to change the villains to Nazis residing in South Africa to avoid offending Arab-American and Islamic groups. Yet, even if aging Nazis lack any credible "outreach program" in Hollywood, they can no longer be credibly fit into many contemporary movies. "The list [of non-offensive villains] narrows quickly once you get past the tired clichés of Nazis," a top talent agency executive pointed out in an e-mail. "You'd be surprised at how short the list is."

For sci-fi and horror movies, there are always invaders from alien universes and zombies from another dimension, but for politico-thrillers, the safest remaining characters are lily-white, impeccably dressed American corporate executives. They are especially useful as evildoers in foreign-based thrillers, since their demonization does not run the risk of gratuitously offending officials in countries either hosting the filming or supplying tax and production subsidies. The "Mission Impossible" franchise replaced the Russian and Chinese heavies that populated the TV series with, in Mission Impossible 2, a WASPish-looking financier who controlled a pharmaceutical company that unleashed a horrific virus on the world in the hopes of cashing in on the antidote. Here, as in other movies in this genre, businessmen's killings are not just figurative. Unlike other stereotype-challenged groups, CEOs and financiers, lacking a connection with the studios' outreach programs, have become an essential part of Hollywood's new version of the axis of evil.

As Steyn wrote last week, "the movies are now so constrained by political correctness the very act of storytelling is itself endangered. That's something slightly more ominous than the feeble limousine liberalism many conservatives blame for the alleged box-office slump".

Botox is powerful stuff. It can make a man look decades younger. And apparently sound that way as well, as Senator Kerry reverted to his radical chic 1971 days yesterday on Face The Nation:

You've got to begin to transfer authority to the Iraqis. And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the--of--the historical customs, religious customs. Whether you like it or not...

SCHIEFFER: Yeah.

Sen. KERRY: ...Iraqis should be doing that. And after all of these two and a half years, with all of the talk of 210,000 people trained, there just is no excuse for not transferring more of that authority.

Ed Morrissey adds:

Kerry thinks that the American soldiers are the terrorists in Iraq, applying that unique gift of his for moral relativity once again to indict an entire deployment of soldiers as criminals of the same order as our enemy. And Bob Schieffer sat there, without even raising an objection to Kerry's smear. Had Kerry not shown a long track record of this kind of rhetoric in the past -- and had to answer for it repeatedly during last year's presidential election -- one could possibly believe it came out as a slip of the tongue. However, he obviously has never stopped believing that the American fighting man and woman represents the same relative evil as the Viet Cong, the Khmer Rouge, and al-Qaeda.

The Democrats need to answer for this outrage. Is it really the party position that American soldiers terrorize Iraqi civilians? Do they want the Iraqis to do it instead of us? Kerry has unmasked himself and his fellow anti-war zealots for the hypocrites they are.

Roger L. Simon once wrote that England's house organ for the left, The Guardian, "has not varied one micro-millimeter from the 1968 weltanschauung for the last, well, thirty-seven years". Kerry appears not to have learned much beyond his "Jengis" Khan days, either.

Update: Jeff Goldstein discovers the checklist that Kerry is working from.

Another Update: James Taranto writes, "The old proverb is right: A haughty, French-looking Massachusetts leopard who by the way served in Vietnam doesn't change its spots.":

Terrorizing kids and children and breaking sort of the customs! Didn't "Jenjis Khan" used to do stuff like that in Vietnam? Note, too, that Kerry isn't against this per se; he just thinks Iraqis should be doing it. It's highly reminiscent of Vietnam, only back then Kerry's words carried some weight because he sold himself as a veteran against the war, whereas now he's just the junior senator from Massachusetts.

Taranto can be truly vicious sometimes...

Neo-Neocon looks at far, far leftwing former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who ever since his days in LBJ's administration, has never met an enemy of the US he hasn't felt sympathy for:

One can argue that even dictators need defense attorneys, and that is most certainly true. It's a nasty job, but somebody has to do it. And yet someone is already doing it; Clark's lamentably eager services are hardly needed.

Yes, Clark never met a dictator he didn't like, and this has been the case for decades. And yes, Clark is probably the most extreme leftist alive today who actually held a position of power in a Presidency--in his case, that of Lyndon Johnson, under whom he served as Attorney General.

Why am I interested in all this? It's what so often grabs me, intrapersonal political change. So my question about Clark is: how did what originally seems to have been a relatively mainstream guy end up esposing views that put him in the running with Noam Chomsky? Did something happen to change him? Or was he always like that, despite having served in the Johnson administration?

After doing a bit of research, I've got some ideas about it, and my answer is "yes" and "yes." Yes, he was always more or less like that; and yes, he became even more so as a result of his experiences during the Vietnam era.

Neo adds:

In some strange and dreadful alchemy, it seems that those suffering peasants of postwar China, those blacks who were disenfranchised (and worse) in the American South, and those who died in Vietnam, have morphed over the years in Clark's mind into the dictators and war criminals who arouse his sympathies now. It's quite a journey.

Read the rest and follow the links to see how he got there.

This is the headline of an article from Friday's San Francisco Chronicle:

BERKELEY
Mao debunkers defend their book
Critics call it effort to discredit communism

After over 100 million killed, one certainly hopes.

(For our earlier looks at Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao book, click here and through the links on this post.)

When Jodie Foster announced she was planning to shoot a biography about Leni Riefenstahl, whom Foster was quoted as saying has been "libeled so many times" about the dark deeds of her role in the Nazi Party, I wrote:

Whitewashing Leni Riefenstahl's place in history was only a matter of time I guess, as all the films airbrushing Che's reputation are becoming old hat.

In a similar vein, Dean Esmay has some thoughts on Prussian Blue, the Neo-Nazi answer to the Olsen Twins we looked at yesterday:

There's apparently a significant kerfuffle over two 13-year-old singers who are gushy about Nazism, and I find myself strangely unable to get excited about it. Not because I have anything nice to say about Nazism, but because I've been watching the entertainment industry speak endearingly of vile totalitarian ideologies for most of my life.

This is the same entertainment industry that lionizes Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. The same industry that made heroes out of the mass-murdering Sandinistas. That to this day pretends that the McCarthy era in America was nothing but one long paranoid nightmare wherein nobody, not even people like Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, or Harry Dexter White, was guilty of anything but being a bit too liberal.

Some of these people still can't admit that Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, and Mary Travers were communists for God's sake.

A couple of years ago I was in a Denny's when I spotted a kid wearing a bright blood-red shirt with a big yellow hammer and sickle. I wanted to walk over to him and slap him in the face. But instead I shrugged. He was 21 or 22 at the oldest, maybe more like 18 or 19. He couldn't possibly have known the depths of the evil his shirt represented. The Soviets, when they invaded Afghanistan, murdered a million innocent Afghans. This out of a country of only 6 or 7 million people. That was going on as recently as the 1980s. You think those Afghans today would find Nazi chic more offensive than Communist chic?

I also, a year or two before that, got into an argument with a friend in his early 20s who actually thought I was "melodramatic" when I pointed out that Stalin had killed, by the most conservative estimates available, about 20 million people in cold blood. (Others place his body count over 60 million.) Yet you can go around the world and find restaurants, drinks, and music that extols the virtues of him and communist dictators just like him.

It's all sick of course. Depraved even. If I were Jewish I'd be particularly stung by "Prussian Blue." If I were Ukranian or Chinese or Vietnamese or Cambodian or Afghan, on the other hand, maybe it would all seem just sadly familiar. Hitler not so bad? Why not? Next up: pop songs about the glories of the Laogai!

By all means, let's kick around "Prussian Blue." Let's especially kick around their parents and their producers. These 13 year old twits likely have no idea what they're talking about, but the adults in their lives have no such excuse. But while we're doing it, let's remember all the other cases of covering up for, even romanticizing, hateful totalitarian ideologies. I think we'd be doing more good in the long run that way.

It can't hurt, but as all of the examples that Dean includes in his post illustrate, it's asking far too much of the entertainment industry to be that self-policing.

(H/T: Murdoc Online.)

It's rare that I read something that perfectly encapsulates my worldview. But I could have written this Dennis Prager piece--only it would have been nowhere near as artfully articulated as Dennis's writing.

In other words: read the whole thing.

(Via the Brothers Judd.)

Shimmying inside a sleek new suit from Freddie's Fashion Mart, Al Sharpton boogies his way into your heart. Let's see Ward Churchill or Michael Moore try those moves!

(Via the Corner.)

Neo-Neocon posts a photo of an astonishing advertisement promoting a hate-filled anti-Semitic Middle Eastern "seminar" (Iran's "World Without Zionism" conference) and writes:

Lovely [poster], isn't it? I mean that sincerely. One of the more pernicious aspects of much modern propaganda is its slickness and polish, its ability to appeal to the most sophisticated among us. This aesthetically pleasing poster is no exception--in fact, it's an excellent example of the genre.

Note how the conference and the poster focus on the word "Zionism," not "Jews." The old argument about whether one can be anti-Zionist and nevertheless not anti-Semitic keeps cropping up around the blogosphere and elsewhere. The comments section of the thread linked above at Gates of Vienna contains a good example of such a discussion.

I'm sure there truly are people who have objections to Zionism but honestly feel they have no objections to Jews themselves. But I'm just as sure that such people would have been hard-pressed to have explained where else the leftover Jews were supposed to go right after WWII, when Europe had killed so many of its Jews and was in the process of spitting out the exhausted survivors. Even the UN, that august body which in recent decades has been the very poster child for "anti-Zionism," voted at that time to partition Palestine and give the Jews their own tiny piece of land.

In the years since Israel's founding, the sophisticated propaganda which has over the last few decades managed to demonize it in the eyes of many has emboldened the Iranian mullahs. It is possible for them to speak quite openly of wiping Israel off the face of the earth, and trust that at least some will defend such a statement on the grounds that it's not technically "anti-Semitic," it's merely "anti-Zionist" (see this).

Poor, poor Hitler, so ahead of his time! If only the state of Israel had already existed when he offered his Final Solution, he could have phrased it in terms so much more acceptable.

If Robert Harris had set Fatherland in 2004 instead of 1964, he'd probably have described advertisements much like the one illustrated in Neo's post.

Ed Morrissey writes:

What is it about frustrated members of the British royal family who, when unable to garner the throne for themselves, decide to campaign on behalf of genocidal nutcases? After being forced to abdicate the throne in order to marry Wallis Simpson, Edward Windsor flirted with the Nazis to such an extent that the British thought they might have to forcibly remove him from Spain. Churchill had to order him to the Bahamas to separate the Duke from German agents.

Now we have Prince Charles, the man who would be King if his mother would just let him, deciding that George Bush just doesn't understand how wonderful Islam truly is -- and wants to travel to the United States to deliver a lecture on the Religion of Peace^TM.

In the 1920s, the Duke of Windsor was one of the most influential dressers of all time (see above title), but as Ed notes, later became a dedicated follower of fascism, a trend that runs in the royal family beyond he and Charles. Prince Harry was spotted last year wearing a swastika armband to a fancy dress party, and as Mark Steyn wrote in response:

Personally, I found the sight of the Prince of Wales climbing into the full Highgrove hejab for dinner with that bin Laden brother a week after the 9/11 slaughter far more disquieting: it seemed a rather more conscious act of identification than his son's party get-up.

And even after not just 9/11 but London's own 7/7 bombing this year, little has changed in the worldview of the man who would eventually lead the Church of England.

Update: Related ironic Drudgery from Willisms. And Don Singleton rounds up additional Blogospheric reaction.

Another Update: Wow--hadn't heard this one before, but it's not at all surprising. Across The Atlantic writes:

[Ed] and others (me included), are deeply concerned about Charles and his blatant flirtation with Islam (Charles wants to do a lecture tour of the US about Islam).

What Ed and others haven’t yet noted is this:-

The oath taken by a British monarch during their coronantion currently contains the words “Defender of the faith”. This, of course, relates to the reigning King or Queen being head of the Church of England. Charles has let it be known that he would like the form of words to be amended to “Defender of the faiths.”

Hmmmmm.

When can we do away with this country’s royal family?

Hey, as long as they're seen and not heard, I like the monarchy. But then I like flipping through Ralph Lauren and Brooks Brothers catalogs. Both the catalog models and the royal family dress equally nicely--and sound equally vacuous when their mouths move.

The legacy media has been using the cliché of "Grim Milestone" to describe the 2000 American servicemen killed in Iraq, but for these Bay Area far leftists, it's time to party like it's 1939!

(Via Charles Johnson.)

It's actually well over 5,000, but then, as Andrew Sullivan presciently noted early last year, for the left, it's as if 9/11 never happened. Nor the Iranian hostage crisis, the chemical weapons used by Saddam in the 1980s, the first Gulf War, the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania by al-Qaeda (on the anniversary of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait), nor President Clinton's attacks against Iraq in 1998 and the bipartisan support for the removal of Saddam Hussein until, well, until the 2004 presidential election began to loom near. Sample quote:

"The suffering inside Iraq can come to an end when Saddam Hussein's regime is replaced...And I hope -- and most of the world community hopes -- that this regime based on terrorism and atrocities against his own people will be replaced. Over time, we hope to achieve that result."

Donald Rumsfeld? Paul Wolfowitz? Dick Cheney?

Al Gore, in 1993.

So remember the mammoth protests and parties when American servicemen died under President Clinton's watch? Me neither. "It wasn't very hip" back then, as Janeane Garofalo would say (when she's not backing the man with the moustache.)

Update: Beyond The News has related thoughts--and a graphic well worth studying.

Well, here's one liberal college's definition of gun control: got a reactionary radical chic professor coming whose entire look and mindset screams 1969 right down to his long hair parted in the middle, beret and AK-47?

Why not give him a fashion makeover? Bring him up to date. Into the 21st century! And airbrush that pesky ol' AK-47 right out of hands. There! Now he's all set to expose the kids to ideas that would been right at home at one of Leonard Bernstein's Black Panther fondue and Twister parties. (To borrow a great riff by Iowahawk.)

Yesterday, we linked to Roger L. Simon's thoughts on the dismissive review by Nicholas Kristof of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's important new book, Mao, The Unknown Story in The New York Times. James Panero of The New Criterion has more:

What is it with public intellectuals and mass murderers? Kristof's disgraceful conclusion to his review speaks volumes to the acceptability and even expectability in intellectual circles of praising the most murderous villain--in terms of numbers killed--of the twentieth century. Kristof's shameful display caps a review that applauds the book in disclosing the details of Maoism abroad but fails to mention anything about Maoism at home. Maybe we shouldn't be surprised, then, at Kristof's critical and moral breakdown. It's the old "Benito Mussolini made the trains run on time" defense--a defense as indefensible for Il Duce as it is for Chairman Mao. [Kristof is far from the first to attempt it of course--Ed.]

Nicholas D. Kristof, thank you for telling us how you really can improve a country by murdering twenty million of its people. And for this, you are today's Walter Duranty Award Winner!

When it comes to the Times, that could be a daily series.

Update: In a post titled "Lost Illusions", Greg Hlatky writes:

Pray, what is incongruous about [Mao] being bumbling and a psychopath and being revered? Take away their power and the great dictators of the 20th century are pretty nondescript. Apart from his cunning and ruthlessness, Hitler was a remarkably banal character. His underlings were even less impressive: a Nuremburg prison guard said, "Who'd have thought that we were fighting this war against a bunch of jerks?"

Then there's Kristof's "Yes, but...", which I've noticed before, where Communism's evils are supposed to be balanced out by the good it brought to the nations unfortunate enough to fall under it: Soviet electrification, China's reduction in child mortality or, nowadays, the famous Cuban health care system, the virtues of which we can always read about in the nuttier letters to the editor of the New York Times or from Hollywood goofballs. Always ignored is the question of whether such advances would have taken place without Communism. The answer, I think, is obvious.

I forget which biography of Hitler I read that noted that while his apologists praise the Autobahn, the Volkswagen, and other technological advancements, such breakthroughs were going on in the 1930s throughout the world--and didn't need murderous totalitarianism to spur them on in the rest of Europe (Italy being the exception of course) or America. The same is even more true in the free world, post-World War II.

Heh.

