Shot In The Dark

Adios, Ritter

Friday, I took my best shot at Scott Ritter's dismissive take on the Sarin Shell. To summarize: while I"m no veteran, I was enough of a reporter to find a few things that I'd have loved to get more details about.

Donald Sensing, a retired artilleryman, lights him up with style.

I don't think the speculation Ritter refers to is irresponsible. But I agree that a lot more about the shell and its legacy would be helpful. The jury is still out. I also note that the US government has been pretty mum about it. I don't really fault them for it - the tests Ritter outlines have surely been done - but I would like to know. (The question is begged, though, whether I have a need to know, and I must admit I don't, and neither does Ritter.)

Just read it.

Public Relations

Oliver "Like Kryptonite to Batman" Willis says:

Bush's response towards the mistakes of Iraq is yet another PR offensive. Expect him and his minions to continue pretending that everything is going exactly according to plan, while making the "transition" and subsequent pullout from Iraq that makes the situation in the region remain status quo -- or even worse.

What is this, besides further proof that the liberals should be required to pass a foreign-policy literacy test before being allowed to comment?

A complete whiff of the point. The President is launching a PR campaign, because the biggest problem the Administration has in Iraq right now, from any meaningful military or civil-governance perspective, is...

...wait for it...

...public relations. The President is facing down a media that is invincibly ignorant about military matters, implacable in their desire to see John Kerry (or anyone) in the White House, and utterly, completely yellow.

To wit: Robin Wright of the WaPo.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48487-2004May22.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48487-2004May22.html

Wright is perhaps the most insufferable member of the Sunday Morning Gasbag Gang. And her piece in yesterday's WaPo is perhaps a perfect encapsulation of the current wave of bad reporting (if I felt a little more cynical, I'd call them "Goebbelsian Big Lies") on which the media has staked their hopes for November.

The diplomatic campaign is a response to serious reversals over the past two months and to growing turmoil. Last week alone, the U.S.-appointed president of the Iraqi Governing Council was assassinated and a cabinet official was almost killed in a suicide bombing; in a disputed episode, more than 40 people were killed by U.S. troops at what Iraqis said was a wedding party; and 16 arrest warrants were issued for aides or associates of Ahmed Chalabi, a longtime Pentagon favorite to help lead postwar Iraq, on charges related to financial issues, leading him to sever ties with the U.S.-led coalition.

Now, look over these events (and, perhaps the one that is mentioned only obliquely in Wright's article, Abu Ghraib - a crisis whose anti-Bush legs would seem to have worn out); the assassination was a tragedy and a setback, but that's what war is like - it hasn't derailed anything. Chalabi - well, go figure, a corrupt figure in Middle Eastern Politics. Shut my mouth - it's not like he was on the take from the Oil for Influence program, now, is it? And, let's not forget, he was caught. Furthermore, why is the media (and the howling bats of the blogging left) acting like Chalabi was current news even before the allegations were brought? The Adminstration had pretty much negated Chalabi as a serious player in Iraq long before the investigation and allegations became public.

So let's recap:

• The press reports the frictional attrition of war - always tragic, eternally capricious - as if it's a unique liability to the Bush Administration.
• The press continues to spin Abu Ghraib - a crime committed by undertrained flunkies - as the direct reponsiblity of the Administration
• The press covers Chalabi - who is so 2002 - as if they've uncovered Kim Philby in the Pentagon

So why would the Administration need to work on Public Relations?

Oh, That Liberal Media

Can you imagine this argument happening if this involved Bush instead of Kerry?

Kerry told reporters in front of cameras, 'Did the training wheels fall off?'... Reporters are debating whether to treat it is as on or off the record...

Is there any doubt?

Michelle Catalano touches on the same point in greater length, and Ed ties it in with some history.

Michelle asks the right question: Is this the kind of immature jerk we want in the white house?

More Of This

On "Meet the Press", Rep. Duncan Hunter debated Dennis Kucinich about our future course in Iraq. (Who's checking the ID's here? Dennis Kucinich? What is Russert thinking?)

After listening to a few minutes of Kucinich's bloviation about there being "no WMDs", Senator ??? brought up the mustard gas mortar round found two weeks ago, as well as the Sarin round. He actually handed Kucinich a picture of the mortar round.

Kucinich stammered and phumphered. Finally, he pointed at the photograph: "Can I see that?"

"Sure, you can have it".

Kucinich looked at it for a moment, then turned and pointed it at the camera. "This is why we went into Iraq?"

It was good to see Hunter take off the gloves with the little twerp. We need more of this.

Post-Mortem Child Abuse

I'm going to be charitable here.

I have a son. I think if he died, a big part of my soul would die - and a chunk of my mind, too. If he were murdered, bigger parts of both would be in jeopardy. If he were murdered in a horrendous, grisly fashion on the world stage, I'm sure I'd be mentally and emotionally much the worse for wear, at the very best.

Michael Berg is no relation, but I think we have that much in common. Again, I'm trying to be charitable.

But his article in the WaPo today makes charity difficult. It counts, I think, as ex post facto child abuse. I try to go sparingly on the hyperbole - but it may be the single most sickening thing I've ever read in my whole life.

Berg, a lefty and alleged member of International ANSWER, the neostalinist group that demonstrated in favor of Saddam Hussein before and during the war, has a long history of, to say the least, bizarre activity, with hatred of the Bush Administration beiing the unifying factor.

Read his WaPo piece. If you're feeling awash in Judeochristian charity, you might chalk it up to the insanity of losing his son amplifying his pre-established barking-moonbat tendencies. If not, you might think he's a horribly-morally-disfigured person, defective in ways that can't even be analyzed.

Whatever you chalk it up to, he writes:

My son, Nick, was my teacher and my hero. He was the kindest, gentlest man I know; no, the kindest, gentlest human being I have ever known. He quit the Boy Scouts of America because they wanted to teach him to fire a handgun. Nick, too, poured into me the strength I needed, and still need, to tell the world about him.

This I don't doubt.

People ask me why I focus on putting the blame for my son's tragic and atrocious end on the Bush administration. They ask: "Don't you blame the five men who killed him?" I have answered that I blame them no more or less than the Bush administration, but I am wrong: I am sure, knowing my son, that somewhere during their association with him these men became aware of what an extraordinary man my son was. I take comfort that when they did the awful thing they did, they weren't quite as in to it as they might have been. I am sure that they came to admire him.

I read this, and sat for a moment exaclty as I'm sitting now, on reading it for the fourth time; agog, mute with the realization that we are dealing with a man who has departed controlled moral flight, and is living in a fantasy world where he believes the terrorist butchers were capable of seeing their victim as anything other than Yudeh, pronounced about the same as Jude. and with all the attendent metaphorical implications.

That other Berg goes on:

I am sure that the one who wielded the knife felt Nick's breath on his hand and knew that he had a real human being there. I am sure that the others looked into my son's eyes and got at least a glimmer of what the rest of the world sees. And I am sure that these murderers, for just a brief moment, did not like what they were doing.

Michael Berg - why do you "feel" that?

For as part of this fantasy, it's also certainly possible to believe that a suicide bomber looks into the eyes of a toddler in a stroller, and the toddler's father, and feels a shred of their humanity - the joys and cares and love that animates them - before she pulls the toggle and eviscerats them all with flying shrapnel.

Right?

Because it's all really Sharon's fault?

We proceed:

George Bush never looked into my son's eyes. George Bush doesn't know my son, and he is the worse for it. George Bush, though a father himself, cannot feel my pain, or that of my family, or of the world that grieves for Nick, because he is a policymaker, and he doesn't have to bear the consequences of his acts. George Bush can see neither the heart of Nick nor that of the American people, let alone that of the Iraqi people his policies are killing daily.

Donald Rumsfeld said that he took responsibility for the sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners. How could he take that responsibility when there was no consequence? Nick took the consequences.

Again I sit. Too dumbfounded to even scratch my head in wonder.

How to react to this...thing? This myopic subordination of the memory of your son, this cynical, amoral exploitation of the horror of his death, to bolster the morale of a bunch of apologists for tyrannical genocidalists?

A stringent Den-Bestian/JoeCarterian analysis of his fallacies? Like spraying Lysol on a turd.

A piqued, Rachel-Lucas-like "What an asshat?" Lets him off too easy.

I'll sit for a moment. Maybe it'll come to me as you read:

Even more than those murderers who took my son's life, I can't stand those who sit and make policies to end lives and break the lives of the still living. ...

...So what were we to do when we in America were attacked on September 11, that infamous day? I say we should have done then what we never did before: stop speaking to the people we labelled our enemies and start listening to them. Stop giving preconditions to our peaceful coexistence on this small planet, and start honouring and respecting every human's need to live free and autonomously, to truly respect the sovereignty of every state. To stop making up rules by which others must live and then separate rules for ourselves.

Right. Because the Arab World lives freely and autonomously. And the butchers who KILLED YOUR SON, YOU WORTHLESS TUB OF...you deluded little man, are fighting for that free, autonomous society that celebrates the dignity of every father's son.

Just like they celebrated the freedom and autonomy of Dan Pearl, and Nick Berg, and the toddlers ripped apart in Tel Aviv, and the Haitian immigrant pulverized in the World Trade Center.

Again, I can't think of a cogent response.

We, the people of this world, now need to act on our beliefs. We need to let the evildoers on both sides of the Atlantic know that we are fed up with war. We are fed up with the killing and bombing and maiming of innocent people. We are fed up with the lies. Yes, we are fed up with the suicide bombers, and with the failure of the Israelis and Palestinians to find a way to stop killing each other. We are fed up with negotiations and peace conferences that are entered into on both sides with preset conditions that preclude the outcome of peace. We want world peace now.

I need a minute here. I'm still too pissed to type.

OK. I'm back.

One of the great casualities of war is the humanity of ones' enemies; when the guy in the foxhole across the clearing ceases to be human, and becomes just another Kraut, Yanqui Peegdog, Jap, Boche, Hun, Gaijin, Towelhead, Infidel, My or Gook. It's an inevitable end result of prolonged warfare.

And what we see here is the same phenomenon - in reverse. Michael Berg credits his enemies - animated by an eliminationist anti-Semitism that recognized his son's humanity no more than a Klansman would have recognized that of a Freedman - with more humanity than he does his countrymen, who it would seem he regards as the real enemy.

The lowest form of evil, some say, is the denial of truth - no, the abnegation of the truth. Michael Berg, Stalinist apologist from International ANSWER, abnegates moral truth as well as reality when he credits his son's butchers, straight from the world of fantasy, with a sense of charity that is inimical to their sick view of their faith, to try to influence the equally weak-minded and deluded.

Is Michael Berg evil?

Or should we be charitable, and stick with sick, deluded, and irrational with grief?

I don't know yet.

