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All of which may never have happened if the US had stayed out of the Great War and a negotiated settlement had been reached in 1917 or early 1918.
But how might this have occurred? Of course, there were elements within the German government who might have desired peace, but at the same time, the military were fomenting anti-US sentiment in Mexico (the infamous Zimmerman letter, revealed by Britain in February of 1917), and shortly after Bethman-Hollweg's conciliatory speech at the end of 1916, the French ejected the German Army from Verdun. When President Wilson tried to mediate some sort of settlement, Britain's Lloyd-George rejected both his attempt as well as Bethman-Hollweg's proposals. And by February of 1917, the Germans had resumed their campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare, thus rendering the entire subject of a negotiated settlement moot.
Sentiment in the US, from the President on down, was opposed to entering the "foreign entanglement" of the Great War. As late as the end of January of 1917, President Wilson was still pushing his proposal for a league of peace-loving nations, and calling for a peace with no victors. None of this was well received by any of the combatants, and it is difficult to see how the U.S. could have forced the situation into a more peaceable path.
It's easy to say "if America had stayed out," but America was dragged in. Once the German wolfpack subs began to sink US ships again, the die was cast. Even the reluctant Wilson could no more have stayed out than George Bush could have ignored the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.
My answer, which was a bit improvised, was this: Mr Bush is still one of the most unqualified people ever to have run for the highest office, let alone to have attained it. There will never come a time when he reads for pleasure or takes a serious interest in another country. But the oldest political joke in America has a double-edged point to it. In this society, anybody can be President. And this particular anybody has happened to match an hour in which it is precisely the ordinary people of the country who have behaved with distinction.
The hed on this piece is supposed to refer to George Bush, but after reading the article, it's evident that it equally refers to the weird balancing act this latest version of Christopher Hitchens is trying to pull off.
Baghdad print shop owner Abdel Hakim Loqman believes his country could again be the target of U.S. bombs, but says his fears have nothing to do with whether Iraq sponsors terrorists or is building a nerve gas arsenal. "The (Iraqi) leadership is working on liberating Palestine and uniting the Arab nation and this is something the enemy does not want," Loqman said after Friday prayers in the Sheik Abdel Qader al-Qeilani mosque, one of the biggest in Baghdad.
As Stephen Den Beste has already pointed out, this is bullshit. Obviously, no Iraqi who is both in his right mind and within the reach of Saddam's secret police is going to say anything the Butcher of Baghdad might disagree with. As reporting, it's useless. So why did WaPo send a reporter there in the first place?
It's part of that ancient prejudice that says news gathered by putting shoeleather on the ground is somehow always better, more accurate, more real than news discovered any other way. That's silly, of course, but it's what accounts for those lemming-like media rushes toward the physical locus of any "newsworthy" hot spot.
Readers should avoid being misled, though. A reporter would have a far better chance of getting accurate accounts by reading anonymous posts to web sites and mailing lists than she would by openly interviewing people who, in fear of their lives, can only lie to her. But this is WaPo - they get the news the old fashioned way - stupidly.
Three hundred highly ranked Chinese officials from central and local governments will be attending training sessions at Harvard University over the next five years, according to the South China Morning Post on Saturday.
Can there be any more certain indicator that the doom of the PRC is nigh?
Mr. Graff's company spends a lot of money flying him around the country. The airlines, not surprisingly, reward him and other good customers with perks — better seats on the plane, early boarding, separate check-in lines and plush lounges away from the crowds.
...the class system at airports is more sharply demarcated than ever. But this is not a system that simply divides the first-class travelers with their sleek designer luggage from the masses with their bulky suitcases and canvas backpacks.
Since the September hijackings and the subsequent drop in air travel, the airlines have been paying more attention than ever to such passengers. At O'Hare, United and American Airlines have recently established separate security lines for first class, business and elite frequent fliers.
Well, this should help the situation quite a bit. Nothing like letting the rich kids whiz on through to make sure the boobocracy gets wholeheartedly behind the new airport security measures.
Sorry I slowed you down, massa. Here, let me drag my cheap canvas backpack out of the way of your Prada loafers. Thank you.
The nation's biggest tobacco companies are demanding more than a half-century's worth of documents, notes and personal files from 10 universities, setting off a debate over the limits of academic freedom and the confidentiality of scholarly research.
"This is a serious infringement upon the academic freedom and rights of our faculty," said Estelle A. Fishbein, general counsel for Johns Hopkins University, one of the institutions resisting the subpoena.
Given the junk science that was used to support the great Second Hand Smoke hypothesis, it might not be a bad idea to see what sort of science is hidden away in some of these academic's closets. No, DailyPundit doesn't smoke - except when he reads stuff like this.
Troops from the Army's 101st Airborne Division took control of the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan from the Marine Corps yesterday, a transfer signaling the intention of American forces to remain in the country indefinitely, defense officials said.
Military officials reported no significant developments in Afghanistan yesterday, with no U.S. aircraft launching strikes in recent days. "It's just been really quiet," Klee said.
Robert Jensen (remember him?) writing a remarkably smug chunk of tripe in the HoustonChronicle, says:
I am no worse for the wear after the events of this fall. Down the road, I hope we can look back and say the same thing for our intellectual and political culture, for the ideals of higher education and democracy.
After a firestorm of criticism descended on Jensen's head, including some mild disapproval from his boss, University of Texas President Lawrence Faulkner, the usual suspects, mistaking disagreement for an onset of the new Hitlerian dark ages, uttered bleats like this one:
… It is Faulkner's privilege to disagree with Jensen; but in such a denunciation of Jensen's membership in our university community, Faulkner shuts down that environment. He derided a member of his own faculty -- a well-informed and well-published scholar.
Faulkner should recognize that his response can have a chilling effect on the intellectual climate of a university.