(Oh God, am I whoring for hits with a headline like that, or what?)

After the past four or five years of watching Hollywood produce hagiography about international communists such as the murderous Che Guevara, Castro, and the Stalin-worshiping Frida Kahlo, and stores as mainstream as Burlington Coat Factory selling Che T-shirts, I can't say I'm at all surprised that National Socialists are worshipped in Hong Kong. It is, after all, under control by a regime with a similarly bloodthirsty totalitarian lineage:

Akasi, a quarterly publication for the discerning Nipponophile, has become the latest convert in Hong Kong’s love affair with Nazi Germany. The October issue of the top-shelf glossy is dominated by pictures of an attractive young lady partially dressed as a tank commander and cavorting with wartime general Heinz Guderian.
But unlike every other local business that naively or cynically cashes in on Nazi notoriety, Akasi has yet to generate a single raised eyebrow. Until this reporter spotted a copy on the top shelf in a Causeway Bay 7-11 last week.

In Hong Kong’s English language media, there are few subjects more likely to generate an outraged print campaign than the use of Nazi memorabilia as a marketing gimmick.

There's nothing a Hong Kong girl loves more than a man in Hugo Boss with a handbag. To many Hong Kongers, Nazis represent the epitome of desirability. Their tanks were made by Mercedes and Porsche; their uniforms were original Hugo Boss. Twenty years after the last British skinhead tired of the joke, it’s still not unusual to see a Hong Kong teen in an Adolph Hitler European Tour t-shirt.

And whether it be a karaoke den with photos of Germans executing prisoners (a strange choice of decoration, admittedly), a fashion store decorated with swastikas, a TV station describing its ad breaks as “the final solution” or a coffee shop picking Hitler for its daily quote, German wartime symbolism is never far from the editor’s outrage button.

From Simon's World, which has the above article minus its photos, and a link to the article itself, which should you follow it past the Simon's World blog, is most definitely not safe for work. (Found via Charles Johnson.)

Jodie Foster has already announced that one of her next projects will be a biography about Leni Riefenstahl:

In an interview in the latest issue of Premiere magazine (September 2005), Ms. Foster was asked: "For years, you've been planning a biopic about Leni Riefenstahl, who directed the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will and who died two years ago. Are you still going to make it?"

Foster replied: "Yeah, we're still working on the script, and I'm still going to play her. I met her a couple of times...She wrote a biography that's almost all lies, but it's interesting. I wanted her archives, but I didn't want her involvement (in the film) -- and that's something she really wanted, because she'd been libeled so many times. She was not a member of the Nazi Party, and she was not Hitler's girlfriend--that's just stupid. But she's a complex morality tale."

[Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies] said: "Foster is wrong. There's nothing morally complex about what Riefenstahl did as Hitler's favorite filmmaker. The only thing complex is Foster's confusion on this issue."

Should do boffo box office in Hong Kong's cinemas, particularly if Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom produce it.

Update: Sadly, this isn't too surprising either, come to think of it. Hey, attractive young women sporting Nazi paraphernalia--they aren't just for Hong Kong anymore!

Thirteen-year-old twins Lamb and Lynx Gaede have one album out, another on the way, a music video, and lots of fans.

They may remind you another famous pair of singers, the Olsen Twins, and the girls say they like that. But unlike the Olsens, who built a media empire on their fun-loving, squeaky-clean image, Lamb and Lynx are cultivating a much darker personna. They are white nationalists and use their talents to preach a message of hate.

Known as “Prussian Blue” — a nod to their German heritage and bright blue eyes — the girls from Bakersfield, Calif., have been performing songs about white nationalism before all-white crowds since they were nine.

“We’re proud of being white, we want to keep being white,” said Lynx. “We want our people to stay white … we don’t want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race.”

Lynx and Lamb have been nurtured on racist beliefs since birth by their mother April. “They need to have the background to understand why certain things are happening,” said April, a stay-at-home mom who no longer lives with the twins’ father. “I’m going to give them, give them my opinion just like any, any parent would.”

April home-schools the girls, teaching them her own unique perspective on everything from current to historical events. In addition, April’s father surrounds the family with symbols of his beliefs — specifically the Nazi swastika. It appears on his belt buckle, on the side of his pick-up truck and he’s even registered it as his cattle brand with the Bureau of Livestock Identification.

“Because it’s provocative,” explains April of the cattle brand, “to him he thinks it’s important as a symbol of freedom of speech that he can use it as his cattle brand.”

As Rob Port (currently profiled on the Pajamas Media site) adds:

What an ironic thing for a Nazi twit to say. Ideals like “freedom of speech” don’t exist when the Nazis are in charge.

Exactly.

To paraphrase something that Jonah Goldberg wrote this past summer, and Simon's World quoted elsewhere in his post above, Nazism is supposed to define the outer limits of evil, not the lowest threshold. That its symbols are joining its linguistic expressions (ala Dick Durbin, Janeane Garofalo, and many, many others), to slowly become part of the dumbed-down pop culture vernacular is a depressing sight to observe.

Back in March, I looked at the surprising number of anecdotes involving Russians and Germans who long for their totalitarian past and concluded:

Part of the challenge of freedom is that it involves the messy vitality of individualism. And a big part of the attraction of totalitarianism is its order. Long before he entered the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan knew the Soviet Union was a third world economy hiding behind an enormous and powerful military. It's easy to look at millions of hulking men in black boots and assume that their force equals the sum total of a nation's vitality. And there's obvious order in those images (see: Riefenstahl, Leni).

They're seductive surfaces, even though what was under them was so rotten. And its obvious that even as the former Russian, East German--and even West German people and their leaders struggle with moving forward, their dark, but ordered pasts can be an awfully attractive alternative.

Roger L. Simon spots the Chinese revering the third man in the troika of 20th century monsters: Mao, who killed 70 million people. Roger wonders if there will be a potent minority of Iraqis who long for the days of Saddam Hussein, even knowing, as they now do, about the shredding machine, the iron maiden (no, not the rock group), the government salaried official "violator of women's honor", and one million murdered.

Sadly, I know the answer; for many Americans, it's right under their nose.

Michele Malkin (found via Roger L. Simon), looks at an amusing--if sadly predictable phenomenon, which Roger dubs (accurately), the mainstream media's "weirdly pro-Saddam coverage, a kind of journalistic Stockholm Syndrome". (Michelle links to blogger Matt Margolis, whose phrase appears in this post's title.)

There was a preview of it this weekend, as the MSM tut-tutted Iraq's democratic elections. Remember, it was only a few years ago, that they gave Saddam's "elections" a pass, without a shred of irony or dissent in their reporting, as these classic groaners in 2002 and 2003 illustrate:

“Seven years ago, when the last referendum took place, Saddam Hussein won 99.96 percent of the vote. Of course, it is impossible to say whether that’s a true measure of the Iraqi people’s feelings.” — ABC reporter David Wright, World News Tonight, October 15, 2002.

“All 11,440,638 eligible voters went to the polls with one thought: Yes to Saddam Hussein! The government proclaimed it a victory of light over darkness, good over evil. It seemed more like a political miracle.“ — NBC reporter Keith Miller on Today, October 16, 2002.

Diane Sawyer: “I read this morning that he’s [Saddam Hussein] also said the love that the Iraqis have for him is so much greater than anything Americans feel for their President because he’s been loved for 35 years, he says, the whole 35 years.”

Dan Harris in Baghdad [responds to Sawyer]: “He is one to point out quite frequently that he is part of a historical trend in this country of restoring Iraq to its greatness, its historical greatness. He points out frequently that he was elected with a 100 percent margin recently.” — ABC’s Good Morning America, March 7, 2003.

CNN of course, served as a de facto propaganda arm of Saddam; its founder seems to have never met a totalitarian regime he didn't admire.

Orrin Judd links to a New York Times magazine feature with this lead:

Ever since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, the strength of American conservatism has largely confounded historians and intellectuals. Before then, a generation of influential scholars claimed that liberalism was the core of all American political thinking and suggested that it always would be. Well into the 1970's, many observers wondered whether a Republican Party that allied itself with the conservative movement could long survive.

Parsing those two sentences reveals quite a gap that missing--two seminal events that both occurred in the early to mid-1970s. The first was the beginning of liberalism's increasing shift to the hard left. As Jonah Goldberg wrote shortly after the presidential election last year:

The conventional wisdom is right: Democrats have a values problem. At the national level, they can't talk about them convincingly. Even Rahm Emanuel, a former Clinton staffer and now a Democratic congressman, explained to the New York Times, "people aren't going to hear what we say until they know that we don't approach them as Margaret Mead would an anthropological experiment."

As my old boss - and lifelong Democrat Ben Wattenberg - noted in his book "Values Matter Most," when the Democratic Party moved to the left, many moderate and conservative Democrats felt abandoned. In 1964 Barry Goldwater carried five states in the Democratic South. In 1968, the left kept LBJ from running and ruined the convention. In 1972 the leftists ruled the roost. A young militant with a huge afro, wearing a dashiki, was splashed across the airwaves because he helped get Chicago mayor Richard Daley dumped as a delegate to the Democratic Convention. That militant was Jesse Jackson.

Jackson both led and represented a change in the Democratic Party. For example, the '72 Convention imposed a severe racial and gender quota system - which exists to this day - so that the party would be more "inclusive."

Referring to such reforms, George McGovern, the presidential nominee in 1972, said he opened the doors to the Democratic Party "and 20 million people walked out." McGovern lost the election in a historic landslide to Nixon. Only Massachusetts voted for McGovern, and even there it was surprisingly close.

Only two Democrats have won the oval office since LBJ. Both were Southerners who campaigned as moderates. Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian, lost his re-election bid in part because he seemed to break his promise to be a moderate (and partly because he was "history's greatest monster" - if you are a devotee of the Simpsons). In 1992 Gov. Bill Clinton also ran as a moderate on abortion, crime, the death penalty and welfare. He even criticized the rapper Sista Souljah - which infuriated Jesse Jackson, now comfortably wearing suits, paid for with corporate shakedowns. When Clinton was elected, he governed from the left - Hillary Care, gays in the military, etc. - and the American public elected a Republican Congress to punish him.

And, because the one thing we know Bill Clinton likes more than interns is being president, he suddenly tacked back to the center and basically stayed there for the rest of his administration.

As to the second statement in that Times lead, which says:

Well into the 1970's, many observers wondered whether a Republican Party that allied itself with the conservative movement could long survive.

The shifting of the Democrats' power base to the hard left created a vacuum in the middle. And it's worth reading Crag Shirley's terrific Reagan's Revolution to understand just how down-and-out Republicans were in 1976, the year that they made a historic choice: to align themselves with Rockefeller me-to liberalism, or Reagan/Goldwater-style conservatism. They made the wrong choice in '76, but Ford's failure set-up the Gipper's run in 1980.

Last July, I wrote:

Because liberalism dominated culture--especially pop culture--for the majority of the 20th century, it's interesting to note how key events have been forgotten by reporters, journalists and historians.

As those two example linked to above illustrate, David Frum was right: more so than the sixties, the seventies is the decade which has shaped modern life. But it's very easy to forget so many of the events of that era--even if you're the New York Times. (Or perhaps, especially if you're the New York Times.)

Nick Cohen, columnist for England's far-left Guardian, discovers a trend that he finds to be new: anti-Semitism amongst his brethren on the left.

It's actually far older than he thinks, as historians and academics as diverse as John Lukacs, A. James Gregor, and Paul Johnson have all documented, and Edward Feser (himself visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University) summarized in a thorough piece last year for Tech Central Station.

Yesterday, I rather cheekily titled a post, "A History Of Nihilism", riffing on Mark Steyn's review of David Cronenberg’s new movie, "A History of Violence". In a post titled, "Terrorists: nihilists and/or mass murderers?", Neo-neocon comes far closer to actually delivering on what my title promised.

In other words, don't miss it.

Michelle Malkin reviews the latest in homicide chic French fashions. A little grungy, a little too Chav for my tastes--but then I doubt I'm in the target market for the explosive growth in these killer designs...

As I posted recently, Jodie Foster is apparently beginning work on her dream project: a film which will rehabilite the reputation of Leni Riefenstahl.

Meanwhile, Charles Johnson looks at a film that's currently making the rounds of the Deutchland art house circuit: Paradise Now, which Charles writes, is "about a Palestinian suicide bomber who blows himself up to murder a bus full of Jews":

The “World Cinema Fund,” who sponsored (paid for) the film, has named it their film of the month because it invites the viewer to “think about the assassin’s motives.”

And according to Davids Medienkritik, Amnesty International has also awarded the film a “peace prize,” because it’s neither “lecturing nor moralizing.”

(Hat tip: Gateway Pundit.)

P.S. At the 55th international film festival in Berlin 2005, “Paradise Now” won the Publikumspreis (“audience award”) and the Blue Angle for best European film.

P.P.S. Have I mentioned lately that we seem to be seeing a replay of 1938 in Germany?

Indeed, to borrow the Insta-adverb.

Her dream comes true: Cindy Sheehan was arrested today in front of the White House. Mary Katharine catches AP selectively revising updates to the story.

Meanwhile, John Hinderaker writes:

I may be wrong about this, but I don't think it is wise for Sheehan to go out of her way to cultivate associations between her anti-war protest and similar events in the 1960s. I really don't think that images of her being carried away by policemen, hobnobbing with Communists, marching with Joan Baez and Jesse Jackson, etc., are helpful to her cause. I think such actions will cause light bulbs to go on in many Americans' heads as they realize, "Oh, she's one of those!"

Hinderaker also notes a glaring exception to the media's otherwise careful framing of her photographs.

Via Norman Geras, here's Oliver Jones, in England's far left Guardian:

Compassion is putting yourself in the other person's shoes and feeling sympathy. It does not require affection. One might feel compassion for Hitler, Stalin or Saddam on learning about their appalling childhoods (like most famous dictators, they lost a parent before the age of 14), or even for George Bush (who had a beastly time), but still hate them for what they did.

Evidently, Oliver forgot the atrocities of National Socialism and international Communism in the 20th century. Or as Jonah Goldberg wrote in January of 2004, during Moveon.org's "Bush=Hitler" ads, the first big salvo in what's becoming a now seemingly endless cycle of moral equivalence by the left:

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.)

"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.

As Norm Geras wrote:

OK, so help me someone. I mean with the 'even'. Oliver James doesn't really think George Bush worse than Hitler or Stalin or... Saddam, does he?

A typo? Carelessness? Too many dinner parties? I'm at a loss.

Nowhere near as big as the one Oliver's having.

By the way, while Debbie Schlussel does give away spoilers in her post on Flight Plan, be sure to at least scroll to the update of the article, to check out Jodie's dream project: rehabilitating the reputation of Leni Riefenstahl.

No, really! Whitewashing Leni Riefenstahl's place in history was only a matter of time I guess, as all the films airbrushing Che's reputation are becoming old hat.

Two men are talking as they drive in car.

Jules: Okay, so tell me again about the porn.

Vincent: Okay, watcha wanna know?

Jules: Porn is supplied for free by the Danish government now right?

Vincent: Yeah, it's free, but it ain't 100 percent free. I mean, you can't just walk into a...videostore, pick up a Ron Jeremy move, and just start bukakking away. I mean, they want only want you to watch it in your home or certain designated places.

Jules: And those are nursing homes.

Vincent: Yeah. It breaks down like this: earlier this year, the Danish government released a report stating that sexuality is an integral part of life for the elderly and the disabled. It recommended that caregivers help elderly residents satisfy their sexual needs. The staff in the nursing home in the Danish capital have been broadcasting pornography on the building's internal video channel every Saturday night for several years. And if videos and dirty magazines don't relieve the tension, residents can ask the staff to order a prostitute for them.

Jules: Oh man, I'm going, that's all there is to it, I'm f***in' going!

Vincent: I know, baby--you dig it the most! But you know what the funniest thing about Europe is?

Jules: What?

Vincent: It's the little differences. I mean, they got the same s*** over there that they got here, but it's just, it's just theirs is a little different.

Jules: Example?

Vincent: All right. Well you can walk into a movie theater in Odense, and buy a beer. And I don't mean just like no paper cup, I'm talking about a glass of beer. And in Hedeby, you can buy a beer in McDonald's. And you know what they call uh...watching porn and getting laid by hookers in a nursing home?