Watch Ritter Spin

Scott Ritter's new piece in the Christian Science Monitor, "Iraq sarin shell is not part of a secret cache", probably answers a lot of questions - if you don't think about it too much.

Ritter, who was in intelligence officer with a Marine artillery battalion during his time in the Corps, says:

I would often find myself deployed in the field, on exercises where thousands of live artillery rounds were fired downrange.
In keeping with the Marine artillery motto of "shoot, move, communicate," we were always moving from one firing location to another to simulate modern war.

Let's stop right here.

Note the scenario carefully: Ritter was an intelligence officer for an artillery unit - probably a First Lieutenant. His job was trying to figure out where enemy targets were.

He goes on to describe some things that he learned in that job. Note them carefully - we'll come back to them:

This mobility had us often passing through live-fire impact areas. One thing you quickly learned was not to touch anything lying on the ground, because modern artillery shells had a high "dud" rate, meaning they didn't always function the way they were intended. Tens of thousands of these "duds" were scattered across the desert terrain, not unlike those found in Iraq.

Seems sensible enough to me - after any major war, the danger of unexploded ordnance is always a huge problem; they're still uncovering live bombs from World War II in London and Berlin.

But remember - he's talking about live fire training for a combat unit.

Not ordnance and munitions testing. The difference, as I hope you'll see below, is crucial.

In the next section Ritter - the last two years of whose life has been an exercise in steering his arguments into the logical weeds - steers into the logical, er, weeds.

The key to whether the sarin artillery round came from an arms cache or was a derelict dud rests in the physical characteristics of the shell. The artillery shells in question were fitted with two aluminum cannisters separated by a rupture disk. The two precursor chemicals for the kind of sarin associated with this shell were stored separately in these containers. The thrust of the shell being fired was designed to cause the liquid in the forward cannister to press back and break the rupture disk, whereupon the rotation of the shell as it headed downrange would mix the two precursors together, creating sarin. Upon impact with the ground - or in the air, if a timed fuse was used - a burster charge would break the shell, releasing the sarin gas.

Many things go wrong when firing an artillery round: the propellent charge can be faulty, resulting in a round that doesn't reach its target; the fuse can malfunction, preventing the burster charge from going off, leaving the round intact; the rupture disk can fail to burst, keeping precursor chemicals from combining. The fuse could break off on impact, leaving the fuse cavity empty. To the untrained eye, the artillery shell, if found in this state, would look weathered, but unfired.

What gives away whether the shell had been fired is the base-bleed charge, which unlike the rest of the shell, will show evidence of being fired (or not). Iraq declared that it had produced 170 of these base-bleed sarin artillery shells as part of a research and development program that never led to production. Ten of these shells were tested using inert fill - oil and colored water. Ten others were tested in simulated firing using the sarin precursors. And 150 of these shells, filled with sarin precursors, were live-fired at an artillery range south of Baghdad. A 10 percent dud rate among artillery shells isn't unheard of - and even greater percentages can occur. So there's a good possibility that at least 15 of these sarin artillery shells failed and lie forgotten in the Iraq desert, waiting to be picked up by any unsuspecting insurgent looking for raw material from which to construct an IED.

Given what's known about sarin shells, the US could be expected to offer a careful recital of the data with news of the shell. But facts that should have accompanied the story - the type of shell, its condition, whether it had been fired previously, and the age and viability of the sarin and precursor chemicals - were absent.

Emphasis added.

So the media - most of whose members can't tell the difference between an F-16 and an M-16 - didn't report the condition of the base bleed plugs on a shell - when most of them doing know the difference between a breechblock and an ogive, or a barrel and a barrel liner. A component of a shell - a specialized component of a very specialized shell, at that. This on a shell that, by the way, exploded, at least partially.

On this basis, Ritter declares the notion of a stockpile dead.

Ritter also notes that the 150 rounds fired were test rounds containing live precursors. Unanswered by Ritter:

• Would the test rounds have had live base bleed charges? Or would the charges have been armed had the shells indeed been testing prototypes, as Ritter himself claims they were?
• Since the shells involved were prototypes, and were being fired to test the functioning of the rounds, wouldn't the crew at the test range have attempted to have recovered any "dud" rounds? And if a test round were unrecoverable by a test range crew in peacetime under controlled test conditions (and isn't it reasonable to think that a small quantity of prototype rounds would be fired under such conditions), how would such a round magically bubble to the surface for a group of untrained thugs?
• In any case, isn't it misleading for Ritter to compare an ordnance test to the type of live-firing exercise that he describes at the beginning of the piece?

I have no answers for these questions - but Ritter doesn't offer any, either. For him to declare the idea of a WMD stockpile dead based on the existence of a shell and no apparentl knowledge of the shell or its condition seems like, at the very least, faulty logic - and at worst, another attempt to create yet another piece of media spin to influence the uninformed.

Agenda

Listened to Russert on the Today show this morning (yeah, I know - I should stop).

Talking about the war in Iraq, Russert said (I'm paraphrasing very closely here, but it's not quite a quote) that the Abu Ghraib scandal continues to hack away at the justifiation for the war, since no WMDs have been found.

No WMDs have been found.

I'm convinced - the Islamofascists could set off a sarin bomb (four liters or forty or four thousand) in Birmingham or Dallas or Pierre, in a truck labelled "From Uday With Love, Allahu Akbar", and NBC et al wouldn't make the connection - or bury it - until something happened in New York proper.

UPDATE: Smash's analysis of the sarin shell. Read the whole piece for the assumptions involved - which lead to his conclusions:

• Sometime between 1988-95, Saddam developed and manufactured sophisticated, “mix-in-flight” binary chemical weapons.

• He failed to declare these weapons, as required, to UN weapons inspectors.

• Iraq did not destroy all of its chemical weapons.

• A stockpile of artillery shells, including at least some that contain chemical warheads, has been found by “insurgents” in Iraq.

Much more to come.

But What's The News?

More photos from Abu Ghraib.

It sure looks bad.

The fresh allegations of prison abuse are contained in statements taken from 13 detainees shortly after a soldier reported the incidents to military investigators in mid-January. The detainees said they were savagely beaten and repeatedly humiliated sexually by American soldiers working on the night shift at Tier 1A in Abu Ghraib during the holy month of Ramadan, according to copies of the statements obtained by The Washington Post.

Quick - look through the story, and find if there is any reference to anyone but the original, small group of embarassments behind the first group of photos.

"It continues a very bad string of news for the Bush Administration...it'll have a horrible effect on the American people...they'll be embarassed" says Tim Russert. Er, yeah - as if this is an accidental byproduct.

Grandstanding

Mike Hatch is at it again.

He's joined a group of state attorneys-general in calling on the administration for a probe of gas prices:

In a letter to President Bush, the group of chief law enforcement officers asked him to direct U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft "to join with us in investigating whether the oil and gas industries are colluding to drive up the cost of gasoline.''

And those states would be...:

The letter was signed by officials from California, New York, Connecticut, Arizona, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Iowa and Arkansas.

Hm. Seven blue states and a small red state. Go figure.

Of course, like many of Mike Hatch's actions, there really is no overriding point:

It is not illegal under U.S. law for a company to act on its own to restrict supplies or close a refinery that may lead to higher pump prices.

Oil companies are also permitted to practice so-called ''zone pricing,'' where they charge different gasoline prices in a specific location or city, which often result in pump costs being higher at service stations located just blocks apart.

I guess it's

Do The Math

The Strib declares "Bush fundraising edge not what it was" in an article reprinted from the LA Times this morning.

Let's look this over. The lede says:

President Bush's once-insurmountable cash advantage over Democrat John Kerry has dwindled in the wake of record spending by Bush and unexpected fundraising success by Kerry.

Wow! Sounds pretty bad for the President, doesn't it? That plucky underdog Kerry is sure giving those rich conservatives what-for, isn't he?

Let's look this over.

Next, the article tells us:

Figures provided by the campaigns Thursday show that, although Bush's reelection campaign is continuing to shatter fundraising records -- it passed the $200 million mark in April -- Kerry has raised $32 million more than the president in the past two months and has now collected $115 million through April.

Right. So in terms of money available that means...:

Bush now has $72 million, compared with $28 million for the presumptive Democratic nominee. At the end of last year, Kerry was so short of cash that he loaned his campaign $6 million by taking out a mortgage on his family's Boston home.

Right. But then Howard Dean flamed out and the real campaign began.

But that's not important, is it?

Posted by Mitch at 06:47 AM | Comments (0)

Hearts and Minds

Further evidence that I might be close to collecting on my bet with the rest of the Northern Allliance, courtesy of Robert Garcia Tagorda.

The news from Fallujah has been generally good, although not spectacular - which I'd suspect is just fine by the locals.

Marines and Navy Seabees are seeking Iraqi contractors to repair and refurbish mosques in an effort to dispel the notion that the United States has declared war on Islam.

The effort is proceeding more quickly in the surrounding nearby villages than in this Sunni Triangle city where Marines and insurgents waged bloody combat for three weeks.

The Marines have a growing list of mosques that villagers would like help in repairing, renovating or expanding. Few, if any, village mosques were damaged during the fight, but the Americans said that fixing the mosques could elicit more goodwill in return than almost any other construction project.

"The mosques are part of their communal life, and that's what we're here to improve," said Lt. Col. Colin McNease, officer in charge of the civil affairs unit of the 1st Marine Regiment. "This is a good way to demonstrate that this is not a war against Islam."

Unreported in the major media? Check.

And yet it's a win.

The Perils of Blogging at 5AM

Reader Mike points out two errors on my part.

First - John Kerry's proposal for a $.50/gallon hike in the gas tax was, in fact, ten years ago. While it's probably fair to say that a Kerry administration will be a taxapalooza, the gas tax hike has been off Kerry's table for a decade. He apparently never voted for such an increase (or much of anything else, as it happens).

Second - I misread the date of a press conference when I wrote the piece about the Boston city councilman scheduling a news conference to peddle phony pictures of GIs attacking Iraqi women. The conference took place a week ago, not yesterday. My error. Of course, it's still disgraceful that a Boston city official would try to make political hay out of photos that were such obvious fakes - but I did mess up the dates involved. I don't know that the councilman involved still believes in the Glob's rape story.

Gotta quit the morning blogging. Bleagh.

When He Says "Help", He Means "Endlessly Stonewall"

The latest John Kerry ad crows that the Massachusetts senator joined with John McCain to work on solving the POW/MIA issue.

Leave aside for a moment the curious mention of a senator from an opposing party in a Kerry campaign ad - certainly a clumsy attempt to drive a wedge among Republicans.

The ad has a problem - there are indications that Kerry stonewalled the investigation into the fate of the MIAs.

I first wrote about this last February, in the wake of a Sidney "Killing Fields" Schanberg piece in the Village Voice.