I had hoped the university's president would stand up to the public criticism in order to defend an open and diverse university community. I'm disappointed and grieve the fact that, as someone critical of U.S. foreign policy, I may not be safe at UT, either.
Right. The Terror was so destructive it couldn't keep Jensen's poisonous yap off the pages of the Houston Chronicle any longer than four months. What a chill. What a guy.
Politics clearly underlie the switch to fuel cells. The high-mileage engine was a showpiece cause of President Bush's defeated rival, Al Gore. Also, an auto industry infatuated with hot-selling SUV gas guzzlers was never wild about shifting to a thrifty engine. In addition, dropping gas prices undercut calls for conservation. Next month Senate Democrats will consider increasing mileage requirements for American-made cars. It will be the party's turn to show leadership on energy conservation -- or push the problem off into the future as the Bush administration seems to prefer.
The primary meaning of the verb "to corrupt" is to destroy or subvert the honesty or integrity of something. The editorialist who penned this screed for the SF Chronicle is clearly out to corrupt the integrity and honesty of the paper. Here's what the "auto industry infatuated with hot-selling SUV gas guzzlers," that has "never" been "wild about shifting to a thrifty engine" is up to
Ford Motor Co. is the first U.S. automaker to commit to producing a gas-electric hybrid vehicle, a fuel-sipping version of its Ford Escape SUV by 2003.
Ford estimates the Escape hybrid will have a range of 500 miles and get 40 miles per gallon, compared to 20-28 mpg for the conventional Escape.
The Escape, which goes on sale in July, is priced from $18,160 to $21,335. Ford estimates the Escape hybrid will cost $3,000 more to build, though the price difference could be lowered if Congress passes a hybrid tax incentive bill.
DaimlerChrysler AG is prepared to produce a hybrid version of its Dodge Durango SUV if the bill passes.
I could a lot more easily swallow liberal apologists's protestations of non-bias if scribblers would stop flat out lying to us in hopes of advancing their agendas in their opinion pieces.
That changed when the public learned the value of news as the attacks unfolded. The daily need for "reliable, contextual" information continues, Brokaw told the gathering of about 120 editors and journalists.
The panelists worried that financial pressures could hurt journalism at a crucial time.
James Carey, of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, suggested banning companies whose primary business isn't gathering news from owning news organizations as a means of keeping journalism's mission of informing the public pure.
Panelists also noted that some viewers and readers were critical of objective reporting they didn't consider patriotic enough.
Brokaw said NBC resisted having its on-air reporters and anchors wear American flag pins as some staffers have at local news stations, and received hate mail because of its stance.
"We know there is an emotional tidal wave in the country," Brokaw said. "Our job is to not get on top of that wave and ride it to wherever it takes us."
Sandy Rowe, editor of The Oregonian, said letters to the editor are running about half against the war in Afghanistan.
"There is no more important time for people to hear the voices of dissent," Rowe said.
This is a panel of bigfoot journalism mandarins who clearly announce, "We still don't get it." They think the terrorist attacks are all about them: their perks, their money, their control, their judgment, their "perspectives." Read it again:
James Carey, of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, suggested banning companies whose primary business isn't gathering news from owning news organizations as a means of keeping journalism's mission of informing the public pure.
Europe marched lockstep into World War One without having any idea how it got from a peaceful world to the bloodfields of Verdun; the American media establishment seems bent on blindly following a similar path into the church of pure oblivion.
We should definitely be assertive about encouraging the Americans to follow the international rules of war if they want our help (and be prepared to do whatever is necessary, even up to walking away, if they don't.)
I suspect that's not really very much leverage for Canadian positions. As Marcus Gee (link: Damian Penny) points out:
The Americans, who, of course, have all the right desert gear, clearly have no idea what our lads are doing there. Like the son whose mother tells him to "take your little brother" on an outing, the U.S. commander will tolerate the Canadians and pray they won't get in the way.
This is not, as everyone's been saying, Canada's first combat role in years. There is no combat. The war is over. If there are any pockets of al-Qaeda or Taliban around Kandahar, you can be sure that the American commander will send his own men to take them on -- and leave the Canadians back at base.
...Our troops on the ground will be little more than tokens. We are sending them because we want to show we stand by our allies in their time of need. But the Americans don't want or need us. They agreed to have us because they are good friends and they knew we were eager to be there, not because we would be any real use.
This is an American show from top to bottom...
And then there's this (link: USS Clueless), from Matthew Parris, writing for The Guardian:
Face it: Mr Rumsfeld does not care about the niceties and cares little who knows it. Washington’s way of “fighting terror” is not, despite appearances, the same as Britain’s. We seek to project the message that there are rules to which all nations are subject. America has a simpler message: kill Americans, and you’re dead meat.
This sounds brutal - it is brutal - but there is a great deal of truth to it. Other western nations, unaccustomed to the role polled public opinion (not to mention voting) plays in American government, may find it a bit hard to imagine both the level of rage shared by the American public, and the amount of attention paid to that rage by their leaders - not least because the leaders feel that anger as well.
For better or worse, this will indeed be an American operation. US public opinion would badly punish any American leader who allowed either "international law", or the preferences of other nations whom they regard as, at best, peripheral players, to interfere with the rites of justice, the needs of self-defense, and, not least, the thirst for vengeance. It's not often remembered - perhaps because the horror of it is too devastating to comfortably keep in mind - but the American nation is pitiless when damaged; we have utterly destroyed every legitimate military threat raised against our homeland in the past century. Noting this isn't triumphalism. It's history.