Jules: They don't call it watching porn and getting laid by hookers in a nursing home?

Vincent: Nah man! They got their own morally relative euphemisms, they wouldn't use language like that over there.

Jules: Then what do they call it?

Vincent: They call it "caregivers helping elderly residents satisfy their sexual needs"!

Jules: Caregivers helping elderly residents satisfy their sexual needs?

Vincent: That's right.

Jules: (laughs) What about the hash bars?

Vincent: I don't know, I didn't go into Amsterdam.

Yesterday, I noted that with all the insane quotes that have been in the air since Katrina hit land at the beginning of the month, "The Silly Season", ordinarily purely a summer event to keep the press busy during an otherwise slow period of real news has extended deep into September. I sagely wrote, "Hurricane Katrina has rightly pushed [Cindy] Sheehan's ravings into the background".

Evidently, I spoke prematurely (and just now, far too adverbially). In order to form The Rosetta Stone Of Silliness, all of the disparate elements converged today, as Cindy posted on (but of course) Michael Moore's Website:

I don’t care if a human being is black, brown, white, yellow or pink. I don’t care if a human being is Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, or pagan. I don’t care what flag a person salutes: if a human being is hungry, then it is up to another human being to feed him/her. George Bush needs to stop talking, admit the mistakes of his all around failed administration, pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans and Iraq, and excuse his self from power.

Just think--it was only a couple of weeks ago that the press was castigating President Bush for not sending troops into New Orleans fast enough. Now the heroine they've created wants them out of there.

Meanwhile, Power Line's John Hinderaker catalogs Cindy's association, not just with Michael Moore, but with an ex-Black Panther and Communist:

Who is Cindy's "new friend" Malik Rahim? He is conventionally described as a "veteran of the Black Panther Party in New Orleans," and was recently a Green Party candidate for local office there. But the truth is somewhat worse. Rahim is a Communist. Here is a speech he gave to the Communist Manifesto conference in December 1998; it begins:

I'm here on behalf of two revolutionary freedom fighters that have spent the last 26 years in solitary confinement in Angola, a state prison in Louisiana. I met these freedom fighters as a political prisoner in 1970. I was in a shoot-out with the police in New Orleans as a member of the Black Panther Party.

The Communist Manifesto conference was reported on by the Workers World Party ("Workers & oppressed peoples of the world unite!"). The Workers World Party is currently the most active Communist group in the United States, in its own name and through its subsidiaries International ANSWER and the International Action Center, which is headed by former attorney general Ramsey Clark.

Hinderaker concludes:

The question is, why is she not just a hater, but a famous hater? Obviously, because she was a mainstream media darling throughout the summer. But where are the media, now that her cover has been blown? A curtain of silence has descended. Once again, the American press accepts no accountability for misleading the American people, and it has no intention of correcting the fictitious record that it, alone, created.

You know--you could really get the wrong impression of the press. Even though they're completely non-biased and neutral, it's almost...why, they sort of seem to agree with her viewpoint!

Nahh--I'm sure it's all just an optical illusion.

"There are probably some people among you here who fancy yourself as having leftist revolutionary credentials,” he said, in a discussion of Kurdish and Iraqi opponents of Saddam’s regime. "And, in fact, I can tell that you do by the zoo noises you make and the scars you can demonstrate from your long underground twilight struggle against Dick Cheney. But while you’re masturbating in that manner, the Iraqi secular left…[is] fighting for [its] lives against the most vicious and indiscriminate form of fascist violence that any country in the region has seen for a very long time."

--Christopher Hitchens, to the audience watching his caged pro wrestling deathmatch gentlemanly debate with George Galloway on Wednesday.

(Via Power Line.)

Currently up on Breitbart.com is this:

Judge: School Pledge Is Unconstitutional
Sep 14 2:20 PM US/Eastern

By DAVID KRAVETS
Associated Press Writer

SAN FRANCISCO

Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools was ruled unconstitutional Wednesday by a federal judge who granted legal standing to two families represented by an atheist who lost his previous battle before the U.S. Supreme Court.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled that the pledge's reference to one nation "under God" violates school children's right to be "free from a coercive requirement to affirm God."

Karlton said he was bound by precedent of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which in 2002 ruled in favor of Sacramento atheist Michael Newdow that the pledge is unconstitutional when recited in public schools.

Given the San Francisco dateline, it sounds like Michael Newdow and his buddies on the Ninth Circuit Court are back in action this fall, winning hearts and minds everywhere.

(It's highly likely, of course, to be overturned. And somewhere, Karl Rove is laughing like a giddy schoolgirl over this...)

Update: Michelle Malkin has lots 'o' links on this, including this one, from Ankle Biting Pundits:

The lefties in the Senate and the groups against Roberts have to be PO'ed. This news is going to overshadow their other messages against Roberts - and now they're going to have to play defense because you know this is going to be the 1st question that they are asked about.
You know these kooks agree with the decision, but they can't say that.

This also bodes well for President Bush picking a very conservative replacement for O'Connor. If he's got a short list he should make his selection quick while the iron is hot and it will be much harder for the loons to say his judicial choice is "out of the mainstream".

ABP also has some amusing details about the judge who issued the decision.

Glenn Reynolds agrees that Karl Rove has to be loving this turn of events:

KARL ROVE MUST HAVE ARRANGED THIS: Just as John Roberts is being quizzed by the Senate Judiciary Committee, another court declares the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional.

You know, Elvis was spot-on: I used to be disgusted by our nihilistic masters in Sacramento and San Francisco. Now I'm just mildly amused, and smile softly each time their causality loop repeats.

Back on Christmas of last year, I quoted from Mark Steyn, on how the actions of the ACLU and the Ninth Circus actually strengthen Christianity in America:

But every time some sensitive flower pulls off a legal victory over the school board, who really wins? For the answer to that, look no further than last month's election results. Forty years of effort by the American Civil Liberties Union to eliminate God from the public square have led to a resurgent, evangelical and politicised Christianity in America. By "politicised", I don't mean that anyone who feels his kid should be allowed to sing Silent Night if he wants to is perforce a Republican, but only that year in, year out it becomes harder for such folks to support a secular Democratic Party closely allied with the anti-Christmas militants. American liberals need to rethink their priorities: what's more important? Winning a victory over the kindergarten teacher's holiday concert, or winning back Congress and the White House?

Currently, their priority is on the former; a lesson they failed to heed from President Clinton.

Another Update: Hugh Hewitt agrees with ABP that President Bush should strike while the iron is hot.

One More: Political Teen looks at the continuing tyranny of the minority:

Athiests account for 902,000 or 0.4% of the US population. Those who believe in a God or some sort of a higher being account for over 86% of the US population. It is amazing that such a small minority can rule over a large majority.

The deal here isn’t just the small amount of atheists in America, but the fact that they have to punish everyone for something they don’t believe in. If you do not want your child to recite the pledge of allegiance, then tell them not too. No one forces your child to stand up, put their hand over their heart and say 20 seconds worth of American patriotism. Thank God I go to a private school.

I'm glad I did, too.

There was a spontaneous memorial erected in Shanksville, PA to remember Flight #93 by everyday folks who wanted to remember the heroic actions of that flight's passengers, especially Todd Beamer, whose "Let's Roll" quickly became the post-9/11 rallying cry for America. That memorial has gotten surprisingly little exposure (maybe it isn't all that surprising, given the mainstream media's voracious memory hole), but Jonathan Last of The Weekly Standard had photos of it on his Galley Slaves Weblog back in December. I have no idea if it's still standing, but in retrospect, it's certainly far more appropriate than what's currently being proposed as the permanent memorial, as Mark Steyn explains:

Read More »

Maybe the Air National Guard and medivac choppers needs someone to ride shotgun on their helicopters:

The scene at the massive New Orleans arena is chaotic as authorities attempt to evacuate the thousands who had massed inside because of Hurricane Katrina.

The airborne evacuation of the sick and injured was put off temporarily following a report of a shot being fired at a military helicopter, although the federal government said it doesn't know about any such incident.

The air ambulance service that was supposed to transfer some of the worse-off evacuees said it won't fly near the dome until security is restored.

As Jonah Goldberg writes:

Looting for personal gain is reprehensible and should be swiftly punished. But when people fire weapons on doctors and rescue vehicles, it is a sign of profound moral decay more grotesque than words can describe. That these images are being beamed around the world is a source of deep shame. Even copkillers like Mumia Abu Jamal can have a perverse morality to them, in the sense that in their worldview cops represent oppression or some such. I think that's an attitude that runs the gamut from profoundly misguided to profoundly malevolent and copkillers should get the death penalty, period. But shooting people as they try to save the lives of babies and old women is an act so base and vile that it cannot even support the veneer of a pernicious ideology. This is so depressing.

Indeed.

Speaking of helicopters and other aircraft, this seems like a logical use for them as they're flying through the area.

Charles Johnson writes:

Excuse me for a minute. Something seems to have happened to my LGF Irony Meter; the little needle is pegged up against the end pin and it’s not budging.

Oh! Never mind; I’ve discovered the reason: Che Guevara’s family to fight use of famed photo.

Who'd have thought that Latin American communism would eventually boil down to T-shirts and royality checks? (Oh, and movie rights, of course.)

(Well, probably these guys...)

Mark Steyn has another great essay today, this time in England's Spectator about Cindy Sheehan. Here's but an excerpt:

Whenever I’m on a radio show these days, someone calls in and demands to know whether my children are in Iraq. Well, not right now. They range in age from five to nine, and though that’s plenty old enough to sign up for the jihad and toddle into an Israeli pizza parlour wearing a suicide-bomb, in most advanced societies’ armed forces they prefer to use grown-ups.

That seems to be difficult for the Left to grasp. Ever since America’s all-adult, all-volunteer army went into Iraq, the anti-war crowd have made a sustained effort to characterise them as ‘children’. If a 13-year-old wants to have an abortion, that’s her decision and her parents shouldn’t get a look-in. If a 21-year-old wants to drop to the Oval Office shagpile and chow down on Bill Clinton, she’s a grown woman and free to do what she wants. But, if a 22- or 25- or 37-year old is serving his country overseas, he’s a wee ‘child’ who isn’t really old enough to know what he’s doing.

I get many emails from soldiers in Iraq, and they sound a lot more grown-up than most Ivy League professors and certainly than Maureen Dowd, who writes as if she’s auditioning for a minor supporting role in Sex and the City. The infantilisation of the military promoted by the Left is deeply insulting to America’s warriors but it suits the anti-war crowd’s purposes. It enables them to drone ceaselessly that ‘of course’ they ‘support our troops’, because they want to stop these poor confused moppets from being exploited by the Bush war machine.

On his show today, Hugh Hewitt had Steyn on and said to him:

HH: Let's turn to Crawford, Texas. I have not said much about Cindy Sheehan in the couple of days that I was back on Monday and Tuesday, because I kind of give her the complete pardon, because she's lost her son. But the media vampires surrounding her, Mark Steyn, are utterly without ethic.

MS: Well, I agree with you. I don't even like talking about this, because I think this woman has become unhinged by the terrible thing that has happened to her. We now learn that her mother apparently has had a stroke. She and her husband are divorcing. The family is split up, and you know, she says...her argument is that liberating Iraq, liberating Afghanistan...she opposes the Afghan War, that none of this is worth any American's life. And yet I think you have to ask the other question. Is this insane Bush hatred, and the opportunism that the left has used her for, is that worth destroying her marriage and her family over? I think this woman will look back at these few weeks she's been in the public limelight, in a couple of years time, and feel ashamed of herself, and feel ashamed at the way she allowed herself to be used, and her son's death to be dishonored in this way. I think it's a terrible, terrible thing, but you know, in the end, this war is about bigger things than the death of any individual.

I rarely disagree with Mark Steyn, and hopefully time will prove him right, and myself wrong, but when he says that she'll look back in a couple of years and feel ashamed, I sincerely doubt it. Yesterday, James Taranto compared her Crawford media circus this year to the very similar frenzy spearheaded by Senator Kerry last August during his presidential run. With almost 35 years to ponder his actions whilst still in the Naval Reserves (His The New Soldier book with its upside down flag cover; calling American soldiers war criminals in front of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations; throwing away his medals in a Washington protest, etc.), has Kerry ever admitted any sort of remorse? I think for most people, once their emotions drive them to any far-extreme worldview, the rest of their brain compensates by finding an endless amount of ways to justify their actions.

There are certainly exceptions (David Horowitz has written extensively about coming to grips with his involvement in Radical Chic politics in the early 1970s, and in England, Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen have both written about leaving the far left), but something tells me she won't be one of them.

Jonah Goldberg's long promised-book is currently scheduled to debut next April, according to Amazon:

Since the rise and fall of the Nazis in the midtwentieth century, fascism has been seen as an extreme right-wing phenomenon. Liberals have kept that assumption alive, hurling accusations of fascism at their conservative opponents. LIBERAL FASCISM offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg shows that the original fascists were really on the Left and that liberals, from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton, have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler’s National Socialism.

Goldberg draws striking parallels between historic fascism and contemporary liberal doctrines. He argues that “political correctness” on campuses and calls for campaign finance reform echo the Nazis' suppression of free speech; and that liberals, like their fascist forebears, dismiss the democratic process when it yields results they dislike, insist on the centralization of economic decision-making, and seek to insert the authority of the state in our private lives–from bans on smoking to gun control. Covering such hot issues as morality, anti-Semitism, science versus religion, health care, and cultural values, he boldly illustrates the resemblances between the opinions advanced by Hitler and Mussolini and the current views of the Left.

Impeccably researched and persuasively argued, LIBERAL FASCISM will elicit howls of indignation from the liberal establishment–and rousing cheers from the Right.

That sounds about right, but I suspect the former will be greater than the latter, through no fault of Jonah's. There's a pretty fair amount of writing on the right from Paul Johnson to F.A. Hayek and John Lukacs that supports Jonah's thesis (as does this recent online piece by David Ramsay Steele) but much of it may come as a shock to those who've been unexposed to it.

Update: Looks like the publication date has been pushed back to August of 2006.

Yesterday, we looked at a couple of recent articles that argued that Islamofascist terrorism has deep roots in the eschaton-raising Marxists and Nazis of 20th century Europe. Jonah Goldberg agrees:

A sizable faction of the Islamists aren't so much pro-Islam as anti-Western.

Consider Hussain Osman, another of the alleged conspirators, Osman spent his youth as an enormous fan of all things American. "He had a fixation with America," his girlfriend explained, particularly with hip-hop. The Somali refugee went to the discos all the time and "worshipped" Tupac Shakur, the murdered rapper and son of a Black Panther. Now, it should be made clear that Mr. Osman is what some experts in the field call a "moron." Explaining to Italian authorities that he "preferred" not to be extradited to Britain — isn't that special? — Osman insisted that he was no "terrorist." After all, "We didn't want to kill, just sow terror."

But idiots are often very useful in illustrating the appeal of fascistic cults. Intellectuals are too good at covering their real psychological motivations with verbiage. It turns out that the famously "homegrown" terrorists of the London bombings were much more like John Walker Lindh or even the Patty Hearst types of the 1960s and '70s. Radical chic may be as a big a part of the story as radical Islam.

We've always understood this was the case to a certain extent. Osama bin Laden's prattling about the Crusades, for instance, merely shows how poisoned Islamism is by Western Marxism and anti-imperialism. Muslims used to brag about winning the Crusades. It was only after the West started exporting victimology that Islamic and Arab intellectuals started to whine about how poorly they'd been treated.

To a certain extent, radical Islam in Europe has taken the place of third-world Marxism — hardly a big leap when you think about how many Vietnamese "revolutionaries" were trained in Parisian salons. It's all about fighting capitalism, American "imperialism," modernism, etc. Marxism no longer provides a workable model, but the Islamists think sharia might. At the same time, like fascism and Communism before it, radical Islam provides a sense of purpose and meaning for losers and misfits who blame their misfortunes on "the system" (variously defined as the ruling class, the Jews, the capitalists, Col. Sanders, etc.). In this sense, Islamism is less about religion than ideology, and less about ideology than it is about alienation and low self-esteem.