According to Schanberg, Kerry did his best to completely bury any evidence of MIA presence in Vietnam:

In the committee's early days, Kerry had given encouraging indications of being a committed investigator. He said he had "leads" to the existence of P.O.W.'s still in captivity. He said the number of these likely survivors was more than 100 and that this was the minimum. But in a very short time, he stopped saying such things and morphed his role into one of full alliance with the executive branch, the Pentagon, and other Washington hierarchies, joining their long-running effort to obscure and deny that a significant number of live American prisoners had not been returned. As many as 700 withheld P.O.W.'s were cited in credible intelligence documents, including a speech by a senior North Vietnamese general that was discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar.

Here are details of a few of the specific steps Kerry took to hide evidence about these P.O.W.'s.

• He gave orders to his committee staff to shred crucial intelligence documents. The shredding stopped only when some intelligence staffers staged a protest. Some wrote internal memos calling for a criminal investigation. One such memo?from John F. McCreary, a lawyer and staff intelligence analyst?reported that the committee's chief counsel, J. William Codinha, a longtime Kerry friend, "ridiculed the staff members" and said, "Who's the injured party?" When staffers cited "the 2,494 families of the unaccounted-for U.S. servicemen, among others," the McCreary memo continued, Codinha said: "Who's going to tell them? It's classified."
• Kerry defended the shredding by saying the documents weren't originals, only copies?but the staff's fear was that with the destruction of the copies, the information would never get into the public domain, which it didn't. Kerry had promised the staff that all documents acquired and prepared by the committee would be turned over to the National Archives at the committee's expiration. This didn't happen. Both the staff and independent researchers reported that many critical documents were withheld.
• Another protest memo from the staff reported: "An internal Department of Defense Memorandum identifies Frances Zwenig [Kerry's staff director] as the conduit to the Department of Defense for the acquisition of sensitive and restricted information from this Committee . . . lines of investigation have been seriously compromised by leaks" to the Pentagon and "other agencies of the executive branch." It also said the Zwenig leaks were "endangering the lives and livelihood of two witnesses."
• A number of staffers became increasingly upset about Kerry's close relationship with the Department of Defense, which was supposed to be under examination. (Dick Cheney was then defense secretary.) It had become clear that Kerry, Zwenig, and others close to the chairman, such as Senator John McCain of Arizona, a dominant committee member, had gotten cozy with the officials and agencies supposedly being probed for obscuring P.O.W. information over the years. Committee hearings, for example, were being orchestrated to suit the examinees, who were receiving lists of potential questions in advance. Another internal memo from the period, by a staffer who requested anonymity, said: "Speaking for the other investigators, I can say we are sick and tired of this investigation being controlled by those we are supposedly investigating."
• The Kerry investigative technique was equally soft in many other critical ways. He rejected all suggestions that the committee require former presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush to testify. All were in the Oval Office during the Vietnam era and its aftermath. They had information critical to the committee, for each president was carefully and regularly briefed by his national security adviser and others about P.O.W. developments. It was a huge issue at that time.
• Kerry also refused to subpoena the Nixon office tapes (yes, the Watergate tapes) from the early months of 1973 when the P.O.W.'s were an intense subject because of the peace talks and the prisoner return that followed. (Nixon had rejected committee requests to provide the tapes voluntarily.) Information had seeped out for years that during the Paris talks and afterward, Nixon had been briefed in detail by then national security advisor Brent Scowcroft and others about the existence of P.O.W.'s whom Hanoi was not admitting to. Nixon, distracted by Watergate, apparently decided it was crucial to get out of the Vietnam mess immediately, even if it cost those lives. Maybe he thought there would be other chances down the road to bring these men back. So he approved the peace treaty and on March 29, 1973, the day the last of the 591 acknowledged prisoners were released in Hanoi, Nixon announced on national television: "All of our American P.O.W.'s are on their way home."

Today, Kerry claims he worked to solve the POW/MIA issue. At least some of his fellow 'nam vets are not buying it.

And it's not just the Village Voice (hardly a left-leaning source), by the way - there was once a fair amount of press coverage of this issue - ten year ago. Apparently that was back before the press had dedicated itself to Kerry's election.

I guess he worked to obscure it, before he worked to solve it...

He Wanted to Raise Gas Prices - Before He Wanted to Lower Them

John Kerry has spent the week condemning the administration for...gas prices.

The same John Kerry that, a month ago, proposed a 50 cents/gallon gas tax.

He also opposed tapping the nation's strategic oil reserve - saying it was a bad idea in a time of terrorism.

As if we're going to fight the war on terror the same way we fought World War II and planned to fight World War III - with fleets of conventional tanks cruising about the North German Plain.

Sniping

Yesterday morning's PiPress story was slugged "DFL Wants to Play Nice". Oh, well. It's about time.

The SCSU Scholars titled it better: "DFL Shoots Their Hostage". It fits.

the Pawlenty administration and the GOP House have effectively neutered the DFL-controlled Senate. The DFL agenda was completlely buried in the Legislature this session - and it very visibly rankled the Democrats.

So they took the only shot they had left; they took Yecke down with their agenda.

The results?

The teacher taliban congratulate themselves on passing a compromise social sciences bill that they cannot possibly have read yet (they weren't finalized until 9:45pm Saturday night and voted on less than twelve hours later) and as best anyone can tell uses the science standards that come from December 2003. (See the Senate Journal, page 5217.) That is to say, they do not know what they are rooting for except the taking of a hide.

Fearless prediction, here: I think the GOP and the state's second-most-powerful party are going to have a major face-off in the near future. That second-most-powerful party is the teachers' union.

The teachers' mounting anger and frustration this past year has been amazing to watch. Teachers have always been involved in politics, of course; I read in 2000 that teachers represented a third of the Democrat party national convention delegates; many DFL legislators came from education.

But I remember a time when those politics stayed out of the classroom. No more. My son's ex-teacher delivered DFL propaganda directly to the class (I paid my son a dollar for every example he brought home, and he kept himself handsomely outfitted in Yu-Gi-Oh cards for a while there - until I yanked him the hell out of that class and school), and his ex-school declared itself a "peace site", with all the multi-culti bloviation that involves.

But a new wrinkle this year - while sitting in conferences about my son's academics, the school staff -teachers, administrators and school workers - would launch into tirades about No Child Left Behind; they'd snarl about Cheri Pierson Yecke and her plans; they'd tell rancid George W. Bush jokes, apparenly assuming any parent in their school would share their views. The staff, at least at that school (and I know it's far from unique - my daughter's school last year felt the same) was no less politicized than a DFL district caucus.

In other words, the DFL drew from a deep well of anger to carry out its hatchet job on Yecke.

And that's all that anger accomplished.

A Lie Will Travel A Thousand Miles

Even though the Boston Glob was caught passing off porn pictures as photos of GIs gang-raping Iraqi women - pictures that didn't pass the most cursory knowledgeable fact-checking by their audience - the damage is done.

A Boston City Councilman is still peddling the pictures.

Taranto says:

A Boston city councilman held a press conference the other day to disseminate enemy propaganda. Dan Kennedy of the Boston Phoenix quotes the press release announcing the event:

Release of US Military rape photographs in Iraq!!!

Assignment Desk/City Desk:

The Black Community Information Center Inc. will hold a press conference on Tuesday, May 11th, 2004, 9:30 a.m. The purpose of the press conference is to release copies of dramatic photos of members of the US Military, gang raping innocent Iraqi women in Iraq.

The press conference will be held in the Curley Room at Boston City Hall (5th Floor) in downtown Boston, Massachusetts.

For more information, call [phone numbers deleted].

Sadiki Kambon
Director, BCIC Inc.The Boston Globe reported on the event, where Councilman Chuck Turner declared: "The American people have a right and responsibility to see the pictures." The Globe made it clear that Kambon and Turner's claims were thin:In the meantime, the Glob's response to the hoax's exposure is coming under fire - from the left:

Boston Globe ombudsman Christine Chinlund gets a B-minus today for her assessment of what went wrong with those hardcore porn pictures that made their way into the Globe on Wednesday. The photos were promoted by Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner and local activist Sadiki Kambon as possibly depicting US soldiers raping Iraqi women.

Chinlund is utterly believable in describing the comedy of errors that led to a photo's being published in which the porn pictures were visible. In newsrooms, as in life, whenever a mistake can be explained in terms of confusion and incompetence rather than malicious intent, go with confusion and incompetence.

It remains inexplicable how or why Globe editors, once they realized they had a problem, decided merely to shrink the photo rather than pull it altogether. Yes, shrinking did make the porn more difficult to see, but come on folks. Get it out of there...

Quit digging!

Site of the Day

Let's get one thing straight: I am no baby boomer. Some people say the baby boom ended in 1964, a year after I was born. Rubbish. Baby Boomers are the children of people who were of child-bearing age at the end of World War II. My dad was nine, my mom was five. Nyah. Find another

Nah, some of my best friends are baby boomers. But like an awful lot of us in the non-generation that came between the baby boomers and the next generation, I am sick to death of hearing about them. In fact, I'm sick of hearing about generations with names.

Not as sick as
this guy is.

It Must Be For Real

For weeks, the blogophere's been up in arms about UNScam - the systematic plundering of the UN's "Oil for Food" program to the benefit of Hussein, his family, and his various benefactors overseas. It's been up in arms to the point that entire blogs have sprung up, covering the scandal in greater depth than to which the "elite" media has deigned.

Finally - over a month after the Northern Alliance first interviewed Claudia Rosett on the topic - signs that the "elite" media recognizes the story...

...because I heard it mentioned on "All Things Considered".

Not that it's on their website or anything...

This Just In

I just got this off the AP wire:

Boston (AP): The Massachusetts Supreme Court has just ruled that men may give birth.

The ruling - brought by a group seeking full equality for men - means that for the first time, men will be able to carry fetuses to birth.

"This is a huge victory" said Pat Wess-Hess, an activist in the field. "It now means the institution of childbirth is fully equal".

Efforts to pass such a law through the legislative process had consistently failed. Critic John Smith said "Y'know, it's kinda absurd - for millions of years, the child-bearing process was something that women did".

Wess-Hess responded "There was a time people thought there were biological justifications for slavery, too! And besides - lots of women are bad mothers - what guarantee do you have that men will be any worse?"

Men are reported to be flying to Massachusetts to start giving birth. According to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, it will be legal at 12:01AM Thursday morning.

More as the story develops.

Guns Didn't Cure Cancer Yet

The Strib saw fit to publish this letter, by Ron Carlson of St. Croix Beach, to the editor the other day:

The first anniversary of Minnesota's "concealed carry" gun law has come
and gone, and the sky has neither fallen nor cleared. I'm still waiting,
though, to hear about just one Minnesota case where a gun, legitimate or
otherwise, has been used to successfully thwart a crime.

We interrupt this pro-victim-disarmament screed for some facts.