And there is something else to keep in mind: despite European and other hand-wringing over American "arrogance," "triumphalism," and similar epithets, there is a vein of uncertainty and insecurity running through the American psyche: many people look at the history of the past fifty years and see, not an unbroken string of US victories that justify arrogance, but instead: Korea, where we spent thousands of American lives to create an uneasy truce zone where our troops are still stationed; Vietnam, a sinkhole of American casualties that resulted in defeat; a series of terrorist attacks where, from our point of view, nobody important was punished; the Iranian hostage-taking, which is still an open, unhealed wound full of Mullahs hooting ridiculous challenges at us; the Iraqi conflict, which left Saddam in place to threaten us a decade later; insults from a corrupt mob of Saudi royals; disdain from Yassar Arafat, whose very existence has depended on the restraint we imposed on Israel; constant snottiness from European bureaucrats; sneers from the Chretiens north of the border; and a host of lesser pinpricks. We may be the big dog, but we certainly don't feel like it. If anything, we feel a smoldering resentment that the rest of the world doesn't seem to understand how restrained we have been, and shows no gratitude or even recognition for the manifest good we have accomplished. Every time a moronic loon like Robert Fisk equates us with the WTC terrorists, that resentment increases; and along with it, a stronger determination to go our own way. We may be atop the world, but we are disliked and alone because of it - and we are highly conscious of that.
Which all contributes to the current national mood; a large part of America is fed up. These people don't intend to take it any more. 3000 dead are enough, and it ends now. Whether the rest of the world likes it or not, George Bush was speaking for much of the American public when he said, "You're either with us, or against us." And this, history teaches, is probably one conflict where being against us may well be a mistake. A fatal one.
"When I got there there were bodies laying everywhere," said Dr. Briggs, who arrived at the first emergency alarm. Two victims suffered point-blank wounds "execution style," one doctor at the scene said. Mr. Odighizuwa was subdued by three law students who were experienced police officers, the authorities said. "We're trained to run into the situation instead away from it," said one of the three, Mikael Gross, 34, of Charlotte, N.C., who ran to his car for his bulletproof vest and service pistol before tackling the suspect.
If absolutely forced to mention the self-defense gun, most liberal outlets will heavily emphasize that it was handled by a "sheriff's deputy." (Among the more rabid gun-controllers, it's dogma that only police officers or other government representatives should be allowed to possess firearms).
I've been unable to find any other major media outlet (besides MSNBC/NBC Today Show mentioned earlier) that has covered this part of the story, and so I salute the NYT for doing so - even if they approached it as I expected. Nobody else approached it at all.
Not a single media reporter has yet covered it. Romenesko, who has reported in the last two days on an editor’s pencil-tapping in meetings at the Southwest Journal and a flap over a cartoon in a Texas college newspaper, hasn’t reported the New York Times’ chief economics columnist on the take from Enron. Romenesko’s liberal double-standards are legendary.
Nothing in the letters column either. However, Romanesko does have a link to Tim Cavanaugh's treacherous screed prominently featured on his home page - although he, in his unbiased way, calls it the "Truth about war blogs." Guess at the perfectly objective poynter.org, a little suckful backstabbing is considerably more important than a major liberal columnist's quid pro quo pocket-stuffing at the NYT.
"This is nothing short of a kidnapping," said M. Cherif Bassiouni, a professor at DePaul University Law School in Chicago, who was chairman of the U.N. Security Council commission that investigated war crimes in the former Yugoslav federation.
"This is a return to the Wild West and is surely likely to affect the credibility of the U.S. as a country that adheres to the rule of law. Worse yet, it will give great support to the claims of terrorists that the U.S. lacks legitimacy in what it does," Bassiouni said.
It's still regrettable the U.S. congress couldn't bring itself to set precedent and formally declare war against terrorism. Much of the confusion regarding the way the U.S. is handling this undeclared "war" results from that lapse: is it a war? A criminal investigation? A police action? What sort of beast is it?
To the good professor, it's a criminal investigation, subject to the rules of law of a couple hundred national and international jurisdictions. To others, it's a straight military action, subject to the Geneva convention and little else. And to the largest faction, (which includes, I think, many in our own government) it's an ever-shifting amalgam of both extremes. A declaration of war would have provided much-needed clarity toward establishing a way we could all think about these situations, these captives, this conflict. Whatever it is.
TEHRAN Yasser Arafat's cease-fire was in ruins Friday after Israeli air raids on the West Bank town of Tulkarem. Israel and the Palestinian Authority each blamed the other for the escalation, with the Palestinians calling the deployment of tanks right outside Arafat's Ramallah headquarters a "real sabotage of the cease-fire."
In this entire Tehran Times article, there is not one mention of the murderous attack on 12-year-old Nina Kardashova's bat mitzvah which triggered the Israeli reprisals. Anybody who speaks of Islamic "public opinion" in speech-controlled tyrannies like Iran, Iraq, or Saudi Arabia doesn't understand the meaning of either word.
Just under half say now that the oil industry has too much influence on the Bush administration, down from two-thirds who felt that way in August. * Almost two-thirds -- 63 percent -- think the Bush administration isn't telling everything it knows about its relationship with Enron. That group breaks up this way -- a fifth think the Bush administration is lying about its relationship with Enron, while almost half -- 44 percent -- think the administration is hiding something. * Just over half said the company's calls to the Bush administration for help were wrong, and just over half said the administration did the right thing if it didn't help the company. * Seven in 10 said the government should not make up pension losses of people whose company goes bankrupt.
Despite the inflammatory and misleading hed on this article, a careful read makes it obvious that, for the moment at least, Democratic efforts to pin the Enron on the Elephant are an abject failure.
The normally meticulous Prince of Darkness, Robert Novak, misses one:
New York Democratic insiders say Sen. Hillary Clinton is a political winner in the Enron scandal. They say she will have the state's spotlight more to herself than usual regarding Enron because her voluble senior colleague, Sen. Charles Schumer, received funds from the bankrupt energy giant. He returned the money Wednesday. The $21,933 received by Schumer for his successful 1998 race against Republican Sen. Alfonse D'Amato was Enron's fourth-largest contribution to a senator. Schumer co-sponsored Enron-backed energy deregulation bills. Schumer is a member of the Senate Banking Committee, which will investigate the Enron scandal. But he may be unusually constrained because of his ties with the corporation.