This is just one reason why poverty is such a silly explanation for terrorism. Most of the 9/11 attackers, like the London bombers, were squarely middle class, and the leadership of al Qaeda is downright wealthy. My guess is that most of these losers would be miserable living in the utopia they're fighting for.

Besides previous examples such as the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Mao's China, North Korea, and Vietnam and Cambodia from the mid-1970s on, we need only look at Afghanistan under the Taliban to see yet another "utopia" that in reality, was Hell on earth.

Over the weekend, it was reported that Pennsylvania's Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll crashed the funeral of a Marine killed in Iraq. As Glenn Reynolds wrote:

IN THE VERDICT, PAUL NEWMAN VISITED FUNERALS to hand out his business card and try to boost his flagging career. Apparently, he's not the only one to try this approach: "The family of a Marine who was killed in Iraq is furious with Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll for showing up uninvited at his funeral this week, handing out her business card and then saying 'our government' is against the war."

After the bits hit the fan via local Pennsylvania news sites and the Blogosphere, Michelle Malkin writes that Baker has issued her apology in a personal letter to Sgt. Goodrich's wife....sent as a press release and containing the usual boilerplate:

Sergeant Goodrich’s service was beyond the call of duty. If my regard for his family’s grief was seen another way, it is thoroughly regrettable. The fact that you have been offended deserves and receives my most profound apology.

I will continue to support our troops in my role as Lt. Governor and support our President as an American. That I somehow conveyed an impression that was interpreted as other than that will forever be saddening and upsetting to me.

It's the old, "if you were offended, I'm sorry" routine, that Dick Durbin sampled from, on his way to a slightly better, if no less believable apology. Who, me do something wrong? Never! But I'm sorry if it was percieved by you that way, poor sod.

But Knoll's original line during the funeral--As I wrote above, Knoll was quoted as saying "our government" is against the war--has deeper implications for the Rendell administration that she serves within. As Dennis Prager wrote earlier this month:

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Back in January we looked at the left's increasing love of nostalgia, trying to put the chic back into its radical chic past. Roger L. Simon writes:

nowhere on the planet that is more completely a bastion of stodgy ultra-traditionalist liberal/leftist thought than the UK's Guardian, which has not varied one micro-millimeter from the 1968 weltanschauung for the last, well, thirty-seven years.

Mister, we could use a man like Che Guevara again!

Self-styled comedian Margaret Cho names her dog after a member of the infamous Baader-Meinhof terrorists of the 1970s. "Terrorism was different then", she was quoted as saying. "It had a chicness to it, which made it seem less like a dangerous menace and more like fashion."

Cho describes Baader-Meinhof as being "art terrorists".

Those fashionable art terrorists are believed responsible "for killing from 30 to 50 people, including high-ranking German politicians, business executives and U.S. military personnel", accoriding to the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism.

You know, this would be the equivalent of a senator praising Osama bin Laden for buildings schools and day care facilities.

Not that such a thing would ever happen of course...

Roger L. Simon has some more-or-less related thoughts on the stances that celebrities enjoy taking:

By making the pronouncements they do, they are trying to convince the audience of their own seriousness and their own goodness (their own value). But most of all they are trying to convince themselves. Fragile egos, not inflated ones, are at work here.

The psychodynamics can be more complex than that, and to dump all celebrity "leftists" in one pot is grossly unfair, but that is, I think, close to the essence. And this, of course, does not exonerate these people for their often peurile opinions. It only indicates why they are not thought through. Most Hollywood liberals of this sort will not engage in a substantive discussion of the issues because they have no real desire to. Thought, or even truth, is not the point. Stance is.

Exactly.

Ever since 9/11 we (by "we" I'm using shorthand that includes both myself and about half of the Blogosphere) have wondered why Reuters has refused to use the T-word when referring to, you know, terrorists. Instead, Reuters refers to them as militants, insurgents, dissidents (as they frequently labeled Osama bin Laden) and other euphemisms that imply that they're more misunderstood James Dean-type loners, than bloodthirsty men with a penchant for killing innocent civilians, and the larger the number, the better.

A 2003 article explains how Reuters' Newspeak works:

Reuters, the influential news agency headquartered in London, whose wire service stories appear in print, broadcast and web media outlets, routinely uses partisan, distorted terminology in its Middle East news reports. It not only bans the word “terrorism” generally but uses language that continually seeks to explain and obscure Palestinian violence. Thus Reuters regularly characterizes Palestinian terror against Israel as “the Palestinian uprising for statehood” or “uprising for Palestinian independence” or “uprising for an independent state.”

This terminology is deceptive, adopting an Arab perspective that legitimizes the use of violence against the Jewish State.

We've even joked that Reuters has never met a terrorist that they didn't like. And naturally, a la Malcolm Muggeridge's great and immovable law, it turns out that Reuters likes terrorists so much...that they ask them to "guest star" in their own in-house videos:

TEL AVIV - Top terrorist Zakaria Zubeidi made a “guest appearance” in a video prepared by the staff of Reuters news agency in Israel and the Palestinian Authority as a “going away” gift for a colleague, Ynetnews has learned.

Zubeidi, who heads Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Jenin, has been named by security officials as a key figure in organizing terror attacks on Israeli civilians. Zubeidi’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades have claimed responsibility for more than 300 terror acts in the last five years.

A Reuters spokeswoman confirmed the video’s existence, but said the London-based news organization is “not associated with any group or faction in any conflict.”

The screening, which occurred in a Jerusalem restaurant last March, involved the showing of a video during a private party. “The video’s theme was what Israel would be like in 10 years,” said an Israeli government official who attended the party and viewed the video.

“All of a sudden, at the end, there is Zakaria Zubeidi, playing the head of Reuters. Zubeidi was sitting in Reuters’ Jenin office, saying he was Reuters’ chief,” the official said.

The party included guests from the BBC, ITN, the Independent newspaper, and French journalists. “They all thought the video was hilarious,” the official said. He added that only a few individuals did not seem amused during the screening. “They were laughing; they thought it was very funny, he said.”

I'll bet they did.

In a just world, this should be the next Eason Jordan/Dan Rather moment for big media, as yet another mask falls. But will the story gain sufficient traction in the Blogosphere?

Update: Dafydd ab Hugh of Captain's Quarters reminds us that Reuters' chief rival, the Associated Press, isn't exactly a bastion of pure Olympian detached objectivity themselves when it comes to reporting on terrorists.

In contrast, this is far less reassuring. Kathryn Jean Lopez quotes from this excerpt from an article in England's Evening Standard, back in April of 2004:

Four young British Muslims in their twenties - a social worker, an IT specialist, a security guard and a financial adviser - occupy a table at a fast-food chicken restaurant in Luton. Perched on their plastic chairs, wolfing down their dinner, they seem just ordinary young men. Yet out of their mouths pour heated words of revolution. "As far as I'm concerned, when they bomb London, the bigger the better," says Abdul Haq, the social worker. "I know it's going to happen because Sheikh bin Laden said so. Like Bali, like Turkey, like Madrid - I pray for it, I look forward to the day." "Pass the brown sauce, brother," says Abu Malaahim, the IT specialist, devouring his chicken and chips. "I agree with you, brother," says Abu Yusuf, the earnest-looking financial adviser sitting opposite. "I would like to see the Mujahideen coming into London and killing thousands, whether with nuclear weapons or germ warfare. And if they need a safehouse, they can stay in mine - and if they need some fertiliser [for a bomb], I'll tell them where to get it." His friend, Abu Musa, the security guard, smiles radiantly. "It will be a day of joy for me," he adds, speaking with a slight lisp. As they talk, a man with a bushy beard, dressed in a jacket emblazoned with the word "Jihad", stands and watches over them, handing around cups of steaming hot coffee. His real name is Ishtiaq Alamgir, but he goes by his adopted name, Sayful Islam, meaning "Sword of Islam". He is the 24-year-old leader of the Luton branch of al-Muhajiroun, an extremist Muslim group with about 800 members countrywide, who regard Osama bin Laden as their hero.

I wonder if a reporter from the Standard plans to follow up with any of the peace-loving moderates quoted above for their reaction to today's events. More importantly--I wonder if London's police will be interviewing them as well.

Iowahawk's Special Guest Commentator, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, is back. And boy, is he p.o'ed.

(Via Charles Johnson.)

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

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

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

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

In the New Partisan, Jonathan Leaf writes:

Here’s a riddle:

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

The Nation? Mother Jones?

Here are some more clues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: Related thoughts from Power Line.

Over at The Corner, Tim Graham writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise's new version of The War of the Worlds set to open later this week, John J. Miller writes that H.G. Wells, its original author, "was a sci-fi pioneer, but his political ideas were abominable":

Wells, for his part, was often appallingly wrong. "Human history is in essence a history of ideas," he once wrote. That may be, but Wells flirted with the worst ideas of his time. After interviewing Lenin, Wells called him "creative" and described communism as the best hope for reforming Russia. The man simply never met a collectivist movement that didn't intrigue him. "There is good in these Fascists," he said of Italians in 1927. "There is something brave and well-meaning about them." He despised Catholicism and mocked Jewish traditions as "nonsense." It was for views such as these that George Orwell delivered a blunt verdict in 1941: "Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany."

Orwell also was referring to the utopianism that distinguished so much of what Wells wrote. Whereas the author of "Animal Farm" and "1984" possessed a keen sense of how and why totalizing states go badly wrong, Wells was constantly drawing up plans for ideal societies driven by rationalist principles and governed by high-minded elites. This could lead to bizarre results: In "Men Like Gods," Wells envisioned a scheme of eugenic reproduction and centralized planning so perfect (in his mind) that everybody went shamelessly nude.

Defending this particular notion, Wells commented that the practice of wearing clothes was a silly taboo. He certainly had little patience for sexual mores. Admirers have hailed Wells as a proto-feminist, but he was more accurately an advocate of free love--a doctrine that typically benefits men who shirk their duties. As it happened, Wells treated the women in his life shabbily. He cheated on his wives and impregnated his mistresses.

Maybe he was just acting on Darwinian impulses. Wells was in fact a strident devotee of the evolutionary creed, which he learned from the biologist T.H. Huxley at the Normal School. "The War of the Worlds" is best interpreted as an aggressive statement of what C.S. Lewis called "Wellsianity"--the promotion of materialistic science as true faith. The moral of the story may be found in the novel's first sentence, which describes the sobering reality of "intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as our own." Humans aren't noble creatures of God, but animal feed for hungry Martians. If we are to go on living, it isn't for any purpose greater than "the sake of the breed" (as one character says in a late chapter).

At least Wells didn't let the Martians get away with their dastardly plot. They fall victim to disease spread by bacteria, which Wells called "the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon the earth." The author of these words would have profited from a little more humility himself. We should be grateful that he left his imprint on the science-fiction genre, and almost nowhere else.

He wasn't the only British proto-technophile to also be a political radical. Last week, I Googled to find the name of the man who uttered a famous quote to give credit when I paraphrased it in this post. I found the Wikipedia page of early 20th century British geneticist and evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane, which had this staggeringly naive paragraph:

Haldane was himself a very idealistic man, and in his youth was a devoted Communist and author of many articles in The Daily Worker. Events in the Soviet Union, such as the rise of the anti-Mendelian agronomist Trofim Lysenko and the crimes of Stalin, caused him to break with the Communist Party later in life. He joined the Communist party in 1937 but left in 1950, shortly after having toyed with standing for Parliament as a Communist Party candidate.

Hard to believe, of course, that 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall that the author of that Wikipedia page could still equate communism and idealism in a single sentence with a straight face without some sort of additional rationalization.

For more on a similar topic, but brought up to date, check out this post on The Volkh Conspiracy, where Clayton Cramer writes, "nothing has really changed; academics are overwhelmingly on the side of totalitarian thugs throughout the world".

Roger L. Simon (found via Instapundit, who has additional links) is wondering whether or not the Democrats are breeding a new generation of Father Coughlins, adding "that's what it sounds like in the wake of the meeting chaired by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, once a revered civil rights leader". That meeting was a mock impeachment trial that Conyers chaired. But that schtick is actually nothing new for Conyers and the left, as Brent Bozell noted a few years ago:

In 1983, Clinton defender John Conyers called for Reagan's impeachment for invading Grenada. (For good measure, he earlier called for impeachment over the Gipper's alleged "incompetence" in dealing with unemployment.) In 1984, as he ran for President, and again in 1986, Jesse Jackson suggested Reagan should be subject to an impeachment probe over U.S. actions in Nicaragua. Rep. Henry Gonzalez called for impeachment in 1983 over Grenada and again in 1987 over Iran-Contra. The National Organization for Women and the American Civil Liberties Union advocated impeaching Reagan in 1987.

Glenn Reynolds writes that the new generation of Father Coughlins "was bred 40 years ago; it's just reaching maturity now". Sadly, he's right on both counts.

Orrin Judd links to a profile that appears in The Australian of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, who have a new history of Mao Tsetung coming out this fall:

"I wanted to get inside his head and understand him because he dominated my life and ruined things for a quarter of the world's population," [Chung] says.

"We thought it would take about two years but as we dug deeper -- like a pair of detectives -- we discovered more and more. We were so constantly surprised [that] we kept going. He killed more people than anyone in history and was as evil as Hitler or Stalin, yet it is astonishing how little the world knows about him."

Mao's portrait still hangs over Tiananmen Square in Beijing, where government leaders proudly present themselves as his heirs, and Western politicians, from Kissinger to former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam, who were so thrilled to visit Mao, have still failed to understand his ghastly nature, she says.

"This is the greatest mass murderer in history, a man we calculate killed at least 70 million people and was prepared to let many, many more die if necessary to pursue his mad policies."

But. You just know the B-word is coming. And sure enough, it appears in a defense of Mao, later in the article:

Philip Short, a British author and journalist who published a book on Mao in 1999, says that Chang and Halliday have come close to a hatchet job. Speaking by telephone from northeastern China, where he is lecturing and conducting further research on Mao, Short says it does nobody any good to exaggerate the obvious monstrosities of Mao.

"I fear this is a case of writing history to fit their own views; doing what the Chinese call cutting the feet to fit the shoes," Short says.

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

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

As Orrin sardonically writes, "Surely we can all agree that his poetry redeems him. Just like with Hitler’s paintings".

This part of Short's defense of Mao is particularly amusing in a grim sort of way:

The handling of the Great Famine was atrocious but it was not just Mao who cooked it up; almost every other Chinese leader was enthusiastically involved in it. It was not just one man who caused all this pain.

Get that? It's a weird inversion of the Nazis' "I was just following orders" defense at Nuremberg. Mao was giving the orders--but hey, so many others were following them. It was the law of the land, the conventional wisdom. And that makes it OK, right? Who are we to judge?!

Let's reword Short's defense of Mao to see how it would look with a more occidental flavor:

The Final Solution was atrocious but it was not just Hitler who cooked it up; almost every other German leader was enthusiastically involved in it. It was not just one man who caused all this pain.

Or, let's take it to the Russian T-for-terror room:

The handling of the Great Famine was atrocious but it was not just Stalin who cooked it up; almost every other Soviet leader was enthusiastically involved in it. It was not just one man who caused all this pain.

Doesn't quite fly, does it? Hitler and Stalin are seen by most civilized people as the pair of 20th century monsters they were. Hopefully Chang and Halliday's book will help cement Mao's atrocities into most people's minds as equally well.

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Earlier today, in a post titled, "The Hysteria Spreads", Glenn Reynolds wrote that Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) compared President Bush's foreign policy to the Holocaust. (And that's after George Galloway (Baathist-UK) recently made similar Godwin's Law-violating statements on Al Jazeera). Glenn Wrote that "Bush's ability to drive his opponents stark, raving bonkers is almost supernatural".

Like the Bush Derangement Syndrome that dominated in the months prior to the election, this new strain is spreading.

September will be the fourth anniversary of 9/11, and it's only about three months away. But 9/11 was only one of several attacks on this country whose origins were in the Middle East. Today, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the minority leader of the house, say that she thinks--(strike that, thinking is the wrong word, for it implies reason)--feels that we need to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center in order to give America "a clean slate in the Muslim world."

