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,