Senator Clinton did receive funds from Enron: $950.00 for her Senate race in 2000. Not as much swag as Sen. Schumer, but swag, nonetheless.
The Israeli Army has destroyed the Voice of Palestine radio station near the West Bank town of Ramallah. Witnesses said that the troops set the building on fire by detonating an explosive charge before dawn on Saturday. Soldiers had earlier entered the building to set the charges and clear away people in the building.
As opposed to Palestinian tactics, which involve clearing away nobody from Bat Mitzvahs before entering and attempting to murder everybody inside.
"This stupid Israeli Government wants to destroy the symbol of Palestinian sovereignty. But Voice of Palestine radio is not only a building to be destroyed, it is inside the hearts of every Palestinian," West Bank security chief Jibril Rajoub told the Reuters news agency.
Perhaps. But cardiac tissue makes notoriously bad receiving antennas, almost as useless as cranial bone. Unless wrapped in tinfoil, of course.
I think I could write this story with my eyes closed, my lips sewed shut, and both hands tied behind my back: "Palestinian terrorists committed (godawful atrocity) near Ramallah. Israeli forces refrained from leveling (Palestinian terror stronghold) entirely and driving the perpetrators and their cheering supporters into the sea. Representatives of the U.S. State Department and the European Union urged Chairman Arafat to act more vigorously and arrest the terrorist leaders (he arrested last week). Chairman Arafat commented (something stupid, belligerent, and dishonest).
Several members of the Al-Qaeda Islamic extremist network arrived in Somalia last week, a Somali warlord told reporters on Friday in Ethiopia. There was no independent confirmation of the statement, made by warlord Hussein Mohamed Aidid, whose forces were involved in heavy fighting with an ill-fated UN operation spearheaded by US troops in Somalia in 1993.
Hussein Aidid (or Aideed) was not commanding the forces of his father, who participated in the Mogadishu attacks that are chronicled in the current movie Black Hawk Down. He was, in fact, serving in the United States Marine Corps, and was an American citizen. He's had his ups and downs since then, but it's possible he still hopes to make Somalia attractive to the US computer industry.
The creation of human clones, babies that are genetic replicas of adults, is unsafe and should be outlawed, a panel of scientific experts said today.
Not one thing that people really wanted has ever been effectively outlawed. Banned, made illegal, legislated against, moralized against, you name it: from drugs, sex, and rock-n-roll to cloned babies, none ever have, or ever will, be actually banished if there is a market for them.
He [Prince Abdullah]is described by Saudis and American experts on the kingdom as an astute politician with a good sense of Saudi public opinion, who has concluded the American presence is more trouble than it is worth. One big problem for Abdullah, said several past and present officials, is anti-American sentiment in Saudi society. "For the first time since 1973, we actually have a situation in which the United States is so unpopular among the [Saudi] public that the royal family now thinks its security is best served by publicly distancing itself from the United States," remarked Chas. W. Freeman Jr. a former U.S. ambassador to Riyadh and frequent visitor to the kingdom.
First, the Saudi royal family cares not one jot for "Saudi public opinion." After all, they're in the business of manufacturing the stuff through the distillery of their government-controlled press, and if "public opinion" is opposed to a US presence, it's because these self-same hypocrites want it that way. Second, the real reason this army of tyrannical faux-theocrats wants the US gone - if they really do, and this is not some stupid attempt at a power play on their part - is that their bloated royal self-regard simply cannot handle the criticism being leveled at them by parts of the American media.
The solution is simple: take them at their word and leave. The US imports about 13% of its oil needs from the middle east - Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Oil is fungible, so even if they tried to boycott us directly, it wouldn't work, but beyond that, an effective embargo from those three countries would not be devastating in anything other than a pr and elite-media panty-bunching sense. Other oil producers, Russia in particular, could and would take up the slack.
The potential benefits of such a withdrawal on our part are obvious: first, we are no longer using our troops to prop up one of the ugliest, most tyrannical regimes on earth; second, if Mickey Kaus is right about our friendship with Israel being a primary cause of Islamic hatred for us, surely our "occupying" Islam's sacred lands - per Osama bin Laden - is equally as great a cause, and so our departure should be a net plus in the terrorism department; third, anything that encourages us to gradually wean ourselves off our all-petrochemical energy diet has to be a plus; and, finally, there's a certain amount of justifiable national glee in telling the turbaned tyrants to fuck off.
Ken Layne has a few things to say about Tim Cavanaugh's loopy broadside at the blogosphere.
When I first encountered blogdom, I was surprised by - and attracted to - one subset of writers right out of the box: those Jim Henley calls "muscular liberals." People like Matt Welch and Layne himself. (And their not necessarily liberal pals like Tim Blair) I could see where we might scrape on each other in places, their biceptual libbiness and my leave-me-the-fuck-alone libertarianism, but I could also appreciate their fine writing, their taste for great LA tacos, and the general feeling they'd be a hell of a bunch to sit down and chug a few brewskies with. They seemed like folks you could trust. That you could depend on.
If Cavanaugh was a part of that group - and Layne says he is/was - then his scurrilous little screed isn't good fun at all. It's the sort of treacherous, stink-weasel, indigestible Judasism that gives friendship a bad name. When some men enter a room, you automatically stand; when others do, you automatically turn and show them your back. Guess where I place Cavanaugh? Some guys you don't need to know, to know everything you need to know about them.
ABCNEWS has learned that CIA officials believe Osama bin Laden escaped from Afghanistan, and most likely has fled the region altogether. What's the next move in the search for the suspected terror mastermind?