Paul Mirengoff responds:

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Glenn Reynolds links to a great post by Matt Welch on the blindness of tourists to death, decay and starvation in Cuba:

this common sentiment has always irritated the hell out of me. Oh, the crumbling, no-longer-beautiful houses! Ah, the lovely two-feet-deep potholes, and rickety Chinese bicycles (because the 50-year-old Chevys and 30-year-old Ladas don't work, and at any rate there's no gas). How people can derive pleasure from evidence of the suffering of innocents is beyond me, and few sights are more unseemly to my eyes than seeing a Lonely Planet-waving travel snob whine about how some current or formerly misgoverned hellhole has been "ruined" by all that yucky reconstruction, material success, and (worst of all!) tourism. Oh how pretty! The baseball players make $20 a month, and they live on a prison, but at least there's no annoying electronic scoreboard!

But hey, at least they've got free healthcare!

The left complains endlessly about the US's prisoner of war camp at Guantanamo, even as they're gleefully ignoring the rest of the island, which is itself one giant prison with Castro as the warden. Val Prieto dubs it a case of OTS--short for "Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome".

British MP George Galloway appeared recently on the Arab world's Al Jazeera TV network to utter this staggering quote, amongst others:

Bush, and Blair, and the prime minister of Japan, and Berlusconi, these people are criminals, and they are responsible for mass murder in the world, for the war, and for the occupation, through their support for Israel, and through their support for a globalized capitalist economic system, which is the biggest killer the world has ever known. It has killed far more people than Adolph Hitler. It has killed far more people than George Bush. The economic system which these people support, which leaves most of the people in the world hungry, and without clean water to drink. So we’re going to put them on trial, the leaders, when they come. They think they’re coming for a holiday in a beautiful country called Scotland; in fact, they’re coming to their trial.

Charles Johnson aptly describes Galloway as "The 21st Century Lord Haw Haw".

Jay Nordlinger writes that tomorrow could be an important day in Cuba:

Tomorrow, an astonishing event is scheduled to take place in Cuba: the General Meeting of the Assembly to Promote Civil Society in Cuba. This is a great democratic gathering, and those participating have put themselves at great risk: For days, Castro has been arresting democratic activists, and otherwise flexing the muscles of his police state.

Anything that promotes spreading democracy to Cuba sounds great, doesn't it? But alas, not everybody likes the idea:

Various groups and institutions around the world have expressed their solidarity with the Cuban democrats, including the U.S. Congress. The House passed a resolution — and 22 congressmen voted against. Oh, yes.

Who were they? Oh, you know — the usuals: Charles Rangel, Dennis Kucinich, Maxine Waters, John Conyers, Barbara Lee, Jim McDermott, Cynthia McKinney, Pete Stark . . .

You’ve heard me say a thousand times before that Rangel is about Castro’s best friend in the United States — at least in the political class. This is doubly a shame, because Rangel is so beloved of the American media. “Good ol’ ‘Chollie,’” they say (because Rangel is a New Yawker, and he talks like that — irresistibly charming guy, most people find).

Guess what he told Meghan Clyne of the New York Sun? He said that he voted against the Cuba-democracy resolution because American politicians “refuse to give the government the respect that it deserves.” He was referring to his friend Fidel’s regime, of course: a regime that imprisons, tortures, and executes at will. That denies its subjects all rights. That is listed by the State Department as terrorist.

We hear all the time that all Americans — certainly those in our political class — love freedom and democracy. We’re all joined in the same cause, no matter what our (minor) differences.

But guess what: It isn’t so. It just isn’t. We are not all on the same side, even broadly speaking. It is sometimes called McCarthyite to point that out. I regard it as realistic.

I agree. It will be interesting to see what comes from the Assembly to Promote Civil Society in Cuba. And hopefully Nordlinger will write a follow-up.

My wife wanted to see a movie this weekend, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had just opened, but it got middling reviews, so I started looking for alternatives. Fortunately, Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur and Dial M For Murder were playing in a double feature at the Stanford Theatre on University Avenue in Palo Alto.

Quick aside: Palo Alto is a beautiful jewel-like town in the middle of the Bay Area--it's both HQ for most of Silicon Valley's venture capitalists, and for Stanford University (where Chelsea Clinton attended in the mid to late 1990s--for a time, whenever her parents came to visit, Air Force One was a somewhat regular fixture at nearby Moffitt Field).

Unfortunately, Palo Alto's handsome architecture, enormous collective net worth and exclusive storefronts are combined with David Dinkins-style laissez faire big city liberalism, which means that walking amongst lots of college kids in their Tommy Bahama khakis and T-shirts past the shops on University Ave. are lots--and lots--of feral Night of the Living Dead homeless people. Which is all the more ironic, considering that Rudy Giuliani's Broken Window urban crime fighting techniques--which involve taking the homeless problem seriously--have their roots in a Stanford study from the late 1960s.

But I digress. Back to the movies.

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This weekend marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, when the last American personel were helicoptered off the roof of the American Embassy. "Within three years" of our evacuation, David Horowitz wrote this past December, "the Communist victors had slaughtered two-and-a-half million peasants in the Indochinese peninsula".

What led to that bloodshed? A Democratically-controlled Congress dominated by the Class of '72, and a liberal media.

More Horowitz:

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One more from Collyvvvvvvornia, as Gov. Schwarzenegger pronounces it. Last June, we looked at the ACLU's efforts to remove the tiny cross from Los Angeles' county seal, an effort that L.A.'s city council was only to happy to oblige.

In contrast, The Wall Street Journal notes that James Hahn, the city's liberal mayor, is using the issue as a bulwark against his opponent in an upcoming mayorial primary--which makes sense: his late father, long time Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn helped design the logo back in 1957:

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Chris Kobin (found via Betsy Newmark) and Michelle Malkin look at Jesse Jackson's Tawana Brawley incident last week.

(For a look at the original Tawana Brawley incident, click here.)

Hugh Hewitt links to a disturbing London Times piece about "Lonsdale Youth":

Lonsdale, the British sportswear label made famous by boxers and Eighties pop stars, faces creeping bans across the Netherlands because racist gangs have taken to wearing the brand.

Nightclubs and bars are refusing entry to people wearing the label, it is forbidden in some schools and a town in the south of the country is proposing a blanket ban after a series of race-hate crimes.

In the past week, a Muslim primary school in the town of Uden was subjected to its second arson attack. Witnesses said that teenagers involved were wearing Lonsdale tops. Civic leaders have announced plans to ban the label in the town.

The first attack came after the murder of Theo van Gogh, the film-maker and critic of Islam, last November, a killing that inflamed racial tensions and fuelled the growth of neo-Nazi gangs hunting for Islamic targets.

Last Sunday, a group of youths smashed windows at a mosque in the town of Venray, sparking riots between 20 Dutch youths and 60 Turkish immigrants that left one man in hospital. The Government responded by starting an investigation into the rise of organised right-wing extremism.

The term “Lonsdale youth” has become a widely used synonym for teenagers with extreme right-wing tendencies. A website, Lonsdalenews, has been set up to track racist incidents.

Right-wing extremists like tops bearing the Lonsdale logo, because a carefully placed bomber jacket can leave only the letters NSDA showing, one letter short of NSDAP, the acronym for Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, Hitler’s National Socialist Party.

As Hugh writes, "Read this piece and think about the next ten years in Europe. It isn't going to be pretty."

Meanwhile, the clothing label (the British boxing equivalent of America's Everlast brand) sounds like they're in a situation similar to Tylenol in the early 1980s, when their name became synonymous with "tainted medicine". Fortunately, like Tylenol, as the article explains, they're taking steps to reclaim their brand name. But in the ban-happy EU, will that be enough for them to stay afloat without changing their name?

The Bay Area has a new play opening, honoring (with scare quotes and bad spelling) "enemy combabtants" held at Gitmo.

No word yet on whether or not Max Bialystock, Leo Bloom, and Franz Liebkind are producing it.

Update: I should have known--the play in San Francisco is the roadshow version. Back in October, Mark Steyn reviewed the New York production.

Soxblog looks at the strange case of Jacques Pluss, a former adjunct professor at Farleigh Dickinson University who sounds like he's been in the audience for "Springtime for Hitler" long after its opening night:

The students’ story had numerous classic vignettes: There was Professor Pluss whining in regard to his dismissal that he had been “stolen away in the night.” There was a student who observed, “Now that I think about it, Dr. Pluss seemed to have a morbid fascination with Hitler and Nazism.” And then there was Professor Pluss again castigating the university for “following the typical Jewish, lawyerly, Hebrew line."

Lest you think the modern Nazi only dislikes Jews, Professor Pluss also had some rather negative observations regarding Farleigh Dickinson’s mostly African American basketball team, alleging that the players were “n***** to the core” and prone to listening to “ghastly rap music.” As perhaps the crowning touch to a story that seemed too surreal to be true, Farleigh Dickinson did not dismiss Professor Pluss because he was a hate-spewing Nazi. Rather, they found his six absences during the past academic semester to be his sole hanging offense.

But of course.

By the way, this is an unintended classic, found at the top of a quick Google search under Pluss's name. The National Socialist Movement (no, I hadn't heard of them either, at least not since '45) has issued a press release on Pluss's purging:

The NSM officially condemns Fairleigh-Dickinson University for engaging in acts of left-wing McCarthyism.

This past Monday, Professor Jacques Pluss, was removed from his teaching position at this university apparently for no other reason than being a member of [the National Socialist Movement].

If that isn't reason enough, what is?!

(Via Charles Johnson.)

I've already linked to this essay by Mark Steyn on the Terri Schiavo case. But I missed a particularly curious passage near its end, which Peter Burnet of the Brothers Judd Blog spotted:

Michael Schiavo’s lawyer, George Felos, is a leading light of the so-called ‘right-to-die’ movement, and his book, Litigation as Spiritual Practice, makes interesting reading. On page 240 Mr Felos writes:

The Jewish people, long ago in their collective consciousness, agreed to play the role of the lamb whose slaughter was necessary to shock humanity into a new moral consciousness. Their sacrifice saved humanity at the brink of extinction and propelled us into a new age... If our minds can conceive of an uplifting Holocaust, can it be so difficult to look another way at the slights and injuries and abuses we perceive were inflicted upon us?

So the Jews "agreed" to participate in "an uplifting Holocaust"? Who represented them at the Wannsee Conference?!

Maybe Felos' mind can conceive of the death of six million Jews being uplifting; I'm having a rather difficult time wrapping my brain around the idea.

Ward Churchill spoke in San Francisco on Friday; his most ardent supporters wore chicken hats on their heads.

Say what? Just click, and it will all be come clear. Nuts, but clear.

When Douglas Kern created the chickendove meme for Tech Central Station last month, I never thought it would catch on so quickly. I also like this comment on Charles Johnson's blog:

Looking at this, I remember a comment from Uncle duke in Doonesbury years ago when Bush I was in office. "I stopped taking drugs years ago. Who can tell the difference?"

And how!

Update: Not sure if it's included in this videotape--it may have been commercially released before Churchill spoke last week. Maybe the next the volume.

As I wrote the day after Janet Jackson's Super Bowl "Nipplegate" wardrobe malfunction:

Perhaps with Madonna's success in mind, MTV decided it needed to shock--really shock--people. Instead, ultimately, it merely anesthezied them. And once Madonna released her Sex book, shocking the masses was pretty much passe, anyhow.

Speaking of Madonna and passe, just click.

A yawn, an eye-roll, and a softly muttered "whatever" are sure to follow.

Jeff Brokaw writes, "These are scary times for college-bound kids with actual working brains, and for their parents. I.e., those who are not looking to get brain-washed by aging liberal hippies":

You shouldn’t have to pretend to be an America-hating radical lefty, just to avoid pissing off your professors. Nor should you, as a normal student or as an esteemed University president, have to pretend that women are identical to men in every way, just to avoid pissing off touchy feminists and their sisters-in-arms.

The fact that some kids feel they must do exactly that is a big problem all by itself, without even addressing the actual damage done to our kids by these people.

On the flipside, Stefan Beck of The New Criterion says that exposure to such hardened leftists is actually a plus for incoming conservative college kids:

As I've written before on this blog, the predominance of these blue-state academics on campus is a problem--but hardly for conservatives. It is a problem for liberal students. These poor specimens must often retreat like turtles from debate, because they know nothing of conservative positions--except from their professors' testimonials, which rely on dilution or caricature. Meanwhile, conservatives are given every opportunity to "know the enemy," and they can test and strengthen their own opinions in the process. They ought to be thanking their instructors for providing a daily object-lesson in enemy S.O.P.

Of course, there are always those kids in the middle: I was fairly apolitical when I arrived at college--in today's times, where public school is politicized seemingly from kindergarten on, I wonder how many of today's kids arrive at universities that way.

The L.A. Times, which earlier this month had nothing but kind words to say about communist North Korea, looks at a financially struggling rest home for aging communists--in downtown Los Angeles!

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Someone needs to tell Malloch Brown, the UN chief of staff, that rape is not "a recreational option" for the boys in the baby blue helmets:

In our case, our very underfunded peacekeeping missions, with soldiers stitched together from Bangladesh, Jordan, many other different countries, all under their own different commands and without the resources to give them the other recreational options, that the standards of behavior have not been modernized in the same way that has happened with the American or the British military, and we've now got to tackle that. (emphasis added)

As Betsy Newmark writes, "Ye Gods, repeat after me. 'Rape is not a recreational option.' It is a crime. Got that?"

It sounds like something Bart Simpson will be writing a 100 times on a blackboard when he hits puberty. Maybe the UN's chief of staff should, as well.

Meanwhile, Lance Frizzell, a Tennessee National Guard medical platoon leader currently stationed in Iraq has photographs of numerous good reasons to keep UN "peacekeepers" out of there:

I would hope we never allow UN "troops" around these innocents. It is tragic that our tax dollars fund the despicable, savage behavior chronicled here, here and here. Perhaps the saddest part is that this is the norm for UN "soldiers" wherever they go.

Indeed, as the man who first linked to Frizzell would say.

Update: More here.

Betsy Nemark links to a Denver Post story about Phil Mitchell, another professor under siege at Colorado University. His crime:

Mitchell taught at the Hallett Diversity Program for 24 straight semesters. That is, until he made the colossal error of actually presenting a (gasp!) diverse opinion, quoting respected conservative black intellectual Thomas Sowell in a discussion about affirmative action.

Sitting 5 feet from a pink triangle that read "Hate-Free Zone," the progressive head of the department berated Mitchell, calling him a racist.

"That would have come as a surprise to my black children," explains Mitchell, who has nine kids, as of last count, two of them adopted African-Americans.

Then, Mitchell had the audacity to use a book on liberal Protestantism in the late 19th century. So repulsed by the word "god" was one student, she complained, and the department chair fired him without a meeting, he said.

The paper notes that Mitchell was eventually reinstated, "but was never able to teach in the history department again".

There's a key quote by Mitchell that sums up a huge difference between liberals the left:

"People say liberals run the university. I wish they did," Mitchell says. "Most liberals understand the need for intellectual diversity. It's the radical left that kills you."

Exactly. And it's further proof that liberals of the FDR, JFK, LBJ variety were essentially purged from power--and from academia--by the class of '72.

Update: Somewhat related thoughts on liberals, leftists and intellectual diversity, here.

Vermouth-infused Update: Dead-on-target thoughts, from Stephen Green.

Particularly if you're Bill Clinton praising Iran's Mullahs for their progressive(!) politics.

(Doesn't the prior Democrat ex-president have a trademark on that schtick?)

Jeff Jarvis watched Bill Maher interview Ward Churchill (who's about 14:58 into his 15 minutes of infamy) so you don't have to.

With his Che chic T-shirt, Carlos Santana seems to be implying that while he's happy to be attending the Academy Awards, he'd rather be off leading Cuban firing squads. (Here's a copy of the shot, since all photos will scroll off Yahoo after a while.)