For starters, you need to be reading Joel Rosenberg's blog for the straight story about anything pertaining to concealed carry issues. To read a week or two's worth of Joel's blog is to see a world of Citizens for a Supine "Safer" Minnesota's army of strawmen lit on fire, as Lileks says, and kicked around the stage.

Let's return to Mr. Carlson's letter:

I still hope this law will reduce crime, not just add legitimacy to our dangerous gun culture.

Mr. Carlson; "gun culture" in this nation is incredibly safe. It's the drug-dealing gang "culture" that gives us our problem. Not that the Strib would tell us.

By the way, there have been several crimes deterred by permit holders. By memory, I can recall a case where a permittee collared a carjacker in St. Paul last year.

In the meantime, I'll remain unarmed, unfrightened and unconvinced.

What is this conceit of the anti-gunners, that getting permit implies some sort of "Fright?" Is carrying a spare tire, or going into a basement when a tornado approaches, "fright"? It's one of those strawmen that the victim-disarmament crowd relies on in the absence of any logical response.

Read Joel's blog.

Underrated

Every morning, I wake with a keen realization that there are colossal wrongs that need to be righted.

Yeah, yeah - dictatorships and injustice, too.

But for the purposes of this post, I'm talking about music, here.

I'm not talking about groups with great critical backing but remained unheard-of outside their regions or hard-core fan bases, groups like the Iron City Houserockers, Southside Johnny, or Tenants' Union. No - I'm talking about artists that saw a glimpse of fame - and have seen their body of work unjustly poo-poohed.

History has left some accounts to be set straight. And I'm just the guy to do it.

1. Katrina and the Waves - Yeah, "Walking on Sunshine" was overplayed. So was "Imagine", and does anyone (but Lileks and I) say John Lennon's solo career was a joke? "Touch Me" gets overplayed, but does anyone say that Doors were a glorified Holiday Inn lounge band with...oh, wait, I say that. Where was I? Oh, yeah - so what if "WOS" got overplayed? They made other music! And lots of it is very, very good! Listen to their American debut record (compiled from the best of their first three British albums), and tell me "Red Wine and Whiskey" and "Going Down To Liverpool" aren't the coolest garage-pop songs of 1983 (Yeah, yeah - except for "I Don't Mind", by the incomparable Nelsons - but that wasn't exactly a hit, was it)? Or that "Cry To Me" or "Go On Cry" aren't the best last-call songs ever written? Or that Kim Rew (an alum of the glorious Soft Boys) isn't the most gleefully, anarchically-baroque guitar player (anarchically-baroque - I like that) ever to do a top-forty record?

   You can't. Dont try.

2. Gin Blossoms - So you heard "Hey Jealousy" too much? Awwww, you poor thing. When I was a kid, they overplayed "I've Never Been To Me" (both versions!) and "Let 'Em In" and "Billy Don't Be A Hero" - treacly dreck, the seamy underside of the seventis. Did "Jealousy" get overplayed? So friggin' what? It was the best song about ex-hankering ever to appear on the top forty, from an album that was, really, the most vibrant hangover record ever put out. That album was on constant repeat during many overnight "finish the job" sessons - partly because it was the only CD I owned in those lean years, partly because it was just damned fine rock and roll. Their second album, at its best, was even better (although not as consistent) - and both albums were crammed with hooks you could hang sides of beef on.
3. Gordon LightfootYou think "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is a joke? First, you're wrong. Second, so what? Lightfoot did the whole singer-songwriter thing, without becoming James Taylor (See: Overrated artists), and wrote a lot of really cool music (including "Fitzgerald") from the perspective of - get this - a regular schlemiel who looked and sounded like he'd meet you at the bar after his set for a couple of Schlitzes. And "Summer Side Of Life" is an amazing song.
4. Big CountryThought "In A Big Country" got beaten to death? Pffft. It was probably the best radio single of 1983. And beyond that, every song on their first American album was great (except "Porrohman", but even that was an extravaganza of fun for guitar players), and their followup, "Steeltown", was just gorgeous - angry (the title cut), lovely ("Tall Ships Go"), poignant ("Just A Shadow")...that record still makes me verklempt.

That is all.

Unintended Consequences?

Christianity is now illegal - at least in Massachussetts.

Let the Chicago Boyz explain.

My inclination, as a Jacksonian American, is to say I don't give a shit what they do or what they call it. And, in fact, I don't. However, by calling a homosexual union marriage, and making it a Constitutional right, the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and soon many like-minded courts around the country, are more or less intentionally making Christianity illegal. Repeat: Christianity is being made illegal. The teaching that homosexuality is a sin is embedded in Christianity. It is in the Pauline letters. There is no getting around it. I have heard the counter-arguments, and they don't cut any ice. The Christian teaching against homosexuality is organic, it was part and parcel of the attack on the pagan society of the Roman Empire and it is fundamental to the Christian conception of marriage and sexuality. So, again, if gay marriage is a Constitutional right, then anyone preaching the moral teaching of Christianity is committing a hate crime or otherwise attacking the exercise of a Constitutional right. I object to this as a Christian, obviously.

More to come.

The Accidental WMD

The left is toddling around the WMD story like it's a big win for them. Oliver "Like Cream Cheese to Bagels" Willis says:

Either way, it's a far cry from stockpiles just outside Tikrit (as Rumsfeld said) or the capability to launch an attack on Europe in minutes (as Tony Blair said) or a mushroom cloud (as Bush said).

And of course, the imperial Secretary Rumsfeld refused to listen to the people who know and send an adequate amount of forces into Iraq in the first place, then at least whatever weapons or weapons material would have been secured.

Leave aside the left's incessant inconsitency (should we have more troops in Iraq, or none at all?) - the left seems to want to establish a acceptable level of WMDs in Iraq.

Problem is, that limit is already completely blown: Between the two sarin-armed artillery rounds, the recent discovery of mustard gas, and of course the huge, busted attack in Amman, any "acceptable" level of WMD in Iraq is long breached.

The Monkeys put it well yesterday, in response to Hugh Hewitt's interview of Ron Brownstein:

In poo-pooing the discovery/deployment of a sarin-containing artillery shell in Iraq (in addition to last week's mustard gas shell), Brownstein was asked if they had any bearing on the notion that "WMD's haven't been found." He said that they didn't, and pondered, "We don't even know where that shell came from." Brownstein was obviously suggesting that the artillery round could have been brought in from somewhere outside Iraq by someone other than Iraqis, but not in so many words.
Taking Brownstein's implication to its logical conclusion, I have to ask: if it's possible that chemical-weapon artillery shells were brought into Iraq in the time since its occupation, isn't it possible that chemical-weapon artillery shells were taken out of Iraq (say... into Syria?) during the many months between the obvious hardening of U.S. resolve for invasion and the point at which all of the hoops had been jumped through to make it happen? I'm bothered by Brownstein's implication that since we have not already uncovered an IKEA or Cosco of chemical, biological, and radiological nasties, there simply could not have been any.

What does the WMD discovery mean?
One of three things. Let's phrase them in the form of standard-issue leftist poo-poohings:

1. It's just a couple of cannonballs - Ah. So what's the threshold of acceptable nerve gas in the hands of terrorists, genius?
2. The terrorists got the shells by accident - Hm. So Sarin gas is lying around where any moron can grab it? That's comforting.
3. It's still no proof that there are any significant numbers of WMDs in Iraq - Hm. So we're supposed to feel better that Iraq's fine, upstanding neighbors in Syria and Iran are supplying sarin gas and Allah knows what else?

So what's the bad news?

Hats Off To Randy Owen

I worked at three country stations during my radio career. I never much cared for Alabama.

Now that they're on their farewell tour, I may change my mind.

You've heard the story. Kyle Munson is the music critic for the Des Moines Register. In his review of Alabama's (first?) Farewell Tour appearance in Ames, he highlights everything that separates the red and blue in this election.:

Dear Randy Owen, lead singer of Alabama:

You had to go and open your big mouth, act like Rush Limbaugh or Michael Reagan or Michael Savage or some similar right-wing blowhard pundit, and ruin the concert review I intended to write.

There's a concert reviewin here somewhere - flat, uninspired, pretty much a cookiecutter review of, to be fair, a very proficient cookiecutter country group.

But this review was never about the concert.

No matter. [Owen's] rant spoiled all of it for me.

"Wouldn't it be great if people in the media would just say something great about our troops?" you said from the stage.

Then you went on to suggest that our reporting on the war in Iraq, including coverage of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison, is what's endangering the lives of U.S. soldiers overseas - not the fighting or atrocities themselves.

"Makes we want to kick their asses," you said of the media.

Of course most of the 6,591 fans applauded your rant, thanks in no small part to how you and the band set them up for your monologue by playing "America the Beautiful."

So the crowd's reaction was due to psychological manipulation, not the genuine feeling of an awful lot of people?

There's nothing wrong with a patriotic salute in concert, and it's certainly a tradition in mainstream country music. What sickened me was how you manipulated that patriotic sentiment in the arena and, worse, the seriousness of the war, just in the name of taking a cheap shot at my industry.

In one breath you praised our nation's freedoms, but in the next breath you dismissed freedom of the press as a monolithic liberal conspiracy.

Kyle Munson! Standing at the very forefront of defending the liberties we hold dear! Against Randy Owen of Alabama!

Look, Munson; Owen didn't "dismiss freedom of the press". He attacked media bias.

Don't misunderstand me. Of course I want every one of our soldiers to return home safely. My outrage here is very specific: your pathetic scapegoating of the media that ruined your attempt to honor the military.

Get outside the big,er, city sometime, Kyle. You might find a lot of people share Owen's beliefs. It's not "scapegoating the media". It's attacking them for their actions.

Meanwhile, good riddance to your political badgering from the stage.

Kyle - I'll make you a deal: You show me any case where you've had a similar hissy about any of the hundreds of artists who regularly inflict these kinds of rants from the stage, from the left, and I won't think you're a precious, whiny little wanker.

Have your people call my people.

On a Roll

This story in the Strib credits momentum from the discovery of Dru Sjodin's body in last weekend's discovery of the remains of Erika Dahlquist.

Dahlquist was one of the four Minnesotans in their early twenties that disappeared nearly two years ago, prompting fears of a serial killer on the loose:

Still grieving but still relentless four weeks after recovering Dru Sjodin's body, her relatives and friends played a major role over the weekend in solving another haunting mystery: locating the body of Erika Dalquist.
The skeletal remains of the 21-year-old Brainerd woman, missing since she left a downtown Brainerd bar 18 months ago, were found early Saturday evening on a ranch just east of Brainerd in Nokoy Lake Township -- property owned by the grandparents of a Brainerd man who was and apparently remains the primary suspect.

Fears of a serial killer have abated over the years.

We should turn our attention to the serial negligence of the Legislature, who created the catch and release system that keeps so many of these dirtwads on the street.