After more than 100 days of war and weeks of speculation that they may have escaped, Osama bin Laden and Mohammad Omar, the top two fugitives in the U.S. war on terrorism, are likely still in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday.
Jacobs's experience in the field began in 2001, the great era of celeblogs that allowed professional writers like Sullivan, Kaus and Joshua Micah Marshall to post their writings online, at prices more accurately reflecting their value.
Yes, Mr. Cavanaugh? Right. I've got a load of pots here for you. Black ones, yes. From a Mr. Kettle. Just sign here, please? Thanks.
Five suspected members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network were arrested in a high-speed car chase as they tried to flee into a tribal area out of the government's reach disguised in women's burqas, officials said Thursday.
"Black Hawk Down" recounts with nearly scrupulous accuracy the 1993 battle in which elite but inadequately armed U.S. troops saw 18 men killed in an enormous ambush by Somali clansmen loyal to warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid. Although cut off in a hostile Mogadishu neighborhood for 17 hours, the American Rangers and Delta Force commandos escaped being slaughtered en masse by displaying extraordinary courage and discipline under fire. In a remarkable feat of arms, they killed about 55 followers of Aidid for each American who died. Both sides were brave enough to die, but the Americans were also calm enough to kill. Unlike the ill-trained Somalis, the Americans generally took aim before pulling the trigger.
From all accounts, including this one, this is a very risky film by Hollywood standards: no "ideas," meaning no anti-war theme, a cast that reflects the almost all-white reality of US special forces, not to mention the completely male makeup of those same troops, and a brutal, straightforward, realistic-as-possible approach to the battles themselves.
This doesn't sound like a PC, feel-good movie. Good. It wasn't a PC, feel-good war that day in Mogadishu.
In a piece for PageSix.com, Adam Buckman reveals a bit of journalistic sausage making:
The initial story of Larry's new contract was reported by celebrity columnist Liz Smith Tuesday in her syndicated column, which is published in newspapers all over the country. The story also ran Tuesday in The Post in a version adapted by me from Liz's column - a routine rewrite job of the sort we do everyday.
"Adapted?" "Routine rewrite job?"
Is that anything like what Stephen Ambrose has been doing?
FOLLOWING ON Bruce Fein's superb effort, we have a new nominee for DailyPundit's Fisk Award (for the year's most badly written sentence by a pro scribe). Here is Mark Morford, writing in my hometown daily:
The war is just something we do now, something we're stuck with like some sort of slow-moving colon disease, no real choice in the matter and everyone pretty much understanding that we aren't about to reach any sort of dramatic victorious parade-in-the-streets endpoint anytime soon even if we do ultimately kill bin Laden sometime in the near future, which we probably won't.
Kind of makes your colon curl. Slowly.
UPDATE: It seems unfair to allow a contestant two entries from the same piece, but the following simply couldn't be denied:
Still pumping the GOP-friendly military-industrial complex full of perky aggro attitude and jingoistic testosterone and years if not decades of billion-dollar missile contracts, all to keep us fully engaged and engorged in this unwinnable war until you've long forgotten how to spell "Al-Qaeda" and Dick Cheney has had his defibrillator plated in platinum.
Students ended the rampage by confronting and then tackling the gunman, officials said. “We saw the shooter, stopped at my vehicle and got out my handgun and started to approach Peter,” Tracy Bridges, who helped subdue the shooter with other students, said Thursday on NBC’s “Today” show. “At that time, Peter threw up his hands and threw his weapon down. Ted was the first person to have contact with Peter, and Peter hit him one time in the face, so there was a little bit of a struggle there.”
I predict that unlike most mass school shootings, this one will not get any extended play in the national media. Why? Because the shooter was stopped by a student armed with his own pistol. This doesn't fit into the media's anti-gun conventional wisdom. In that world, guns are always bad, and the notion that average human beings might be able to effectively defend themselves and others with a gun is nothing more than an NRA propaganda fantasy.
This might just be a fairly good test case for media bias. Conservative news outlets will try to keep this story in play, to emphasize the pro-gun twist. Liberal sources will try to bury it, because of the same twist. You've just read how MSNBC described the incident. Here's how the NYT played it:
Odighizuwa left the building and dropped his gun after being confronted. Students then tackled him and one who is a sheriff's deputy handcuffed him.
And here's the relevant description from two WaPo stories:
Three students pounced on the gunman and held him until help arrived.
NYT and WaPo don't mention the defense weapon at all. Instructive, don't you think?
Let's see who has more influence. Here's my bet: three days, and you'll hear no more of this except a faint squeak here and there. If absolutely forced to mention the self-defense gun, most liberal outlets will heavily emphasize that it was handled by a "sheriff's deputy." (If it was: the NYT story isn't clear). And within ten days, either WaPo or NYT will print a thumbsucker from some "expert" about how trying to defend yourself with a gun is one hundred eleven times more dangerous than allowing a murderer to shoot you in the head.
Trust this one: Chris Carter's Emmy-winning sci-fi powerhouse "The X-Files" will wrap its nine-season run on Fox in May.
Carter and Fox confirmed the decision Wednesday following a meeting in which Carter told Fox Entertainment Television Group chairman Sandy Grushow and entertainment prexy Gail Berman he was ready to end the series.
And so ends, whatever you may think of it, one of the most influential series in television history. Personally, I've thought the show has been showing its age for several seasons now, but even so, I have to admit a twinge at its passing. It was a spec script I wrote based on X-Files that got me my first paid tv writing job for an (unlamented) chopschlocky spinoff of the Mortal Kombat empire: I wrote the episode called Noob Saibot. Thank god television writers don't get paid based on quality.
PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY reviews (Feb. nonfiction; not yet online):
HOW TO GET YOUR E-BOOK PUBLISHED: AN INSIDER'S GUIDE TO THE WORLD OF ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING Richard Curtis and William Thomas Quick
The Internet and the World Wide Web gave birth to digital publishing as we know it today - an industry still in its "drooling infancy," according to Curtis and Quick. In a witty, chummy, - sometimes corny - style, Curtis, a literary agent turned online publisher, and Quick, a self-described computer geek and science fiction author, deliver an impressively thorough and up-to-date operations manual for writers who want to navigate the world of electronic publishing. Writers who shrink from anything remotely technological will be pleased to find that they can follow a discussion of the ins and outs of the various HTML editors, for example, distilled into clear, relevant and practical explanations. But the best feature of this book is that it explores thoroughly issues that are larger than the dauntingly large technological ones. Curtis and Quick expound upon the developing area of digital rights management that writers who e-publish will have to contend with. How do authors protect their copyright when the ability to make an infinite number of copies - or, worse, to change the original composition - is only a mouse-click away? Much about digital publishing is yet to be resolved, but Curtis and Quick present an articulate, reasoned contribution to the revolution. WRITER'S DIGEST BOOK CLUB main selection, (Feb.)
Forecast: this book's gung-ho tone may seem misplaced in light of the folding of iPublish and other major e-publishers. But the tactic of going with smaller e-houses or self-publishing, both covered here, will appeal to many aspiring authors.
Just so you know. ("Latest book" cough, link at, cough, left...)
Like generals fighting the last war, many pundits are claiming that we should profile young, Arab, Muslims--giving them greater scrutiny in the security of planes, buildings, etc. Okay, so let's say they do that. Guess what we're not prepared for? The fact that fundamentalist Islam is not an Arab movement. Racial profiling would not scrutinize, say, Johnny Walker. If al-Qaeda wants to adapt to new security measures, profiling may be the easiest thing to adapt to--all you need are hijackers who aren't Arab.
Well, it seems to me that we should be doing both, if it's true security we're after. First, we should be profiling like crazy, and giving everybody who matches the profile a very hard going-over. These terrorist operations aren't planned so they can turn on a dime - for instance, where would Mohammed Atta and his grisly crew have found a sufficient number of non-Arab, or female, or aged terrorists to carry out their attack? And historically almost all these attacks have been carried out by members of a fairly narrow profile. So yes, we should be carefully checking every Arab male between 18 and 35, especially if they match other profile characteristics.
And we should also be doing random searches, for precisely the reasons Knapp outlines. Is this the sort of compromise that would satisfy both sides? Or neither one? Beats me, but I'd like to find out.
UPDATE: On further thought, one more reason to approach security from both directions: real profiling coupled with random checks would go a long way toward defusing passenger resentment of random checks themselves. Nothing infuriates the seventy year old midwestern grammies who get strip-searched more than to see some 23 year old Arab-appearing guy breezing through a line without a second glance. If folks who fit terrorist profiles were all checked, people who don't fit the same profiles might feel a lot better about their own random inspections - and might feel a lot safer, too.
Has the Washington press corps lost its taste for White House scandal?
He answers himself several graphs later:
Tempting comparisons with a previous era can be overdrawn, of course. So far as anyone knows, neither the President nor any of his appointees were doing business with Enron when the firm’s principals were ripping off their stockholders and employees.
Afghanistan's interim government, headed by Hamid Karzai, has banned the cultivation of opium poppies, in a bid to stop drug trafficking.
This is nothing more than an Afghan dance for public - make that U.S. public - consumption. It has no more chance of having any effect than Osama bin Laden has of being elected leader of Afghanistan. The Kabul government doesn't even exert effective control over much of the poppy growing area. Short of tasking the US Air Force with unloading defoliants over the fields, there is no way this promise can mean anything at all. More kerfluffle, but we'll be seeing a lot of that over the next couple of years.
A few interesting nuggets in this WaPo roundup of the day's War on Terror (remember that?) news. Don Rumsfeld said he didn't think Omar or Osama had slipped out of Afghanistan, but he couldn't prove it one way or the other. And
A senior defense official acknowledged some surprise at Rumsfeld's comment. "We don't have any evidence that shows he's anywhere but Afghanistan, but we don't have anything compelling that shows he's in Afghanistan," the official said.
In other words, much ado about nothing. Of more, though twisted, interest was further evidence that the hierarchs of al-Qaeda were abject morons. Speaking about some mysterious Russians cannisters marked with skull and crossbones discovered in al-Quaeda hideaways,
A Pentagon official suggested that the canisters may not contain any harmful materials and may have been part of a hoax in which fraudulent material or weapons were sold to the terrorist network. "Al Qaeda was victim to numerous scams involving people passing off something as WMD [weapons of mass destruction] that really wasn't, and this is probably one of those cases," the official said.
Finally, a bit of news from the non-lunatic fringe side of the Guantanamo prisoner debate:
At a news conference, U.S. Marine Brig. Gen. Michael Lehnert, commander of the task force running the prison operation at Guantanamo Bay, said some of the prisoners have vowed to kill Americans. "These are not nice people," Lehnert said. "Several have stated their intention to kill an American before they leave Guantanamo Bay."
The Taliban would have known how to handle that little problem. Instead of cutting off the prisoners's beards, they'd have cut off their hands.
Much of this Ann Coulter rant is a rambling mess. But after she finishes with the race baiting and mau-mauing, she makes two worthwhile points:
Meanwhile, three men with real names raised that flag in that photo at Ground Zero: New York City firefighters Dan McWilliams, George Johnson and Billy Eisengrein. We know what they'd do if the situation were reversed.
Forgotten in all the discussion is that the picture was of three living men. It was not three abstractions who raised that flag, it was three real guys, with real names, real families, real jobs.
After World War II, a statue was made of six American servicemen raising the flag at Iwo Jima. (Three of the six raising the flag were killed in the battle.) White male patriarchs didn't bleach Indian Ira Hayes off the Iwo Jima memorial. Back when the oppressors were white men rather than race demagogues, the truth still counted for something.