As Jay Nordlinger once wrote:

Listen to what Lincoln Diaz-Balart, the Miami congressman, has to say about Che. I doubt the New York Public Library would trust it — but you can: "Guevara was an Argentinian loser who alleged he was a doctor even though he couldn't give a simple flu shot. What he was good at was killing people, and he became one of history's cruelest serial killers. He was Castro's primary henchman, murdering hundreds of innocent people without due process, usually finishing off the work of the mass-production firing squads with shots to the back of the neck. He was and will always be the most despicable, disgusting figure of the Castro killing machine, the foreigner who was made a serial killer of Cubans by Castro, and got great pleasure from his role."

Indeed, he did. Guevara, famous as he is — famous as his mug is — is little known. He was, as Diaz-Balart says, Castro's number-one revolutionary thug. He presided over those summary executions at La Cabaña — the old fortress that Guevara commandeered — and he very much enjoyed administering the coup de grâce. He also enjoyed parading people past El Paredón, the reddened wall against which the victims were killed. Viva Cristo Rey! ("Long Live Christ the King!") they would sometimes yell.

Remember this, too: Guevara founded the labor-camp system, in which countless Cubans — judged "deviant" by the regime — would suffer and die. This is the Cuban gulag; it is Che's legacy.

And it's oh so in at the increasingly politicized--and radicalized--Academy Awards!

Update: Earlier this month, I wrote a piece for the Weekly Standard on a new Miles Davis DVD that was built around documentary footage of his appearance at the 1970 Isle of Wight music festival in England. Santana appears fairly prominently in new footage on the disc, to offer a rocker's take on Miles Davis' music. I left this bit about him on the cutting room floor, to keep the article a managable length:

There’s a classic “shut up and play” moment (to paraphrase the title of Laura Ingraham’s recent book), when Santana, discussing how incredible and wonderful and universal pop music of the 1960s was, says:

Isle of Wight was a pure result of consciousness-revolution music. “Hell no, we won’t go to Vietnam” and “we shall overcome”. The sixties—the late ‘60s, early ‘70s—was the most important decade of the 20th century.

Why?

Because it gave birth to questioning authority, particularly if it’s not enlightened by God. Are you listening, George Bush?

Is the president listening to God, or to Santana? If it’s the latter, to coin a phrase that’s probably been uttered a few times at the ranch in Crawford, the odds are slim and none, and Slim just left town. And both Santana and the DVD's director know it—but that doesn’t stop them from preaching to the choir and alienating half of the disc’s potential audience.

So are Che and Castro enlightened by God? Is it possible for their victims to question their authority--which most definitely flows from the barrel of a gun, one that was more than likely being aimed at the base of your skull by the man whose T-shirt Santana chose to wear the Academy Awards?

As the Professor would say, not for peace, merely on the other side.

(Post title via Frank Zappa, incidentally.)

Accused by a Boulder, Colorado TV reporter of plagiarizing, then selling, famous artwork depicting American Indians, academia's golden boy responds by taking a swing at the reporter's cameraman:

BOULDER, Colo. (CBS4) An exclusive report by CBS4 News indicates embattled University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill may have broken copyright law by making a mirror image of an artist’s work and selling it as his own.

Placing Churchill’s work beside that of renowned artist Thomas E. Mails and the two look like mirror images. But one is a copyrighted drawing. The other is an autographed print by Churchill.

When CBS4 News tried to talk to Churchill about a possible copyright infringement, we received an angry response.

“Get that camera out of my face,” Churchill said.

CBS4 News reporter Raj Chohan: “This is an artwork we’ve got called ‘Winter Attack.’ It looks like it was based on a Thomas Mails painting; it looks like you ripped it off. Can you tell us about that?”

That prompted Churchill to take a swing at Chohan.

Click here for the video. For a Ra^therGate-style comparison of Ward's artwork and the original, click here. And for more examples of his artwork, click here.

Should he lose his tenure? Jim Geraghty has an interesting discussion on the topic, as does Glenn Reynolds.

Update: Watching the video again, Churchill took a (rather wussy) swing at the reporter himself, not his cameraman.

UPI says that a hotel will built on the site of Adolf Hitler's Alpine retreat at the Obersalzberg in Bavaria:

OBERSALZBERG, Feb. 24 (UPI) — A Jewish leader in Germany has termed as tasteless a luxury hotel set to open March 1 on the site of Adolf Hitler's Alpine retreat at Obersalzberg in Bavaria.

Michael Friedman with Germany's main Jewish organization said the 138-room Intercontinental Resort Berchtesgaden is "tasteless and robs the place of its history," the BBC reported.

But Kurt Faltlhauser, Bavaria's finance minister, said: "There can be no covering up and absolutely no glorification of the Nazi regime."

The hotel has been built on the spot where Hermann Goering, the former Nazi air force chief, had his summer residence.

Guests will pay about $264 per night for a room.

Hitler developed Obersalzberg as a second seat of government for his regime after becoming German chancellor.

Actually, it wouldn't surprise me to read of more developments like this in Germany, just as there are ongoing efforts to relive the days of the Soviet Union in Russia. (That both trends are concurrent is a further reminder of just how interconnected the two ideologies are.)

To be honest, when I saw the URL "PirateBallerina.com" show up in my referral logs, I thought it was one of Manolo's fans who found me via his link earlier today.

And, hey, of course it could be--but the actual site is a compendium of links to the Colorado moonbat himself, Ward Churchill. And well worth scrolling through.

Meet Ward Churchill: Republican civil rights pioneer.

(For an update on Churchill himself, click here.)

One of Charles Johnson's readers catches Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) on audio tape during a public speech on the advertised topic of Social Security reform making a wild accusation straight out of Oliver Stone/Michael Moore-land. But then this has been a trend since 9/11 as the left has become increasingly conspiracy-obsessed as they seek to emerge from the political wilderness.

Update: Jim Geraghty writes:

In the course of research for a book proposal, I've been looking at the reaction of the far left of the Democratic party to 9/11. You probably remember a lot of it--Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, etc. The "well, we had it coming" voices were not that numerous in the fall of 2001... but what was interesting was how few mainstream or centrist Democrats were willing to denounce their ideological brethren.

Perhaps the most extraordinary change in American politics over the last few years is how comments that once would have seemed ridiculous, or silly, or way out there have now become fairly common sentiments in what was once mainstream circles.

Putting Howard Dean in charge of the DNC isn't exactly sending a big glowing signal that it's going to end anytime soon, either. Incidentally, David Frum, Geraghty's colleague at NRO, did a great job of tracing how all that started, in the dank, dark, musky days of the 1970s.

Another Update: Gee, what a surprise--Hinchey's rant got zero coverage today in his district's newspapers. On the other hand, Charles Johnson will be on MSNBC tonight to discuss it with their viewers.

Roger Kimball looks at just how deep the roots in academia run when it comes to hiring professors like Ward Churchill.

Incidentally, like the collegiate equivalent of an NFL superstar being nominated to the Pro Bowl, Ward's off to the Aloha state to discuss "little Eichmanns" at the University of Hawaii.

Charles Johnson, linking to a piece in Front Page, writes that while "Colorado University professor Ward Churchill may have written and said some outrageous things", Northwestern University has on its faculty somebody who's done some outrageous things--a former member of the '60s far, far left radical group the Weathermen:

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Terry Teachout comes to bury Arthur Miller, not to praise him:

I wonder how much attention would now be paid to Miller if he hadn't married Monroe, and if the House Un-American Activities Committee hadn't made the mistake of subpoenaing him in 1956 to testify about his Communist ties (which were extensive, though he always denied having been an actual party member), thereby bringing about his citation for contempt of Congress when he refused to "name names." The one made him a pop-culture footnote, the other a liberal icon.

The irony is that the smartest critics of Miller's own generation, virtually all of whom shared his left-wing views, held his plays in a different kind of contempt. Back then he took his roughest beatings from the likes of Eric Bentley, Mary McCarthy, Kenneth Tynan and Robert Warshow, who found him heavy-handed and insufferably preachy. Tynan, for instance, wrote that "The Crucible" "suggests a sensibility blunted by the insistence of an outraged conscience: it has the over-simplifications of poster art." Bull's-eye.

* * *

Times have changed, and today's more stringently politicized critics and playwrights seem willing to overlook Miller's limitations because he thought as they do. "As a political figure, he was a progressive man, but never doctrinaire," Tony Kushner said last week. "There was a simplicity, and humbleness, and decency in his work." Some of this is true--Miller was "progressive," and his plays were simple--but if there was anything humble about him, it escaped my attention. He was a man of limitless self-regard who confused the state of Broadway with his latter-day inability to get his new plays produced there: "A new 'Crucible' could not be produced on Broadway today, nor a 'Death of a Salesman,' either. . . . Is this situation satisfactory for what purports to be the main stage of the richest country in human history?"

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the fanfares to die away, and no less interesting to see whether any of Miller's plays outlive him. Most are already deservedly forgotten, but I expect that "Death of a Salesman" will continue to hold the stage, though not because it is beautiful or intelligent or provocative. It is, rather, sentimental, and sentimentality always goes over big in the commercial theater, so long as it's disguised as realism. More important, "Death of a Salesman" has a coarsely compulsive power that somehow manages to mask its aesthetic deficiencies, or at least render them momentarily palatable. That's the mystery of theater: It's all about what works, and like it or not, "Death of a Salesman" works. But it's no "Lear," just as Arthur Miller was no Shakespeare, and anyone who thinks otherwise is as lead-eared as he was.

Read the rest. For more on Miller, check out this New Criterion piece from 2000, and Jacob Weisberg's 1999 piece on the then-latest revival of Death of a Salesman.

Update: Betsy Newmark also has some thoughts on Teachout article, and leftwing Miller-worship in general.

Last week, I quoted Roger Ailes of Fox News talking about CNN International, one of CNN's many spin-off channels:

Well, the best way to get distribution around the world is to be the BBC or Al Jazeera or CNNi, basically do -- if you watch it day in and day out, you can't find a whole lot good about America. Now, they have no obligation to do good stories about America, but they do have an obligation to have balance and context. And Al Jazeera simply doesn't. BBC doesn't. And CNNi is less offensive, but they don't do it much, either. And I think that context is critically important to the news.

Maybe one of the reasons why CNNi reports little good news about America is because it's trying to continue to appeal to the man whom Eason Jordan credited in 1999 as being its inspiration.

Update: Geez, talk about radical chic: between Castro, Saddam and now this fellow, Eason's apparently never met a dictator he didn't like.

As you probably know by now, attorney Lynne Stewart was convicted for illegally assisting her client, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman (the man behind the first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993), in furthering terrorist acts.

Yesterday, Jonah Goldberg wrote, "It will be great fun to see who makes a martyr out of her".

First on deck, This is CNN!

Update: Meanwhile, the New York Times publishes a couple of love letters of their own to Stewart.

Stefan Beck of The New Criterion, who have been all over the Ward Churchill story, writes:

I've always said that when universities hire left-wing profs exclusively, they hurt their avowedly liberal students most. The right-wingers, we may safely assume, have been exposed to right-wing ideas, but the left-wing ones are receiving half an education, unless they go out of their way to supplement what they're taught. I tried not to complain about my professors' uniformly leftist bent--one way or another, I was getting both sides of the debate.

Nevertheless, if Ward Churchill had taught at my college, I'd certainly have complained. Why? Simple: a college education costs a lot. It's the one commodity that, despite being preposterously expensive, is subject to virtually no quality controls.

Maybe that's why President Bush is recommending that his friends read I Am Charlotte Simmons, even though the International Herald Tribune writes with mock-innocence, "It is unclear exactly what Bush liked so much about the book".

Update: Of course, if the whole collegiate gig falls apart for Churchill, there's always television to fall back on...

James Panero of The New Criterion writes:

Churchill is an issue, Kirkland is an issue, but the real issue is the normativeness (can I use that word here?) of deadening rhetoric on college campuses. Why is it that it takes a public outcry and national media coverage to challenge tenured ideas? The process of academic review and administrative oversight should be analyzed more than anything. Not until colleges and universities begin to question their assumed role as political re-educators (rather than educators) will we begin to see the end of the Ward Churchills, the Kirkland Projects, and the spectacles that substitute for real learning. There will always be radicals and ideologues out there, but it doesn't mean that shrill thinkers deserve tenure-track jobs. I should think that freedom of speech still translates into a freedom from employing troglodytes.

Wretchard of The Belmont Club also has some thoughts:

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Is Robert Byrd thinking of running again?

Patrick Ruffini looks at his odds and says that another Daschle-style upset is possible.

Glenn Reynolds has an update on the Colorado professor that's well worth reading. Start here and keep clicking for our previous coverage.

We've been following Ward Churchill since late last week. He's the university professor who referred to the Americans killed in the 9/11 terrorist attack as 3000 "little Eichmanns". Today, Charles Johnson writes:

Hamilton College has canceled the panel discussion with Colorado University professor Ward Churchill—not because his monstrously inverted opinions deserve to be shunned, but because of alleged “threats of violence.”

Kind of surprising; Churchill poses like a man who can handle--and cause--plenty of violence.

Ward Churchill, whom we wrote about on Friday, is the University of Colorado ethnic studies professor who described the victims of the 9/11 attacks as 3,000 "little Eichmanns".

Charles Johnson writes that Churchill has "resigned his post as chairman (but not his professorship), and released a lengthy statement defending his vile essay".

Roger Kimball has some thoughts as well.

The Professor looks at The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and dubs it "neo-Confederate secessionist":

Way back when the term "idiotarian" was coined, it was quite explicitly aimed at the idiots of the Left and Right equally. The idiots of the Right have been somewhat quieter lately, but they're no less idiots for that.

Read the whole thing.

Imagine the howls of derision and gallons of black ink the New York Times would spill if Karl Rove was ever quoted as saying, "I hate the Democrats and everything they stand for”.

But only the Blogosphere seems to have picked up that Howard Dean, who may very well become the next chairman of the DNC, has said over the weekend, "I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for”.

No wonder Orrin Judd and Glenn Reynolds are wondering what happened to the more moderate-sounding New Democrats of the mid-1990s.

"Nostalgie de la boue" is a French phrase for "nostalgia for the mud". As this site explains:

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Back in June, Michael Moore was the toast of not just one, but two towns: Hollywood and the left side of the Senate in Washington, DC. But today, since Fahrenheit 9/11 failed to accomplish its mission, he's simply toast. Moore's film is thoroughly ignored by the Academy Awards, and the left is completely silent about the snub. Jim Geraghty has some thoughts why; as does Roger L. Simon.

Mark Steyn puts Prince Harry's Nazi dress-up moment in context:

Personally, I found the sight of the Prince of Wales climbing into the full Highgrove hejab for dinner with that bin Laden brother a week after the 9/11 slaughter far more disquieting: it seemed a rather more conscious act of identification than his son's party get-up. But a good indication of societal decadence is when it prefers to obsess over fictional offences rather than real ones.

I suppose it's possible that, should fate bring Harry to the throne, he'd turn into a Victor Emmanuel or King Carol of Romania and lend a constitutional figleaf to some Fascist regime. But worrying about a minor Royal schoolboy's alleged Nazi bent seems something of an indulgence at a time when the neo-Nazis get as many votes in Saxony's elections as Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party; when from Marseilles to Paris, Jews are being attacked and their homes, schools, kosher butchers, synagogues and cemeteries burnt and desecrated in a low-level intifada that's been going on so long the political establishment now accepts it as a normal feature of French life; and when the Berlin police advise Jews not to go out in public wearing any identifying marks of their faith. It's not just Nazi insignia you don't see in Germany these days; Nazi wise, the uniforms are the least of it.

Read the whole thing.

Update: James Lileks (in a pretty brave column for a blue state newspaper) wonders what sort of reaction Harry would have received if he had been photographed "wearing a hammer and sickle or a Che shirt".

Today marks the 35th anniversary of the infamous party that Leonard and Felicia Bernstein held in their Park Ave. duplex to raise money for the Black Panthers. Also attending was Tom Wolfe, who wrote the event up for an article originally published in New York magazine, called "Radical Chic". Later that year, it would be published in book form, along with his "Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers", another article about similar (if more low-rent) shenanigans on the West Coast.

You could make a pretty good argument (as I'm about to attempt) that "Radical Chic" was the most influential, or at least most significant, magazine article of the past forty years--and that it foreshadowed the next 34 years of American politics.