All The Wrong Reasons

Leave aside political and religious beliefs for a moment. I worry about some of the gay couples that are currently saying their vows in Massachussetts.

There are a lot of reasons to get married; some good (because you've met someone who's not only the love of your life, but someone you know you'll love for your whole life), most of them bad (convenience, morally-acceptable access to sex, because all your friends from college are doing it, because you've got nothing else going on in your life, because you want the tax deduction already, because your spouse-to-be wants to feel you're committed, etc, etc).

Of all the reasons to get married - and remember, we're leaving the gender mix of the participants out of it - I can't think of a worse one than "sticking it to the man", getting married because it sticks it to the homophobic patriarchy.

Again, leaving aside the genders involved - approaching marriage from such a perspective is crushingly irresponsible, cheapens the institution, and, in the case of gay marriage, reinforces all the stereotypes of the whole idea.

How many of the couples flooding to Massachusetts are marrying for political reasons? I don't know - they know who they are. Or, given the emotions that frequently lead to marriage, perhaps they don't. In any case, we'll find out soon enough.

No, We're the Judean People's Front...

The radical left in London gets into a battle over who's more radically left, as opposed to leftily radical.

It happened at a protest in London:

OutRage and Queer Youth Alliance went to the protest march at Trafalgar Square to show their support for people of Palestine. But they also urged the Palestinian Authority to halt the arrest, torture and murder of homosexuals.
As soon as they arrived at the square members of the two groups were surrounded by an angry, screaming mob of Islamic fundamentalists, Anglican clergymen, members of the Socialist Workers Party, the Stop the War Coalition, and officials from the protest organizers, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC).
They variously attacked the gay activists as "racists", "Zionists", "CIA and MI5 agents", "supporters of the Sharon government" and accused the gays of "dividing the Free Palestine movement".

Wow. That has to hurt.

Via Roger L. Simon, Jay Reding and Little Green Footballs.

Posted by Mitch at 03:30 AM | Comments (0)

All Hope Is Not Lost

My daughter was watching TV in the next room. A Clay Aiken video came on.

"Oh, G-d!", she exclaimed.

I made a crashing thunder sound. "Don't blame me for him".

It's two minutes, and she's still laughing.

Line of the Day, Issue of the Year

Scott "The Big Trunk" Johnson at Powerline has the money quote of the day, perhaps for the whole blogosphere, in re the Massachussetts Supreme Court's decision on gay marriage.

The love that won't shut up now demands the approval of those who want little more than the inner freedom to dissaprove of certain conduct and to preserve legal recognition of the natural distinctions on which the family is based so that the family might be preserved.

This hits the nail on the head.

As a libertarian, I was at one point a grudging supporter of gay marriage. The conduct of those who support the idea, especially their end-run around the court of public opinion straight to the Court of the Disengaged Starchamber - as well as the often-more-coherent conservative arguments against the idea - have morphed my opinion from grudging support to mild opposition. The spectacle in San Francisco, and the ideologically-jackbooted demands for aquiescence and often-facile sloganeering on the part of some gay marriage supporters, have overrun what seemed at one time to be in some ways a reasonable argument.

Chronicles of NARN

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost writes an overly self-effacing (of himself) and gratifyingly laudatory (for us) post on his appearance on the Northern Alliance Radio Network (NARN) show last weekend.

Doing a radio interview into a cell phone - especially if it's your first radio intervew - is a little like trying to sing opera through a Mister Microphone. It's especially hard if you're doing it, as Joe did, from a rifle range. Or so it seemed. The phone line had a loud, rhythmic "snap" that actually hurt through the headphones.

Technical glitches aside, Joe Carter is a great interview - the incisive intelligence you see on Evangelical Outpost is still there on the air. I highly recommend him to any media people who are looking for a great perspective on the war, and much more.

His post brings up some interesting points.

Joe notes:

The NARN model is based on a simple premise: take people with interesting viewpoints, something to say, and an ability to communicate and give them airtime.

There's a lot of luck involved, too. After shows, many of the guys will smile and say "It's like falling off a log". When it all works, it is - and we've gotten pleasantly spoiled by the fact that the NARN guys have such great chemistry together, something that is all the more amazing when you realize that the show came together with no rehearsal, no serious preparation. In fact, when the show started on March 6, I had met most of the guys exactly twice, at lunch with Hewitt and at the studio the week before, where I called a one-hour meeting to show everyone what a microphone looked like and how headphones worked. If the show is a success, it's because by a pure roll of the dice, we managed to find 10 or so guys that just plain click on the air.

But as Joe notes, the premise is simple - and I'm sure that if the NARN continues to succeed the way it has (far beyond my wildest pipe-dreams, to be honest) it'll be tried again. Bloggers have been percolating upward through the media for a while - the likes of Glenn Reynolds are becoming A-list guests - and liberal uber-blogger Atrios got a shot filling in for Janeane Garofalo in April.

Content-wise, of course, Joe notes a huge advantage we have:

In the last hour of Saturday’s show, the show featured Vox Day. Vox, who is a syndicated columnist as well as a popular blogger, is a “Christian libertarian”, a inimitable viewpoint you’re unlikely to find espoused in the mainstream media...By adding him to the lineup, NARN shows that they are interested in airing unique voices.

The choice of adding me to the show was also rather radical. When discussing the Abu Ghraib scandal, most media have either talked to other journalists or interviewed high-ranking military officers. Since the atrocities were committed by enlisted reservists, the NA took what should be the common sense choice and talked to someone who was both enlisted and familiar with reservists...I’ve been a Marine for over fifteen years and yet I can’t recall the last time an active-duty enlisted service member was given a full thirty minutes of air time to present their views on military issues.

Joe hits on a huge point; a hugely fun thing about NARN is that we can straddle both talk-radio worlds; we can talk eclectic without sounding like NPR (Scott "Big Trunk" Johnson of Powerline books the most fascinating guests I've ever dealt with), and we can do talk radio that goes outside the traditional template for conservative talk radio. It helps that most of us aren't "radio people" (only Lileks and I have ever done radio for money before). We bring perspectives and backgrounds to the table that most commercial (and public) talk radio people just don't.

It could be the recipe for a lot of interesting projects in the future.

But the big question that every radio station's management will ask - and "will it be interesting" won't make the top ten list of questions - is "where's the money". It's a good question. Radio's not a charity (unless you're Air America and George Soros is keeping you afloat) - commercial radio floats on a sea of money, that substance that talks while BS walks. We are, quite frankly, lucky that AM1280 has given us three hours of air time a week that we don't have to pay for, basically on the promise that we'll be a net gain for them someday. It doesn't happen often - the reason weekend radio is, as Joe correctly notes, "...programs with titles such as “The Home Mortgage Show” or “Here’s to Your Health.”, shows so dull it makes you wonder how their hosts even manage to stay awake through them" is because they buy the time for their shows. That's right - most weekend talk radio is, essentially, infomercials. AM1280 is, essentially, waving off three hours of infomercials to run NARN. Not many station managers will take that sort of chance on an idea this unproven. I think everyone involved would like to see the Northern Alliance develop a raft of sponsors and become a profitable venture for AM1280 - that, in fact, will be the arbiter of real success. There are possibilities here.

There are no doubt dozens of bloggers, and groups of bloggers, that could get together a show every bit as interesting as the NARN. I'd love to hear people like Infinite Monkeys or Michelle Catalano on the air. Even non-commercial radio could benefit from bloggers' input - a gleeful eclectic like a Sheila O'Malley could do a lot to un-stodgify public radio. And I wonder if Air America would be a very different proposition if they'd shucked their Hollywood-style, top-down, downright-condescending approach and tried out a few of the more interesting lefty bloggers? I think Oliver Willis, Kevin Drum and/or Wonkette would do a much more interesting and vastly more saleable show than, say, Laura Flanders or Robert Kennedy Jr. (or perhaps Marty Kaplan).

The real question is, can the idea pay its way?

The next 6-12 months should be interesting, both for the NARN and for the whole idea of bloggers doing radio.

Blargh

From Friday through yesterday I put in 28-odd hours, during which I came down with one of those existentially-terrifying cold/headache/cough combinations.

So it should be another fairly lame day of blogging - it hurts to look at the monitor right now.

More later - or tomorrow.

A Bunch of Naked Guys..

...in an Iraqi prison going through the equivalent of fraternity hazing get ten days of breathless coverage in the media.

Pictures of guys watching Private Lindy Englund (the Tonya Harding of the 21st Century) get jiggy with a bunch of her comrades in, er, arms takes up hours of the Senate's time.

But let a bunch of Islamofascists firebomb a Jewish school in until-recently-appeasenik Canada?

What do you think?

If the first you saw of this story was in Little Green Footballs, then I'm not surprised:

Montreal — Three of five people charged in last month’s firebombing of a Jewish elementary school made a video court appearance Saturday.

Two 18-year-old men and a woman in her 30s entered pleas of not guilty and will be back in court Monday for a bail hearing.

They continue to be held in custody.

The men are charged with arson and conspiracy. The woman is charged with being an accessory after the fact. Two other men also face charges in the case.

A note left at the United Talmud Torah elementary school after the April 5 firebombing said the attack was in retaliation for Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

I wonder if firebombing a school was in retaliation for the nude pictures?

Senator Kennedy?

Counting Our Blessings

I've often wondered what the threshold of experience and talent is to become a columnist.

Very low, I've guessed repeatedly over the years, as I and my fellow Northern Alliance members raked the likes of Nick Coleman and Lori Sturdevant and Brian "The Press Is Conservative" Lambert over the coals.

But then I look at the bright side; we could live in Toronto.

To wit: Antonia Zerbisias, in the Toronto Star.

She wrote this piece, claiming that the so-called "warbloggers" have fallen silent.

It begins like this:

The warblog drums are growing silent.
They're either running out of time, or money, or steam — or the conviction that Operation Iraqi Freedom was going to be a cakewalk in the sand.
If the above makes no sense to you, then you have not been paying attention to the chest-thumping chaterati of the cybersphere, a post 9/11 class of might-is-right and right-is-might wordsmiths who rode the "War on terror" wave with their warmongering web logs.
But now, with the news getting more dire, the quag more mired and the cost of war ever higher, the warbloggers find themselves on the wrong side of history. And so some of them are putting down their mice and putting up a white flag.

I'll spare you having to read the rest of it; her "point" is that since many "warbloggers" are not covering the war, 24-7-52, exclusively, anymore, it's proof that "we" think the war is a debacle.

Which warbloggers? The ones that insulted her - apparently the only conservative bloggers she reads. The whole piece is the sort of whiny, petulant screed you'd expect to read in a fourth-tier blog in full dudgeon over yet another de-linking controversy. Tripe.