Another point that gets lost in the shuffle is the truth; changing these real, living men to bronze abstractions is a lie. How can a lie be an honorable memorial to the devastation of the World Trade Center?
So when it comes to this statue there is a clear and simple choice: Either (1) recreate the photo and the memories it instills in all of us OR (2) create a more abstract, representative memorial that evokes the character and heroism of the entire department. But don't try to smoosh both together. It ruins both. It's not art. It's not reality. It's not a memory. It's not a memorial. It's a mess.
Middle aged men can have sex as many times as they like without increasing their risk of having a stroke, according to research.
What a relief!
Scientists also discovered that frequent sexual intercourse can actually reduce the risk of suffering a fatal heart attack.
Is modern science wonderful, or what?
However, in several states same-sex sexual relations are illegal. Would homosexuals in those states have a case, based on this research, that the state is denying them equal access to a longer life?
JUST WONDERING: Why do they make the lever on stainless nail clippers perfectly smooth and shiny, so that when you're trying to clip your off-fingers, your grip slides down until you lose all your leverage? Especially since most of the diabolical contraptions come equipped with a tiny nail file whose surface is perfectly non-skid?
Is it possible the file designers and the lever designers could sit down for coffee one day, and see if there are any areas they could practice, you know, like, synergy?
AS THE ENRON STORY continues to gather steam, it becomes clearer - well, as clear as the collapse of any business with three thousand, six hundred subsidiaries can be, that what political scandal may be there to find will most likely stick more easily to Republicans than Democrats, if only because Enron slathered the Elephant pocketbooks so disproportionately with lard vis the Donkeys, $203,000 to $88,000. Fair enough.
So what would be the reaction to the messy dissolution of, say, the AFL-CIO COMMITTEE ON POLITICAL EDUCATION/POLITICAL CONTRIBUTIONS COMMITTEE, which contributed $994,000 to Democrats in 2000, while balancing that with $3,000 to Republicans. Probably in such a case Henry Waxman would be a bit less self-righteous, but, unfortunately, Dan Burton would be moreso.
And nobody, either way, would wonder about a system that permits - or demands - these gigantic lubrications in the first place.
Briggs said that after the gunman shot the staff members, he went downstairs into a common area and opened fire on a crowd of students, killing one and wounding three others. He was tackled by some male students as he left the building. "They just wanted the guy," Briggs said. "They weren't worried about their own personal safety."
...The governor, who had served on the school's board until he took office last week, said he was shocked and saddened by the shooting. "I commend the students who acted swiftly to apprehend the suspect, who is now in custody," Warner said.
More evidence of a sea-change in the national zeitgeist concerning self-defense. Prior to 9/11, the civilized reflex to the approach of violence was to run, and wait for "trained personnel" (ie. police) to handle it. The WTC attack demonstrated that people directly threatened, who could not run away were capable of making effective efforts to defend themselves and others. In this case, the students, though able to run away, chose not to, and instead, without regard to their personal safety, took down an armed murderer.
Two thoughts: Evidently a growing segment of America is no longer willing to assign responsibility for their own safety to others. And at some point, this attitude will manifest in a desire for much freer access to more efficient tools of self protection. Like guns.
LOTS OF META-THUMBSUCKING and navel gazing gripping (griping?) the blogosphere of late. Are we influential? Are we powerful?
Most of the arguments one way or the other hinge on the notion that blogpower depends on changing the minds of the powerful, or convincing them of some blog POV they hadn't considered, or otherwise altering their perceptions of reality. Those who say, aye, blogpower is real, posit that the Times editorial board reads us and is thereby convinced to mend their ways. Those who say bloggers are overblown, self-regarding egomaniacs reply that almost nobody reads us, and the few who do aren't altered one whit by what they read.
But everybody misses one reason why blogdom could very well have an influence - a reason that doesn't really involve intellectual or ideological massaging in any way. I'm a bit surprised nobody's mentioned this, because the blogosphere thrives on daily postings. Of course, by far the largest number of posts involve comments and links to original material written by others who are usually working in the mainstream press. A lot of the stuff that gets linked to or commented on is straight news reporting, paycheck journalism. But the writing that sets the national tone comes from the legions of the paid pundits, an army of wretches who have to find something to write about five days a week, fifty weeks a year. Or they don't get paid.
You try it. See how much fun you find it. And try to imagine you suddenly discovered a place you could go where fifty, sixty, a hundred good, smart, witty, unconstrained writers spread a smorgasboard of ideas, approaches, attitudes, and generalized pundamentalism before you every day. Why, hell, your columns and thumbsuckers would practically write themselves!
Listen, we're talking about a bunch of people so desperate they'll recycle the output of both the RNC and DNC without changing a word on the press releases except to put their own names above the first graph. You think folks like this won't consider the blogosphere an answer to their most fervent prayers? If not, you don't know the life of a workaday journo hack very well.
Our influence isn't pursuasion, it's chumpdom. We're cranking out, not words, but the tough, difficult precursors to words - ideas, slants, angles, attitudes and approaches - that begs to be lifted. Not that top name scribblers (cough, Stephen Ambrose) would ever (cough, Mike Barnicle) actually steal (cough, Ruth Shalit) anything. But if they did...
Today, three short months later, we're back to right-v.-left bickering and backstabbing and bitching. We're back to politics for politics' sake. We're back to the bullshit. Look around you here in Blogdom and you see it everywhere: people snipping and sniping at each other because of the their political clique -- Andrew Sullivan on one end, AntiWar.com on the other, and lots of people lobbing spitballs inbetween. There's a lot of nya-nya in the air. I confess that I partook in -- and, yes, enjoyed -- my own binge of reactionary conservative-baiting in the last few days when I had started suffering repetitive stress syndrome reading the monotonous whining about alleged liberal media bias. I snapped back. And it was fun because it got reaction and it got links but it was stupid. Such bitter banter is all meaningless, unproductive, inane. Stupid. Politicians do it. Media people do it. And now we're doing it.