It helped that the timing of Wolfe's article and book was exquisite. 1970 was the apex between two key presidential election years: two years after far left anti-war protestors attempted to disrupt the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and two years before its 1972 equivalent, where, as Ben Wattenberg said back then, "there won't be any riots in Miami because the people who tried to riot in Chicago are on the Platform Committee."

As Wolfe tells the story, he was visiting his wife-to-be while she was working at Vanity Fair, and noticed an invitation on journalist David Halberstam's desk to a cocktail party and fundraiser to be put on by the Bernsteins to raise money for the Panthers. Wolfe was intrigued, and called the number on the invitation to RSVP. A voice on the other end took down his name and told him he was added to the list. He arrived, the Bernsteins had some idea of who he was from his New York and Esquire articles, and in plain sight, he pulled out his reporter's notepad and ballpoint pen, and began to jot down the evening's events.

"I was openly taking notes", he recently said, "but they just assumed that if I was there for New York magazine it was because I must have approved of what they were doing.":

I just thought it was a scream, because it was so illogical by all ordinary thinking. To think that somebody living in an absolutely stunning duplex on Park Avenue could be having in all these guys who were saying, 'We will take everything away from you if we get the chance,' which is what their program spelled out, was the funniest thing I had ever witnessed.

By the time of the 1972 presidential campaign, the ultra far-left anti-American politics that Wolfe observed in miniature in the Bernstein's duplex would come to dominate the Democratic Party--to varying degrees, right up to the present day. As I wrote last month, that was the year where the wheels really came off the Democratic Party:

Radical chic and punitive liberalism became the norm, to the point where McGovern compared Ho Chi Minh to George Washington in a Playboy interview, and his aides took to wearing upside down flag pins on their lapels.

This was a very different Democratic party from the New Frontier of JFK and LBJ's Great Society which, while was a little too big government for me (particularly as it ballooned under LBJ), had lots of redeeming qualities: they were patriotic; believed in strong defense at home; trying to spread democracy abroad; had a vigorous space program; and at least with JFK, willing to cut taxes.

The election this past November may have been a watershed--the year that radical chic finally began to die. President Bush defeated a man who made first made his mark on the American stage in 1971 with a radical chic gesture of his own: as a Navy reserve officer excoriating US troops serving abroad, in front of the US Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations.

This is an extraordinary moment for the Democratic Party.

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The Brothers Judd and their readers look at liberal nostalgia for Manhattan during its Death Wish/Taxi Driver period in the 1970s.

Eric Adler and Jack Langer, writing in The Wall Street Journal, describe how the Intifada came to Duke this fall.

Stanley Crouch of The New York Daily News writes that "At last, women lash out at hip hop's abuses."

Meanwhile, Jay Nordlinger looks at continuing--and often successful--efforts that fight back against the glorification of "Che chic".

Susan Sontag died yesterday. Roger Kimball of The New Criterion has a brilliant essay on her long career as "The Dark Lady of American Letters":

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David Horowitz looks at the Dean (if you'll pardon the pun) of the Class of '72.

Los Angeles County completes the airbrushing of its history: its new non-religious seal officially goes into effect today, according to UPI.

Since it's intent on eliminating all traces of its Christian heritage, doesn't the name have to go as well?

Dennis Prager had an excellent column on the topic when the firestorm first erupted, back in June.

Moral equivalence at its zenith: Michael Moore compares himself to Rosa Parks.

My God, what a payroll list Karl Rove must have:

Liberal powerhouse MoveOn has a message for the "professional election losers" who run the Democratic Party: "We bought it, we own it, we're going to take it back."

If that's true, don't look for self-destructive hemlock like this to disappear from the left anytime soon.

Frank Martin has some excellent, common sense advice for CBS, now that Dan Rather is planning to hang it up--at least from the nightly news.

It's well worth reading; natually, like navigation advice proffered to the captain of the Titanic as the ship headed into the North Atlantic, it will all go unheaded by the folks inside Black Rock.

Update: Heh.

President Bush is in Canada. Protesting moonbats are in full force. Glenn Reynolds has the links--including a disturbing photo of a mutated American flag.

John Hinderaker of Power Line writes:

I bought a book today (Sharpe's Rifles) in my neighborhood Barnes & Noble. It was the first time I'd been in the store since shortly before the election. I was struck by the difference: then, the tables were piled high with anti-Bush books. Dozens of them. Today, they had disappeared without a trace, not even in evidence on a remainder table. It was as though the book store (or the left) had said: Oh, well. Never mind.

Which got me thinking--remember the al Qaqaa story? Ten days before the election, it was of vital importance that we find out what happened to a "missing" one-tenth of one percent of the munitions in Iraq. Since the election? Who cares?

Or how about the draft? Remember how just before the election, the Democrats were feverishly trying to convince college students and others that, should President Bush be re-elected, there was a secret plan to reinstate the draft? Well, now that President Bush has indeed won re-election, shouldn't the left be gearing up to resist this very real danger? Um, no. Forget about it. The draft rumor has served its purpose (or, rather, failed to serve its purpose). The left has Moved On.

Do you suppose, two years or four years from now, when the Democrats are again spinning fables, anyone will remember how quickly they abandoned some of the principal themes of this year's campaign?

One thing the left has always been able to do, is turn on a dime, when they feel the need to.

I was about to say, "Just ask Winston", except that that supposes that the clean-up in aisle #12 at Barnes & Noble (and Borders) is the result of some sort of top-down conspiracy--but I think it's something in the left itself that allows it to instantly disgard old ideas and create new ones just as quickly as the American populace can go from one fad to another: skateboarding, rollerskating, disco, jogging, and down the line.

Why on earth is the Target department store chain taking aim at the Salvation Army??

Hugh Hewitt has details and contact information for Target.

Update: For more Blue State-style buffoonery, James Lileks has some thoughts on the ACLU's ongoing war against that most evil of American enemies...the Boy Scouts.

Here's Michael Moore on April 14th.

Here's Chris Matthews, last night.

(And of course, they're both unconsciously parroting "Pinch" Sulzberger of the New York Times.)

And the left wonders why Americans don't trust them to defend the country?

To paraphrase that eminent archeologist Dr. Henry Jones, Jr., "Tranzis--I hate those guys".

(Via InstaPundit. And yeah, I know--but it's too good a line not to spoof. Background here.)

Jonah Goldberg look at how the Democratic party, post-JFK, has continued to move further and further to the left of the American people--with disastrous results.

Update: Nice piece of symmetry, as Jonah writes in his column:

The conventional wisdom is right: Democrats have a values problem. At the national level, they can't talk about them convincingly. Even Rahm Emanuel, a former Clinton staffer and now a Democratic congressman, explained to the New York Times, "people aren't going to hear what we say until they know that we don't approach them as Margaret Mead would an anthropological experiment."

Meanwhile, David Cohen of The Brothers Judd says that same clinical approach is exactly how The New York Times approaches people in general:

The Times does not blame the [Islamofascist killers of Theo van Gogh], but the Dutch government, which did not have a plan for winning the peace. Clearly they need a Prime Minister Kerry.

Once again, the Times provides supporting evidence for my theory that the left regards people as the right regards animals, and government officials as the right regards people. Imagine a zookeeper who acquires lions for his zoo, but fails to properly segregate the new lions from the lambs. No one would blame the lions for murdering the lambs; they would simply be living out their nature. We would blame the zookeeper. The problem would not be lion immigration, but a failure to plan for a smoother transition to a more diverse zoo.

Back in 1970, Stanley Kramer, who by then had assembled a string of very liberal, but enjoyable and generally on target "message films" decided to make one about college rebellions. Hence the title: RPM, short of "Revolutions Per Minute". Get it? Get it?! (It was written by Erich Segal, who would shortly have more success with another campus melodrama: Love Story.) It starred Anthony Quinn as a liberal professor and Gary Lockwood as one his disaffected and protesting students who rebels, goes on strike, you know the drill.

It was a terrible film, and of course by then, the sixties were over.

And if they were over in 1970, they're really over 34 years later.

Of course, that hasn't stopped about 85 students at Boulder High School in Colorado from holing up in the school library today. According to AP, "they're concerned about the direction the country is headed and refusing to leave until they've met with leaders from the Republican Party".

How sixties.

Somebody needs to remind the left that the sixties are really over, because since 9/11, they've been wallowing in more nostalgia than any conservative Republican ever did: the peace symbols, the tie-died clothes, the bell-bottoms, and now the desire to move to Canada, etc.

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NewsMax.com reports:

Hours after the election returns showed that a Bush win was inevitable, Rev. Al Sharpton told a reporter for the Black Press USA Network: "Let’s all head to the airport and get out of the country."

Please, please go, Al.

The Motorcycle Diaries is a new film praising every leftist's favorite revolutionary and T-shirt icon, Che Guevara. Fortunately, James Bowman and Paul Berman have other ideas.

Iranian citizens trash Fahrenheit 9/11.

When I linked to a 1999 Jonah Goldberg G-Spot in the post below as background on Mumia Abu Jamal, I was struck at how well it also served as background for another recent scandal:

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Patrick Ruffini explores "The Mother of All Flip-Flops".

Update: Orrin Judd writes:

John Kerry did the American people a great service today. In a powerful anti-war speech at NYU he laid out a vision of a Kerry foreign policy that could not be more different than President Bush's nor further divorced from America's traditions.

* * *
It seems unlikely that any candidate for the presidency has ever made a more morally despicable statement than this one: "Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell. But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war."

With that "but", Senator Kerry may have just made the ultimate Copperhead Conjunction.

Meanwhile, the RNC counts 14 flip-flops in that speech alone.

Alan Bromley, who grew up "in a Jewish-socialist household, where whatever my poor mother served for dinner was secondary to the political rantings of my father, an attorney, activist and speaker before the Abraham Lincoln Brigade", has some thoughts on what motivates the angry left. Bromley says it all boils down to one word: revenge.

The Washington Times notes that the Protest Warriors are fueling rage on left--and are getting ready to join them in Fun City next week.

Will they get the same discounted theater seats and restaurant prices from Mayor Bloomberg that the leftwing protestors are promised?

A tale of two presidential endorsements.

Get it while you can: a PDF version of John Kerry's early '70s book, The New Soldier, complete with an upside down flag on the cover.

UPI reports that "U.S. prisoners of war and their families...are launching a Web site and documentary that will likely further fuel election campaign rancor":

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John Podhoretz has a few friendly words for those stopping by New York next week to protest the Republican convention, and take advantage of the many discounted shows and dining opportunities offered by Mayor Bloomberg.

Update: Meanwhile, The New Criterion looks at one protestor who can't make up her mind. As Stefan Beck writes, "So is it arson and vandalism you want, or suffocating bureaucracy? Total anarchy . . . or Canada?"

"Greyhawk" of Mudville Gazette provides helpful translations for the aging vets with hearing difficulties at the Cincinnati VFW post, who may have misunderstood portions of Senator Kerry's speech to them earlier this week.

Front Page interviews Scott Swett, the man behind the WinterSoldier.com Website, which has served as a tremendous repostory for information on Senator Kerry's record, including his shameful activities while in the Naval reserves.

In 1969, Tom Wolfe wrote Radical Chic, his classic "new journalism" story of Leonard Bernstein welcoming the radical Black Panthers into his fashionable Park Avenue apartment and listening with glee, along with numerous other members of New York's upper crust, as they announced their plans to Bring Down The Man.

New York's Mayor Bloomberg is going Bernstein one better: he's giving the protestors arriving in New York to riot during the upcoming Republican convention at Madison Square Garden discounted tickets to Broadway shows, museums and restaurants.

“It’s no fun to protest on an empty stomach,” the New York Times quotes the mayor as saying, apparently with a completely straight face.

It's too bad Tom isn't writing many articles these days, because he'd have a field day with this story, which proves that Muggeridge's Law continues to rule the land.

Senator Tom Harkin, the master of the chickenhawk slur is caught by the Blogfather doing major puffery on his service record.

John Kerry, aka, Colonel Kurtz, could not be reached for comment.

Mark Steyn and Lloyd Grove muss up Senator Kerry's $75 $1,525 haircut.

But hey, don't all local guys--plumbers, construction workers--fly their barbers in when they're on the road, just like they blow $250 a pop for plane tickets to windsurf?

More crushing of dissent, this time at Colorado State.

I blame John Ashcroft. And Pete Coors. And maybe John Elway.

Given a week of stories about an imaginary Christmas in Cambodia that was seared--SEARED--on the memory of a presidential candidate and a postmodern married-with-two kids-but-bisexual New Jersey governor in New Jersey, you'd think Mark Steyn would have lots of fun writing about such stuff.

And you'd be right on the money:

"My truth is that I am a gay American,'' announced Gov. James McGreevey to the people of New Jersey last Thursday.

That's such an exquisitely contemporary formulation: ''my'' truth. Once upon a time, there was only ''the'' truth. Now everyone gets his own -- or, as the governor put it, ''One has to look deeply into the mirror of one's soul and decide one's unique truth in the world.'' For Jim McGreevey, his truth is that he's a gay American; for others in the Garden State, the truth about McGreevey is that he's a corrupt sexual harasser who put his lover on the state payroll in a critical homeland security post, and whose I-am-what-I-am confessional is a tactical feint that distracts the media sob sisters from the fact that, as his final service to the Democratic Party, he's resigned in such a way as to deny the people an early vote on his successor.

We'll see whose truth prevails in the fullness of time.

In politics, it's helpful if whatever ''unique truth'' the consultants have run past the focus groups bears at least a passing relationship to the real, actual truth -- not the whole truth, but at least a grain of it. That was what was so ingenious about Bill Clinton's ''60 Minutes'' appearance in 1992. He didn't come clean -- he was, as usual, full of it -- but he set in motion his designated ''unique truth'' -- flawed but human. It was designed to get him past Gennifer, but it wound up also getting him past Paula, Monica, Kathleen, Juanita. . . . Whatever goods you got on him, it fit ''his truth'' as he sold it to us on CBS that day. As his attorney Cheryl Mills put it during the impeachment trial, Bill Clinton, along with Jefferson, Kennedy and Martin Luther King, ''made human errors, but they struggled to do humanity good . . .''

Which brings us to John Kerry.

(Yes, it's time to read the whole thing.)

By the way, Steyn manages to write a column titled "Democrats peddle their own unique truth" without even mentioning the 800 (or more) pound postmodern gorilla who was in the presidential box at their convention. Amazing!

Update: Speaking of truth, Jeff Jarvis has some thoughts on why McGreevy really resigned.

Charles Johnson notes that when John Kerry was was Michael Dukakis’ Lieutenant Governor, "Kerry authored an executive order saying the state of Massachussetts would refuse to take part in any civil defense efforts in response to a nuclear attack on America".

Charles describes it as illustrating Kerry's "true radical pacifist nature".

Maybe he'd just seen Fail-Safe one too many times.

The American Thinker reprints an essay it ran in May, long before Christmas in Cambodia became a household phrase in the Blogosphere. This is a riot:

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If you read the material that Drudge is quoting from Unfit For Command and you compare it with Kerry's own quotes from shortly after he returned from Vietnam, then either both the Swift Boat vets and Kerry are telling the truth, or they're both lying about Vietnam.

First, one of the excerpts on Drudge:

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(HO CHI MIN CITY--AP): Seemingly on a whim, Senator Kerry, having only recently started reading a "Web log" apparently called AllahPundit, decides to recreate one of the "blogger's" Photoshopped parodies of the Senator's campaign posters.

More on this as it develops.

(Yes, the description I wrote is satire--but the photo's real (here's a version taken from a slightly different angle), and was found via Little Green Footballs.)

This "band of brothers" come not to praise Kerry, but to bury him--or at least his campaign.

Glenn Reynolds adds, "And Kerry played right into this with all the stuff about Vietnam and medals".

Given that the mainstream media will probably give this skant attention, it will be interesting to see how quickly this ad, and its message, disseminates.

Bad and good news on the education front. First the good news: Duncan Currie looks at a right turn by Harvard's students, which is starting to have a positive influence on its faculty.