It's a moronic conclusion, of course - most of the genuinely good coverage of the war is still coming from the likes of Belmont Club, Command Post, and a host of Military and Iraqi bloggers; reading a handful of these daily provide more coverage of the successes, and more honest coverage of the troubles in Iraq than a month in the major media, and more than Antonia Zerbisias will ever write in her entire, inexplicable career.

Boo, meet Yah

Set your alarm clocks: Tuesday, May 25, the Northern Alliance will be filling in for Hewitt again - 5-8 Central time, coast to coast.

If you live by one of Hewitt's affiliates, give us a listen - or better yet, call in!

Question for FrankenNet's Webmaster

Webmaster/Masterette: Two questions about the FrankenNet website:

1. I see you've chosen to break up your station list by grography. I notice that you divide the nation into "East" and "West/Central". Is that an insight into the way the left views America as a whole?
2. Also - are you suuuure Key West, Florida is "West/Central?"

Just checking.

Lonesome Day

15 hours of work today.

More work tomorrow and Sunday, and the NARN show on top of it. Not the fun kind of work - where you're rolling on inspiration. No - just dotting and crossing. Mental Chinese water torture.

Expect more blogging Monday.

Andrew Sullivan can take a month off - I think I rate a day, right?

Scam America

Not only is this piece another scathing review of Air America FrankenNet, we got into something potentially much deeper.

It's something that might tend tend to confirm something I got from Captain Ed's comments the other day.

During a day of torture by radio, I heard ads for Hewlett-Packard, Greyhound and, especially, General Motors. I asked GM why it appeared in such shows.
Ryndee Carney, GM's manager of marketing communications, said the ads were wrongly picked up from an earlier deal with WLIB. She said the station was ordered to "cease and desist" Tuesday, and added: "GM will not advertise on any Air America affiliates."

I'm going to have to look into this.

If you work for HP (and you're already on my schvitz-list for giving money to Sarah Brady in the nineties) or Greyhound, or any of the companies I hear on Franken when I flip on the radio in a few minutes, expect a phone call shortly.

And if FrankenNet is running spots that they're not supposed to be - well, wouldn't that be fascinating?

Again...

...lightish posting today. Much going on.

Stay tuned!

Tipping Point

I think we're at one of those points where things could slide quickly in one of two directions - which one, I don't think anyone knows.

The The New York Times > Washington > NYTimes reports the CIA used some "coercive interrogation methods" in interrogating senior Al Quaeda prisoners who were involved in the 9/11 attacks:

In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as "water boarding," in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.

These techniques were authorized by a set of secret rules for the interrogation of high-level Qaeda prisoners, none known to be housed in Iraq, that were endorsed by the Justice Department and the C.I.A. The rules were among the first adopted by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 attacks for handling detainees and may have helped establish a new understanding throughout the government that officials would have greater freedom to deal harshly with detainees.

The reactions from both sides are predictable.

Jonah Goldberg:

"My response? Good. I would be far more upset to learn the CIA was being prevented from using coercive techniques against these people. Now, I don't want permanent, cruel physical torture to be used -- unless truly absolutely necessary (ticking bombs and all that) -- but if Khalid Shaikh Mohammed finds his stay with the CIA to be the worst thing that ever happened to him, I say "Wahoo! look at my tax dollars at work!"

Mark Kleiman:

What makes me sick is that some of the CIA officers may get hung out to dry, but there's no probability whatever that the lawyers safe in their Washington offices who approved all this garbage -- in your name and mine -- will ever be called to account.

There's a simple principle that applies here. No human being, or small group, is fit to be trusted with absolute and unreviewed power over another human being.

What do I think about this? Who cares.

The real question is, what will the American people think?

It's a lock that the media will get it wrong: although I noted two days ago that the media refers to a "Drumbeat" against Donald Rumsfeld, seven in ten Americans support the Secretary of Defense even in light of the Abu Ghraib Kerry Campaign Spots scandal.

Like I said - this could tip one of two directions:

1. The media could lead the public by the nose to the conclusion they want - that the Bush Administration is condoning torture, and are morally base and out of control.
2. The media is out of control and morally incontinent, ignoring the real atrocities that Islamofascist regimes worldwide practice daily that make the abuses in Abu Ghraib, vile as they were, look like fraternity hazing. And they don't mind the notion of a Khalid Mohammed, who is a terrorist and not covered by the Geneva Convention, getting shaken down hard for more info. Captain Ed is right in pointing out:

   They are non-state actors, meaning they officially represent no government, which in Geneva Convention terms makes them about the same level as spies. They are not POWs -- POWs must wear the appropriate insignia of a government when captured in battle. The reason for this distinction in the Geneva Convention is precisely to prevent non-state actors from taking up arms against a nation, for the precise reasons we see today: they act as a terribly destabilizing force throughout regions in which they operate and hold civilian populations hostage when using them as screens for their attacks.

   Screw him.

Which way do I the people will break on this? Depends on how confident I feel in the knowledge and maturity of the American public.

Most unthinking leftists of the Democrat Underground stripe made up their minds in December of 2000. If Bush called the sky "blue", they'd say Blue is a neocon conspiracy.

I'd like to hope for better.

Truer Words

Katie Couric: "It's getting to the point where people can hardly stand to tune into the TV news because of the parade of graphic images from Iraq".

Well, she had the first half right.

Story this morning; dealing with the psychological impact of the pictures...

...from Abu Ghraib and of the Nick Berg murder.

Not 9/11. Not people plunging a thousand feet to keep from being burned to death.

Not the plastic shredders and rape rooms.

Not the gassing of the Kurds.

They had Doctor Phil on, naturally.

I can't watch this anymore.

The Slime Among Us

I got this bit of commentary from Indymedia, a lefty "alternative" media organization. It's by a "King Daevid MacKenzie, for IndyMedia Radio, from America's Heartland".

Quick: Spot the bizarre priorities!

There are a few facts about the terrorist murder-on-video of Pennsylvania businessman Nick Berg that raise the darkest, most disturbing issues of recent memory.

What would those darkest, most disturbing issues be?

Islamofascism?

The sort of moral relativism that says blowing up innocent people is valid political criticism?

Maybe the struggle between Democracy and tyranny?

What are those dark, disturbing issues?

First off, Berg, who ran a small telecommunications firm in a Philadelphia suburb, was in Iraq for the second time this year, looking for work. With all possible respect to this man and sympathy to his loved ones, one has to start with the question, wasn't that in itself a particularly stupid thing to do -- seeking monetary gain in a war zone in a nation and culture increasingly hostile to his own?

Looking for business is a dark, disturbing issue?

And from a different angle: when told Tuesday afternoon that there was a video of Nick Berg's murder released to the Internet, his family collapsed in tears on their front lawn. Michael Berg indicated that he knew his son had been decapitated, but that he hoped the manner of his son's murder would not have been publicised. Within two hours, ABC Radio and Fox News Channel talk show host Sean Hannity put links on his web site -- a site hosted by ABC's own servers -- directing his audience to videos of both Berg's beheading and that of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Hannity then plugged the links on his site throughout his entire radio show Tuesday afternoon. Not only had they specifically done what the Berg family had expressed they did not want done, Hannity and ABC began using the Berg murder to attract an audience, generating sponsorship money and uttering anti-Muslim rants along the way.

Did "King Daevid Mackenzie" whizzle and moan like this when the networks publicized images of the Iraqis at Abu Ghraib? It's a fair bet they (who still live) and their families (ditto, no thanks to the likes of "King Daevid Mackenzie) didn't want them publicized, either.

But no, they went out to a billion or more people. And we all know the "anti-Bush rants" they inspired. Where was "King Daevid Mackenzie"'s outrage?

Different story?

It is not far afield from what Josef Goebbels and Fritz Hippler were doing with their hate cinema of 1930s Nazi Germany.

Yes, it is. Because unlike the fictional perpetrators and caricaturish Jews of the Nazi propaganda films, Nick Berg was murdered, and Islamic thugs did the killing. It's an objective fact, and it's news.

It should also be noted that ABC is owned by the Walt Disney Corporation, which is currently doing its best to suppress Michael Moore's latest film, FAHRENHEIT 911, which is critical of the Bush regime's conduct in Iraq.

If you're a rational person, you realize here what a defective personality you're dealing with.

Disney is refusing to distribute F911 - not "suppressing" it. The flap will (as Moore himself noted) bring massive publicity to Moore's movie - some suppression.

On the other hand, the American media - and pseudomedia, like Indymedia - does suppress photos and video showing the depravity of the Islamofascists; try to find footage of the planes ramming the towers, the people jumping their deaths, the blood and tissue scattered about pizzerias and bus stops in Israel, the deaths of Dan Pearl and Nick Berg, American Jews - or, for that matter, footage from the 75% of Iraq where the liberation is going swimmingly.

THAT, "King Daevid", is suppression.

Perhaps the most tragic element of all this is that Michael Berg is strongly against the war on Iraq, while the murdered man, his son Nick, was a strong supporter of both George W. Bush and the war. If nothing else, this whole shocking episode illustrates how deadly dangerous it is to believe what George W. Bush says.

Ah. So that's the tragedy.

It's said this upcoming election will be between the adults and the children in our society. This editorial (which is available in audio as well) shows that some of the children, tragically, ride the short bus.

Sorry, "King Daevid". The real tragedy of Nick Berg is that he's not alive to kick your effete ass for hijacking his name for...

...wait for it...

...your own gain.

Y'know. Just like the eeevul Hannity.

The @#$@#% Weather

I've gotten an email or two about this, as well as a comment - I had originally intended to hold my painting party this weekend.

The forecast, however, calls for lows in the forties. I'm told that the temperature needs to be above 50 for 24 hours when painting.

So unless I hear otherwise, I'm going to end up putting off the Berg House Paintapalooza for another week, to 5/22.

OK, spring - spring, already.

Busy Day

Fairly light posting today - crushingly busy.

Pennies From Heaven - Dyspeptic Edition

I was worried about Nick Coleman.

Once the Bus Strike ended, he had no more excuses to wander the streets of the Twin Cities, looking for "victims" of the Cities' "big cheeses", stringing quotes together into out-of-context attacks on the people who brought multi-party politics to Minnesota. I worried he might go into shock.

The torture scandal has given Nick a new lease on life.

Today's column starts:

When you visit the St. Paul Healing Center on Dayton Avenue, the first thing you see is a picture of Rudy Perpich. It was the late Minnesota governor and visionary who championed the idea of a place where broken people from other countries -- torture victims -- could come for help and healing. A worthy idea, it sometimes seemed just a little bit otherworldly.
Until now.
Not even Rudy (he died in 1995) could have imagined a time when the Center for Victims of Torture might have to deal with torture committed by soldiers wearing American uniforms.

Which is, of course, bollocks. The Torture Center is a worthy project - but they and their supporters (look at the news releases) have a long tendency to harp endlessly on victims of US-supported regimes (go back to the eighties and look at the press they got), rather than those who survived places like...