No, pal, you did it. Don't pitch rocks and then whine that the situation now includes a few stones whizzing through your own windows. And don't expect to credibly interpret Raimondo's calculated posturing as any kind of intra-blog sniping - the blogosphere hardly knew that antiwar.com existed. Although Justin-boy is doing what he can to change that.
The notion that the firefight you started is now unsettling to you smacks of the orphan's defense: I killed my parents, please have pity on me, a poor orphan. I wouldn't respect that if I read it on the NYT Op-Ed page - and I won't shy away from skewering it just because it comes from a fellow blogger.
WHORING FOR HITS: The news of the sub rosa email campaign to "alert" bloggers to Justin Raimondo's recent excoriation leads me to think I may have to rewrite the phrase to "ANTI-WARRING FOR HITS."
And of course the pathetic goof doesn't realize that slavering after attention from the blogosphere only reinforces the thesis that bloggers have influence larger than mere numbers would indicate.
At A Dog's Life Gregory Hlatky nails the NYT perfectly:
Related stories: In Europe, Feelings of Smug Superiority The Arab Street Erupts on Scandal News Editorial: Campaign "Speech" is Not Speech Anthony Lewis, columnist emeritus: Have You No Shame, Sir? Frank Rich: Fox News, A Fascist Network Maureen Dowd: Homeboy and Hollywood
In reference to the parties potentially at fault -- Enron executives and the Bush administration -- a quarter of all Americans say they do not know enough about the matter to have an opinion about the scandal.
Wonder why it never occurred to Gallup pollsters to slip in a question asking about the Democratic party's potential fault - after all, Enron liberally greased the Donkeys, too.
Some Catholics I know can never quite understand the lifelong hostility by ex-churchmembers who’ve been fondled by a priest, or resent the ridiculous Cult of Mary, or simply can’t stomach the hypocrisy of a dominant religion.
Peel back the side-paneling on a Limousine Liberal, and often you’ll see someone who went face to face, on the front lines, with the ugliest that America can muster. I have much more sympathy for them, than for people my age and younger who spout unlearned bullshit.
I can understand this position. It was a confrontation with a particularly priggish and treacherous rep of a mainline religion that first thrust me, as a young man, firmly into the lefty camp. But in 1968, that led to to such fandangos as the Peace and Freedom Party, and backstage fistfights with representatives of the PLP over their fascist tactics in the war against fascism. I've seen America muster a lot of ugly things, from the right, the left, and the Babbity center. It's why I'm a member of the "leave me the fuck alone" faction.
In Slendertone's study, 72 women were assigned to use the Slendertone--or nothing--for eight weeks. The women who used the product showed an average increase in muscle strength of 12% while the control group showed no such improvement. The women who used Slendertone also reported improvements in muscle firmness and in their self-image.
12% improvement? So how do those results compare to what you'd get doing fifty sit-ups or stomach crunches a day for eight weeks? Manufacturers of these kinds of "miraculous" body improvement systems never give you that comparison. Odd, huh?
The fanatically pro-Israel stance of the warbloggers is due, at least in a few cases, to the influence of the Ayn Rand cult, who believe – as Rand did – that Arabs are subhuman creatures devoid of rights...
I can't speak for anyone else, but my defense of Israel has nothing to do with a failed actress who wrote long books about her girlish crushes.
Recently I cited one Ronald Orlowski, a lefty scribbler who said of Rand,
...Ayn Rand, the whacky, crypto-fascist Russian émigré much beloved by spotty adolescent 14-year olds (and by spotty free-marketeers, when they fail to grow up).
So have I missed something? Is Rand now universally denigrated amongst lefties like Orlowski, conservatives like Stryker, and self-described libertarians like Justin Raimondo?
Thoughtful analysis like the above, including such penetrating insights as "Ayn Rand cult," "failed actress...girlish crush," and "crypto-fascist" is not particularly convincing, but what accounts for the hysterical venom from such disparate sources of late?
DAILY PUNDIT'S BIASES: Let me admit it up front: I'm biased.
I'm pretty much small-l libertarian, as much in the "leave me the fuck alone" party as anything. I'm a rabid civil liberties absolutist. I believe that all the amendments in the Bill of Rights either limit the power of government, or affirm individual rights of the people. I believe the 2nd Amendment guarantees the right of the individual in almost all cases to bear arms, and that at least ninety-five percent of gun control laws are unconstitutional.
I want the government out of my pocket, bedroom, and mind. I believe that liberal solutions, especially when they involve massive government power and authority, have done far more harm than good. I prefer a smaller, less expensive, less intrusive government, although not one limited only to the classic libertarian notion of "defense and doing justice.".
I believe a large part of the major media - that media which charts the course for most of the rest - is either consciously or unconsciously biased toward the left, and consciously or unconsciously express their bias in their reporting, not to mention their opinions.
I don't much like big concentrations of power, though if I have to choose, I'll take corporate monopolists over government monopolists. The government monopoly guys have guns and, on occasion, the will to use them.
I think most things can be approached, apprehended, understood, and dealt with rationally. I don't believe life is too complicated for anybody but experts or government agencies to understand.
I am an atheist, but I don't begrudge anybody their right to practice any religion they wish, as long as their religious practices in no way infringe on my freedom to act as if they - and their religions - don't exist.
I believe in the right to own property, the right to self defense, and freedom that stops where your nose begins - and mine, too.
I believe in the possibility of self-education, self-improvement, and self-esteem gained through practicing both of them, as well as hard work.
I believe the human spirit is much more good than evil.
I view the world from these perspectives, and write my analyses of the world from them as well. Now you know where DailyPundit's coming from. Where are you coming from?
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