For the bad news, Michelle Malkin notes that the National Association for the Education of Young Children, which oversees preschool teacher training, curriculum standards and daycare accreditation, is promoting a book written by a woman who wants to install an anti-American, anti-war bias in her students...her preschool students.

Update: Not surprisingly, England isn't immune to similar kinds of nonsense, either.

Star Parker: "It was entertaining to hear the man who achieved fame with the Tawana Brawley charade attack the president for supposedly misleading the nation".

Heh, as the Blogfather would say.

Pauline Kael was among the first critics perceptive enough to spot what a huckster Michael Moore is (unlike Rex Reed), and her 1989 review of the film has been reprinted here.

Back when I was a film junky, I also remember reading an article in England's Sight and Sound magazine (hardly a bastion of conservatism) that exposed many of the lies in that film as well, which put Moore on the map. Not the least of which was the film's premise: Moore wore a silly cardboard cartoon "PRESS" badge whenever he visited GM, thus ensuring that he'd never meet with Roger Smith--because if he did, there'd be no movie.

(Via Terry Teachout.)

Update: The blog post with Kael's review has been deleted, but curiously enough, it's also been reprinted--in English--in a French Web forum devoted to film that Google spidered. Here's the text, before that too vanishes:

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David Brooks points out something that Rod Dreher wrote about last year: that just as Republicans became the party of religion, the Democrats have become the party of the Godless. As Brooks writes:

More than any other leading Democrat, Bill Clinton understands the role religion actually plays in modern politics. He knows Americans want to be able to see their leaders' faith. A recent Pew survey showed that for every American who thinks politicians should talk less about religion, there are two Americans who believe politicians should talk more.

And Clinton seems to understand, as many Democrats do not, that a politician's faith isn't just about litmus test issues like abortion or gay marriage. Many people just want to know that their leader, like them, is in the fellowship of believers. Their president doesn't have to be a saint, but he does have to be a pilgrim. He does have to be engaged, as they are, in a personal voyage toward God.

Clinton made this sort of faith-based connection, at least until he sullied himself with the Lewinsky affair. He won the evangelical vote in 1992, and won it again in 1996. He understood that if Democrats are not seen as religious, they will be seen as secular Ivy League liberals, and they will lose.

John Kerry doesn't seem to get this. Many of the people running the Democratic Party don't get it either.

This isn't news; the fact that it's being discussed in the Times, is. As Dreher wrote:

True story: I once proposed a column on some now-forgotten religious theme to the man who was at the time the city editor of the New York Post. He looked at me like I'd lost my mind. "This is not a religious city," he said, with a straight face. As it happened, the man lived in my neighborhood. To walk to the subway every morning, he had to pass in front of or close to two Catholic churches, an Episcopal church, a synagogue, a mosque, an Assemblies of God Hispanic parish, and an Iglesia Bautista Hispana. Yet this man did not see those places because he does not know anyone who attends them. It's not that this editor despises religion; it's that he's too parochial (pardon the pun) to see what's right in front of him. There's a lot of truth in that old line attributed to the New Yorker's Pauline Kael, who supposedly remarked, in all sincerity, "I don't understand how Nixon won; I don't know a soul who voted for him."

And unlike Dreher and Brooks, I doubt many of the reporters on The Times understand how the Democrats became the Godless Party.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Think this detail about John Kerry would have gotten in there otherwise?

Earlier this month, Andres Oppenheimer of The Miami Herald asked John Kerry what he thought of something called the Varela Project. Kerry said it was "counterproductive." It's necessary to try other approaches, he added.

The Varela Project happens to be one of the most inspiring democracy movements in the world today. It is being led by a Cuban dissident named Oswaldo Payá, who has spent his life trying to topple Castro's regime. Payá realized early on that the dictatorship would never be overthrown by a direct Bay of Pigs-style military assault, but it could be undermined by a peaceful grass-roots movement of Christian democrats, modeling themselves on Martin Luther King Jr.

As a young man, Payá founded a magazine called People of God, but it was shut down. He criticized the Soviet Union and was thrown into a work camp. He was given a chance to escape Cuba, but refused.

Then in the mid-1990's, he and other dissidents exploited a loophole in the Cuban Constitution that allows ordinary citizens to propose legislation if they can gather 10,000 signatures on a petition. They began a petition drive to call for a national plebiscite on five basic human rights: free speech, free elections, freedom to worship, freedom to start businesses, and the freeing of political prisoners.

This drive, the Varela Project, quickly amassed the 10,000 signatures, and more. Jimmy Carter lauded the project on Cuban television. The European Union gave Payá its Sakharov Prize for human rights.

Then came Castro's crackdown. Though it didn't dare touch Payá, the regime arrested 75 other dissidents and sentenced each of them to up to 28 years in jail. This week Payá issued a desperate call for international attention and solidarity because the hunt for dissidents continues.

John Kerry's view? As he told Oppenheimer, the Varela Project "has gotten a lot of people in trouble . . . and it brought down the hammer in a way that I think wound up being counterproductive."

Imagine if you are a Cuban political prisoner rotting in a jail, and you learn that the leader of the oldest democratic party in the world thinks you're being counterproductive. Kerry's comment is a harpoon directed at the morale of Cuba's dissidents.

Imagine sitting in Castro's secret police headquarters and reading that statement. The lesson you draw is that crackdowns work. Throw some dissidents in jail, and the man who might be president of the United States will blame the democrats for being provocative.

Imagine if in the 1980's Ronald Reagan had called Andrei Sakharov or Natan Sharansky or Lech Walesa or Vaclav Havel "counterproductive" because, after all, what they did spawned crackdowns, too.

If there's anything we've learned over the past 20 years it is the power of moral suasion to buck up dissidents and undermine tyrannical regimes. And yet Kerry seems to have decided that other priorities come first.

Based on his record in the Senate, I'm not at all surprised that Kerry is an anti-anti-Castro. And while Brooks is an awfully squishy conservative, his column continues to pay big dividends with its location.

UPDATE: More here.

If you add up all the information about John Kerry--much of it from his own Website and his own words, you see, in 1971, a 27 year old man who threw away not only the medals of men who served in Vietnam but also of those who served in World War II. And then there's his Winter Soldier speech in front of the Senate on April 22, 1971, the birthplace of the 1970s' "'Nam vets are baby killers meme." All of which occurred while he was still in the Naval Reserves.

"Strange that they think there's a way to spin this that doesn't make him unfit to lead our nation", writes Orrin Judd.

Captain Ed writes that on Good Morning America today, "Even Charlie Gibson wasn't buying Kerry's explanation, and if Kerry loses ABC, things are definitely going downhill".

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, Mickey Kaus has lots of thoughts on Kerry GMA, and even "www.johnkerryisadouchebagbutimvotingforhimanyway.com", which is an actual (if not for the faint of heart), working URL!

His interviewer just demolishes him over his lack of knowledge of Castro, whom he's just made a (thoroughly whitewashed) documentary on.

And this is the guy who was going to get to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination!?

UPDATE: David Cohen adds, "This interview serves as an important reminder that sometimes there's no conspiracy. Sometimes, at bottom, there is just an ignorant idiot."

ANOTHER UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan writes, "Just when you think Stone couldnt get more morally depraved...The man is laughing - laughing - at a gulag".

One of the lessons of Bill Clinton and the 1990s was that if you cocked up on a spectacular enough scale, it wasn't necessarily the end of your career, because there's a thin enough line between fame and infamy to survive. So Bill buggers interns and subverts the law, but because he was the president, he'll always have lucrative new speeches to give, new articles and new books to sell, and new talk shows to appear on.

While few men living have had the power that Clinton did, numerous celebrities have committed similar crimes and misdemeanors and have managed to maintain whatever level of power or fame they've achieved quite nicely afterwards

Speaking of "Crimes and Misdemeanors", 50-something Woody Allen rogered his decade-long partner's adopted teenage daughter, but sells enough tickets in Europe and DVDs around the world, and is enough of a Hollywood icon that a studio will always give him a director's contract.

Janet Jackson may have exposed herself to a worldwide primetime audience of parents and their kids and violated the decency standards of the television network which carried it, but so what? She's now probably guaranteed a minimum level of CDs she'll sell, concert halls she'll fill, and TV shows to appear on.

And likewise with Jayson Blair. Sure, he cooked the books at The Times, but in his eyes, it's all OK, because the man was trying to keep him down. So let's give him a book deal and book him on all the talk shows!

The lesson in all of this? Crime pays--if it's a big enough offense, and you're already very successful at the time you commit it.

And morals? They're strictly for suckers.

Last week, I linked to a couple of jaw-dropping quotes from the 1940s and early '50s by Paul Robeson. When I was going through my archives, I found this recent classic about Communist Cuba, from Al Sharpton. And of course, Nelson Mandela and Harry Belafonte have paid a fair amount of lip-service to Castro as well.

Ayn Rand once said that "The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities". So why do men such as Mandela, and the late Robeson, who hold themselves out as seeking civil rights, admire leaders who crush them?

Guess who said this, in 1945:

If the United States and the United Nations truly want peace and security let them fulfill the hopes of the common people everywhere -- let them work together to accomplish on a worldwide scale, precisely the kind of democratic association of free people which characterizes the Soviet Union today.

Paul Robeson, who joins Frida Kahlo as another unrepentant Stalinist to be honored with his own American Postal Service stamp.

As The New Criterion asks, "what's next, a stamp honoring Julius Rosenberg"?

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan unearths an even more jaw-dropping quote by Robeson, and asks, "Would anyone who had written such things about Hitler in 1945 now be celebrated on a postage stamp?"

Geoffrey Wheatcroft examines how 9/11 finished off the intellectual far left.

Orrin Judd writes that Berlin is considering resurrecting their 60 foot high statue of Lenin.

Ironically, there's already a statue on Lenin in the US. A 30-foot high representation of Vladimir Ilyich is displayed prominently on a street in Fremont, a suburb of Seattle.

No really--Seattle has a statue devoted to one of the most evil, destructive men in history--and they're proud of it! When we were there during Memorial Day weekend, we stopped by the Guitar Center that was near our hotel, both so I could explore, and to kill time. I bought a few CD-ROMs of Acid Loops, and the clerk, a bearded, but otherwise surprisingly clean-cut fellow in his mid-30s or so noticed my out-of-state credit card and asked what we were planning to see that day. My wife mentioned she'd like to see the canals and locks in Fremont (just across the bridge from our hotel), and the clerk said, "yeah, they have a state of Karl Marx there. It's really cool!"

He didn't notice the death ray I was projecting. I had to bite my tongue to not say, "nahh, I'd like to check out the Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler statues first. Then I'll check out Marx." Instead I just took my purchase and waited to get in the car before blowing a gasket.

It's actually not Marx, it's Lenin, which I discovered after a little Googling. But either way, it's been frequently noted that a huge mistake on our part was not holding Nuremberg-like trials for the apparatchiks and party members of the Soviet Union after the Cold War ended. It might have caused more people to think before erecting statues to mass murderers--especially in the US.

Jeff Brokaw has a link to his 1953 obituary in the New York Times, which is as close to necrophilia as the Times as ever come.

And Andrew Sullivan has a link to The Onion's "1953" Stalin obit, which he describes--quite accurately--as "better than the New York Times'".

Meanwhile, ABC News' Peter Jennings yesterday, reported that "more than 3,000 people met today at the Soviet dictator’s grave adjacent to Red Square. Many of them said Russia could use a leader like Stalin again":

But at least Jennings described Stalin as “one of the world's most brutal dictators” and pointed out that “he murdered millions of his own people.”

After relaying how a 14-year-old boy claimed that though “Stalin had many sins,” they “were justified,” Jennings powerfully concluded: “There are still no memorials to the people Stalin had killed.”

Jennings concluded the March 5 World News Tonight: “Finally, this evening, a lesson about remembering. As the Bush administration contemplates trying to get rid of Saddam Hussein, who President Bush has always referred to as a brutal dictator, we take note of an anniversary. It is 50 years ago today that one of the world’s most brutal dictators died: Josef Stalin.”

For Peter Jennings, I suppose, that's progress.

Duke University will be launching an Axis of Evil film festival, showing films from Iraq, North Korea and Iran, and rogue states such as Cuba, Syria and Libya. Check out this quote by Ariel Dorfman, a professor of literature and Latin American studies at Duke University:

"I'd urge everyone who believes in cultural dialogue -- and particularly those who don't -- to come and submerge themselves in these works of art from the very places that some in the United States would like to bomb out of sight and out of existence".

Oh--I guess I missed the part where President Bush said he was going to obliterate Cuba with nuclear weapons. (Heck, we may be removing the nukes from many of our missiles.)

And then there's this statement by Negar Mottahedeh, assistant professor of literature at Duke:

We know how Bush sees 'the Axis of Evil.' How does someone from within that Axis see his or her own everyday life?"

Given state-controlled censorship by many of these countries, how do we really know how these filmmakers "see his or her own everyday life?" But they're probably deeply envious of the freedoms that most Americans take for granted, such as the freedom to both make movies and protest your government, and the freedom to make movies free of government interference. And the freedom to keep at least some of the profits from your work.

By the way--nice use of quotation marks by Reuters. And nice of Reuters to list a film series about largely enslaved film makers under their "Oddly Enough" category.

(Link via James Russell.)

Miss Coulter's comments came in response to a report in The Times on Monday that detailed Republicans' concerns that Mr. Duke's presidential bid would divide their party."He's an unknown quantity; that scares people. What they read about him causes people to cringe because they don't know him."

Miss Coulter said Mr. Duke's Republican critics "need to take a deep breath and exhale."

Sounds pretty scary, huh? But all we did was to swap Donna Brazile's name with Ann Coulter's, and Al Sharpton's with David Duke, from this Washington Times article. (And it's instructive that Brazile's quotes--assuming they're true--indicate that she's willing to work with anyone who will increase black votes to the Democrats, no matter how odious that person is. As Rod Dreher of the conservative National Review wrote in January:

Republicans took a whipping over a gaffe made by Trent Lott, a mere senator, but now the Democrats have to deal with a bona fide black racial demagogue, a man in David Duke's league, blunder bussing onto the national stage as a candidate for his party's nomination. Democratic politicians are scared to death of offending Sharpton, because they don't want to be denounced as racist by a man who can command such media attention.

Or as Peter Beinart of the liberal New Republic recently wrote:

Bull*****ing is the mechanism Sharpton uses to escape unscathed from the moral train wrecks that dot his career. On "Meet the Press" in January, Tim Russert reminded the freshly reinvented presidential candidate of four episodes in his past: His 1987 conviction for defaming a man he accused of raping Tawana Brawley; his 1993 conviction for tax evasion; his 1995 incitement against a Jewish store owner in Harlem, which culminated in the racially motivated murder of seven of the store's employees; and his 2002 eviction from the Empire State Building for failing to pay his rent. Sharpton responded by implying racism and changing the subject: "I think you've got white candidates with worse backgrounds who--." Russert interrupted to ask whom he meant. Sensing a dead end, Sharpton declared, "I'm not getting into name-calling," and changed the subject once again. "If you want to talk about background, talk about how a white male stabbed me at a nonviolent march. I forgave him, testified for him. That's somebody that brings America together," he declared. Russert doggedly returned to his question, asking Sharpton, "Why not apologize for Tawana Brawley?" "To apologize for believing and standing with a woman--I think all of us need to take women's claims more seriously," Sharpton responded indignantly. "No apology for Tawana Brawley?" Russert tried one last time. "No apology for standing up for civil rights," replied Sharpton.

That last answer is particularly revealing. According to Al Sharpton, the behavior of Al Sharpton is synonymous with the cause of civil rights, and therefore any criticism of Al Sharpton is, by definition, an attack on racial justice. By running for president, Sharpton is effectively asking the Democratic Party to bless that proposition. He knows that, by treating him as a legitimate candidate, the party is ratifying his self-coronation as the leader of black America. And, if the Democratic Party and the media accept him as the leader of black America, the post-Martin Luther King Jr., post-Jesse Jackson civil rights movement will become, in effect, whatever Sharpton says it is.

Brazile's response to Beinart's article? "Stop beating him up."

Dreher sums it up best: "Sharpton will make fools of the Democrats.

"Good. They created this monster. They bloody well deserve him."