...well, Iraq.

I'm trying to remember if Nick Coleman has ever written about the victims of Hussein's immense, comprehensive, systematic torture system.

Coleman's priorities, of course, are crystal-clear. He knows who the real enemy is:

None dare call it torture. But it is. The pictures you have been seeing are not pictures from a frat party, as some radio blowhards -- some of the same ones who have been in the forefront of those who have called for American interrogators to take off the gloves -- want to believe.

Aaaah. It's talk radio's fault.

In the world of Nick Coleman, all problems lead back to talk radio.

However, this is the part that I wonder about the most: The pictures document torture. If you aren't sure, picture this.

Imagine we make this offer to Donald Rumsfeld: You won't have to quit as secretary of defense if you agree to a little fun. We will strip off your clothes, put you in a pile of naked prisoners, molest your genitals and have pictures of happy Muslim women holding you on a leash be printed around the world.I'm not sure, but does it seem to you that Coleman takes and excessive amount of pleasure at this description.

I'm sure the Fraters will be interested in analyzing that section as well.

Coleman, per usual, issues a call to action:

The Center for Victims of Torture is asking citizens to do three things: 1) Call it torture. 2) Denounce it. 3) Demand an investigation by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture (for more, visit the center's Web page at www.cvt.org).

Ah, yeah. The UN Special Rapporteur.

They did such a wonderful job investigating Abu Ghraib's previous management, didn't they?

You Might Not Be An American If...

For the ten-thousandth time - yes. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes, dissent can be patriotic. Dissent away.

Yes. Oh, yes, yes, We were a nation born from dissent. We started in an armed, violent revolution - the dissentiest dissent there is, yepper, sho nuff.

Dissent is American. Got it.

But there comes a time - and the point moves back and forth depending on the issue - when dissent becomes no longer patriotic. And then seditious. And then treason.

Let's put our stake in the ground, shall we?

With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy:

If You Believe: that America has problems - huge problems - then dissent is American.
But If You Believe: ...that America's problems make it an inherently rotten concept, then maybe you should think about whether you're living in the right place.

If You Believe: ...that America's projection of power around the world is immoral - then dissent is American.
But If You Believe: ...that any projection of American power is inherely unjust because it's America, then maybe you should be living in, say, Sweden? Just an idea.

If You Believe: ...that capitalism is wrong because its inequalities are inherely unjust, then dissent is American.
But If You Believe: ...that the free market is inherently, irrevocably evil, perhaps China would be a better fit? Just suggesting...

If You Believe: ...that invading Iraq was wrong, then dissent is American.
But If You Believe: ...that our temporary administration of Iraq is worse than Hussein's 30 year reighn of horrors, then perhaps you should rot in hell we need to have an attitude adjustment.

Just a hunch.

Sjodin: The Federal Case

The Feds will be the first to prosecute the murder of Dru Sjodin:

Federal prosecutors in North Dakota will pursue the case against a man held in the death of University of North Dakota student Dru Sjodin, The Associated Press has learned...The move means it's possible that Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., a convicted sex offender, would be eligible for the death penalty if convicted. Neither North Dakota nor Minnesota, where Sjodin's body was found last month, has the possibility of the death penalty in state court.

I'm glad it's being tried in my native North Dakota. People out there have a lot more common sense about these things.

Which is bad news if you're Alfonso Rodriguez.

Hearing Their Own Drummer

On the Today show, reporter Jim Miklaszewski wrapped up a report by referring to "a growing public drumbeat" calling for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation

Drumbeat? Polls are showing that the public is backing Rumsfeld.

The media is the drumbeat.

Legislative Chicken

With a war going on, it's almost comforting to report on Minnesota's legislative squabbling.

The lines are drawn: Pawlenty will propose a budget.

The DFL-controlled Senate will push back, stalling the budget process.

Pawlenty will not back down. He'll threaten to use his executive power to cut budgets if the Legislture doesn't finish the job:

Pawlenty: Without budget, agencies must cut

Pressure to close out the legislative session mounted on Monday, as Gov. Tim Pawlenty asked agencies to prepare for immediate, statewide spending cuts and publicly chastised DFL senators after yet another attempted negotiation fizzled.
Agency heads have been asked to pare their budgets by at least 3 percent for the remainder of this fiscal year and the next, in anticipation of a session that may end next Monday without a budget agreement.

More as the sesson winds to an end.

Tone Deaf

Captain Ed finds this fascinating bit of tone-deafness on the part of the almost-completey-white Kerry campaign, reported (inadvertently, I'm sure) in teh NYTimes:

Billye Burns, a retired teacher from West Monroe, had driven more than two hours to see Mr. Kerry in Baton Rouge. Ms. Burns, who is black, sat at a prime table marked "white ticket holders only [emph mine]." White tickets, she explained, were for those who were active in the party.

Ed asks the question:

Can you imagine the furor that would arise had the Bush campaign put signs on tables that read "white ticket holders only", regardless of the reason? In Louisiana? I'm no water-carrier for Affirmative Action, but this displays a stunning lack of historical sensitivity and has to result from an ignorance that suggests no locals were involved in the planning and staging of Kerry's rally.

Amazing insensitivity.

The important question? What did Kerry know, and when did he know it?

(You had to know that was coming, right?)

Double Standard

Al-Reuters notes that Bush's Backing of Rumsfeld Shocks and Angers Arabs.

Arab commentators reacted with shock and disbelief on Monday over President Bush's robust backing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld against calls for his resignation.

Critics had called for him to quit after the furor over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners but analysts, editors and ordinary Arabs were united in their condemnation of Bush who said the United States owed Rumsfeld a "debt of gratitude."

"After the torture and vile acts by the American army, President Bush goes out and congratulates Rumsfeld. It's just incredible. I am in total shock," said Omar Belhouchet, editor of the influential Algerian national daily El Watan.

"Bush's praise for Rumsfeld will discredit the United States...and further damage its reputation, which is already at a historic low in the Arab world," he added.

mr. Belhouchet: the reputation of the Arab World could use a little buffing up here in the US, too - what with the "Arab Street"'s predilection for dancing around when your people drive planes into our buildings or blow up Jews.

Will To Power

George Will is a smart guy.

But it's interesting; I was flipping through "The Morning After", a collection of his columns from the '80s. He's a smart guy, sure enough.

But just because he's a conservative doesn't make him always right. It helps, but it's not a lock.

In the eighties, George Will thought that the Second Amendment should be repealed, thought that we were undertaxed for the level of service our government supposedly delivered, and that the legacy of the Reagan Administration was going to be disastrous, due to the deficits and his brinksmanship with the Soviets.

He's at it again. Two weeks ago, he called for a pullout from Iraq, claiming the war was a gathering disaster (a move that made the leftybloggers waddle around with big grins like toddlers that had just made really good pantses).

And yesterday, he called for Rumsfeld's resignation.

Big Trunk from Powerline takes it apart:

I may be a slow learner, but the concept of "domination for self-defense" as a form of empire is one that requires more explanation than Will provides.

It is also unclear to me how Will is able to distinguish imperial misconduct photographically from misconduct in a cause that is simply worthy. Here he puts me mind of Peter Hurkos, the world's foremost psychic; his forte was "psychometry," the ability to see past-present-future associations by touching objects. Will claims to be able to deduce national motives from photos of a few soldiers misbehaving.

Two weeks ago Will called, sort of, for an early exit of American forces from Iraq, even if it were to lead to civil war. Will argued that "in Iraq, civil war might be preferable to today's combination of disintegration tempered by violent Sunni-Shiite collaboration against U.S. supervision." But it is impossible that civil war would be the finale to the withdrawal Will calls for; civil war would end in the probable division of Iraq into parts dominated by Iran and/or Syria.

George Will is a smart man; he knows that civil war would be a temporary condition whose probable outcome is the evil against which our current difficulties in Iraq must be compared. Why pretend otherwise?

Today Will advises: "Listen to the language. It is always a leading indicator of moral confusion." I wonder if this advice does not apply more to Will's column than to its ostensible subject.

Will's a smart guy, but he's not the oracle of Delphi.

Make Mine Guinness, Gents

On the Northern Alliance Radio Network on May 1, I bet the Elder, Rocket Man, Captain Ed and JB Doubtless a beer that Fallujah would be secured by June 1.

Without a Stalingrad-style bloodbath.

Without a frantic, politically-motivated battle that would waste American lives to no useful purpose.

Without wanting in any way to trivialize the efforts and sacrifice of the Marines who are doing the actual work, it looks as if I may just collect soon.

Tell you what: I'll donate the prize (assuming I collect - and I do) to the first four USMC vets back from Fallujah that I run across. More as details warrant.

Marine General Conway's strategy - co-opting former Republican Guards, including apparently many who had in fact recently fought against us, aroused gasps of bemused horror on the part of conservatives, and giggles of misplaced joy on the part of moonbats - but in retrospect, may have made perfect sense, and for reasons that I used to know (but had forgotten).

As with many despots, Hussein recruited his most elite (meaning "trusted" rather than "militarily competent") forces from areas that he was fairly sure he could trust. "Republican Guard" units were mostly recruited from Sunni regions of Iraq, while the formations that watched over the Guard, the "Special Republican Guard", were primarily recruited from Tikrit, Hussein's hometown and the hotbed of his Ba'ath Party support.

So a hugely disproportionate number of men in hardcore-Sunni areas like Fallujah would be both Ba'athist and Republican Guard; they would also be men with the most military training and experience, and the sort of esprit de corps lacking from most of Hussein's old military.

The results? As of April 19, according to the WaPo (Via Belmont Club):

Although Marine commanders insisted that Conway's superiors were fully briefed about the arrangement and signed off on it, the unorthodox nature of the deal has led senior officials at the Pentagon, the U.S. military command in Iraq and the civilian occupation administration to react with skepticism. "It's Conway's thing," said one U.S. civilian official involved in the issue. "Either it works out, and he emerges as they guy who solved the Fallujah problem, or it turns into a big failure." ...

Marine commanders said they intended to test the new brigade's success in combating the insurgency in a week or two, when they plan to send a convoy through the center of the city. "We're going to see whether anything has changed," one officer said. "If not, we'll just have to go back to where we were."

And today? Says the Telegraph, with emphasis mine:

US marines have entered the Iraqi city of Fallujah for the first time in more than a month, according to witnesses. Soldiers drove armored vehicles to the mayor's office in the city center without incident. They were accompanied by Iraqi security forces, who will eventually take over security, witnesses said.

Just one convoy? Yep.

Sure - give it a few weeks for the city to be totally, officially secured. But it's going to happen.

Further proof that while the openly-partisan press can take a tempest from the Abu Ghraib teapot and use it to fabricate a crisis here at home, over in Iraq itself the military issue is in no significant long-term doubt.

As the Frater say, we have to deserve victory. The leathernecks who are doing the lifting in Fallujah certainly do. It's the folks at home I'm worried about.

As usual, read the whole Belmont Club piece.

Mehdi? That's Soooo April...

More evidence that the campaign on the ground against the "Mehdi Army" - the catastrophe of the month for April, until "Abusegate" was ready for prime time - is winding down.

Something that seems to have slipped by Reuters, AP, et al. these past few weeks is that the U.S. Army has been steadily whittling away at Sadr's troops, to the point that today, an American military spokesman is estimating that Sadr is down below a thousand hard-core supporters in his home town.

The US military estimates less than 1,000 members of the Mehdi Army militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr are fighting from their Baghdad stronghold, using women and children as human shields.

"I don't think it's a thousand, it's probably not a hundred," Brigadier General Jeffrey Hammond, a deputy commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, told AFP about the size of the rebel cleric's army in the slum of Sadr City.

Hey, didn't the Mahdi Army have over 5,000 members just a month ago?...The Americans are winning without forcing the giant conflagration that almost everyone had predicted.

This same dynamic also explains why a Marine patrol was able to wander through the streets of Fallujah relatively unmolested today. . To quote the sage, "Heh".

Two Heroes

Blackfive reports on two heroes.

On April 17th, during one of the worst firefights in Iraq, Captain Richard J. Gannon III, Comander of Company L, 3/7 Marines, was killed while trying to rescue a wounded Marine. He and two Lance Corporals ran out into a hail of gunfire to rescue a wounded comrade. The CO was lost.

A common misconception amongst the enemies of the United States is that if you kill the leadership of a unit, the unit will fall apart. There is nothing farther from the truth. And the Marines proved it that day.

The beloved Commander (said by his men to be as "tough as a $2 steak!") had trained his Executive Officer well.

First Lieutenant Dominique Neal took over the battle after losing his good friend and Commander, Captain Gannon. The Marines took the fight to the terrorists and won the day.

Read the whole thing.

Woo Hoo!

I'm Right Wing News' "Site of the Day" for today!

Thanks, guys!

Essential Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson has yet another essential column, with a lesson that a good chunk of our society needs to have constantly reiterated.

Money quote:

The 20th century should have taught the citizens of liberal democracies the catastrophic consequences of placating tyrants. British and French restraint over the occupation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, the absorption of the Czech Sudetenland, and the incorporation of Bohemia and Moravia did not win gratitude but rather Hitler's contempt for their weakness. Fifty million dead, the Holocaust and the near destruction of European civilization were the wages of "appeasement"--a term that early-1930s liberals proudly embraced as far more enlightened than the old idea of "deterrence" and "military readiness."
So too did Western excuses for the Russians' violation of guarantees of free elections in postwar Eastern Europe, China and Southeast Asia only embolden the Soviet Union. What eventually contained Stalinism was the Truman Doctrine, NATO and nuclear deterrence--not the United Nations--and what destroyed its legacy was Ronald Reagan's assertiveness, not Jimmy Carter's accommodation or Richard Nixon's détente.

And more:

Most important, military deterrence and the willingness to use force against evil in its infancy usually end up, in the terrible arithmetic of war, saving more lives than they cost. All this can be a hard lesson to relearn each generation, especially now that we contend with the sirens of the mall, Oprah and latte. Our affluence and leisure are as antithetical to the use of force as rural life and relative poverty once were catalysts for muscular action. The age-old lure of appeasement--perhaps they will cease with this latest concession, perhaps we provoked our enemies, perhaps demonstrations of our future good intentions will win their approval--was never more evident than in the recent Spanish elections, when an affluent European electorate, reeling from the horrific terrorist attack of 3/11, swept from power the pro-U.S. center-right government on the grounds that the mass murders were more the fault of the United States for dragging Spain into the effort to remove fascists and implant democracy in Iraq than of the primordial al Qaedaist culprits, who long ago promised the Western and Christian Iberians ruin for the Crusades and the Reconquista.

It seems self-evident to anyone even remotely literate about history.

But of course, most Americans are not.

Surreal

You may have heard - we had a bit of a storm last night. The Fraters confirmed it, so you know it's a fact.

The kids and I were driving...

...north on Snelling past the Fairgrounds as the hailstorm started. The wind was howling like Howard Dean, blowing the branches horizontal, and the hail was approaching the size of Robert Byrd's brain.

I saw something in the distance - a large blue flash. It appeared quickly - but trained off out of sight to the right. I figured it was an excessively-bright halogen headlamp via some quirk of optics in the rain and wind.

Then, as we crested the big ramp over Como Avenue, we saw it again - a blue explosion, cascading huge sparks that the wind whipped straight to the east before they burned out somewhere above the ground. Then another. Then another, just as we passed it, lighting up the neighborhood for a couple seconds like a huge blue Klieg light.

My daughter was tense, and my son was plugging his ears - the hail was rattling off the roof like DFL budget initiatives clattering off the electorate's hide before bouncing out of consciousness, with a noise louder than Sandy Pappas in full legislative rut.

But for a moment it was a beautiful scene - the blue glare highlighting the scene with flailing branches under the churning sky, the searingly bright blue blaze (a transformer? Street lamp?) flashing and sputtering and showering sparks before burning out.

Got home to find that, for one, my basswood tree didn't shed any branches. It was a good weekend!

Lack of Condemnation

On Thursday, the House voted on a non-binding resolution condemning the abuses at Abu Gharib. The measure passed 365-50, with 19 no-shows.

(Hat tip Iraq Now)

The "Nay" votes were (Minnesota reps bolded):

Abercrombie
Blumenauer
Brown (OH)
Clyburn
Conyers
Cummings
Fattah
Frank (MA)
Grijalva
Gutierrez
Hastings (FL)
Hinchey
Hoyer
Inslee
Jackson-Lee (TX)
Jones (OH)
Kaptur
Kilpatrick
Kucinich
Lee
Lewis (GA)
Markey
McCollum - my "representative"
"Baghdad Jim' McDermott
McGovern
Meek (FL)
Millender-McDonald
Miller, George
Mollohan
Oberstar
Olver
Owens
Pallone
Paul (the only Republican)
Payne
Pelosi (!!! - House Majority Leader!)
Rangel
Ryan (OH)
Sabo
Schakowsky
Serrano
Stark
Strickland
Towns
Velázquez
Waters
Watson
Watt
Waxman
Woolsey

If you live in any of the districts represented by the above, you really need to get on the line.

Not that calling Betty McCollum does any good...

The Hardest Part

I was watching my son last night.

He's 11 years old, going on six. It's probably the last summer I'll be able to say that; little boys seem to go through a little last grab at childhood before they begin the slide into adolescence.

And it scares me. This war started before my son was born. And I'm afraid it won't be over for a very long time, especially if the weasels and defeatists and pacifiers have their way.

I'm the dad. I'm supposed to take care of this stuff.

I've said it before. I'm sure I'll say it again; the Cold War ended about the time my daughter - the older of my kids by 18 months - was born. I remember watching the Wall fall; I remember holding my little girl as I watched Strategic Air Command end its forty years of alert; thinking "that's that" when they started uprooting the Minuteman silos around my hometown.

Of course, the peace even then was illusory; the roadmap leading to 9/11 seems to clear in retrospect. The mission now seems just as clear - to paraphrase Tom Skeritt's sergeant in Saving Private Ryan, "the only way home is over the bloody bodies of every Islamofascist who feels death is preferable to civilized coexistence.

Reading Belmont Club the other day was enlightening - in a profoundly depressing way. Wars like this never get any less brutal and barbaric:

posterity would recall the incident in the same way the Christmas Truce in the first year of the Great War is remembered today. The last grasp at enforcing civilized standards of conduct before the brutality of the trenches coarsened men completely. The fraternization of that first December so alarmed the generals that "special precautions were taken during the Christmases of 1915, 1916 and 1917, even to the extent of actually stepping up artillery bombardments" to prevent its recurrence.

The brass didn't have to worry: it was never to be repeated. After the Somme in the following year, infantrymen on both sides filed saw-teeth into their bayonets to make the thrusts more painful. The history which remembers the Second World War as 'the Good War' forgets how four years of fighting transformed Allies that refused to bomb German cities in 1940 into those that planned thousand plane raids on Hamburg and Dresden in 1945 to rain incendiaries on tens of thousands of Western Europeans as policy. There were no reprimands, only medals, for the B-29 crews that incinerated 100,000 civilians in Tokyo in the raid of March 9, 1945. And the sad balance of probability is that Abu Ghraib will be displaced from the front pages by the next terrorist outrage, the next Bali, the next Madrid, the next 9/11 until we find ourselves wondering why it upset us at all.

While it is important to punish everyone responsible for the outrages at Abu Ghraib, the only effective way to stop the corrupting influences of war is to achieve victory.

Victory. It's really the only option. I'm not saying that in any jingoistic sense at all; I'm saying it because the idea of defeat, of caving in to what the enemy represents, is too noxious to stomach.

And yet as implacable as our enemy is, there's at least a fair chance that the job of finishing the war will fall to kids my son's age.

Gawd.

I watched him playing "Gundam" on the computer tonight, his still baby-smooth face glowing from the monitor, alert little gray eyes dissecting the problem with that joyfull fierceness that little boys bring to games. No.

I'm the dad. I'm supposed to take are of this shit.

I'm the one who's supposed to go stuff the monsters back under the bed. I'm the one who's supposed to beat the bad guys down, to teach them manners.

I'm the one who's supposed to protect him. I'm the one that's supposed to blow big holes in anyone that tries to harm him.

And that's just what I want to do.

But I'm 41, I have a blown-up knee, one bad eye, and two kids to watch, and while in my heart there is not a snake-eating killing machine on earth who has anything on me when mine are threatened, in reality I doubt I'd fool any recruiters.

And it kills me. Keeping my family safe is my job.

And it scares me stiff to think that it will someday be his instead.

So what do you tell your kids? "The best we can hope for is that we stay committed to winning this thing. The worst we can expect is if this nation goes insane and elects a vacuous hamster like John Kerry, which will prolong the war into your childrens' lifetime."

God, this is hard.

Pound Wise, Penny Foolish

Before John Kerry made counting political waffles a national pastime, we had Tim Penny.

Penny, of course, was one of the original "Moderate DFLers" in Minnesota - one of the thin film of DFLers who journeyed toward the political center to meet the likes of Arne Carlson.

The only way be be a "moderate", of course, is to stand on both sides of every issue.

Penny is doing the same with the Minnesota Personal Protection Act. Joel Rosenberg supplies an inspired fisking of his latest, grossly-inaccurate, and waffle-rific op-ed.

Tim Penny embodies the flaws of "Moderate" (read: DFL Liberal Lite) thinking: They favor increasing taxes and spending, just not as much. And they support victim disarmament - but only a more moderate kind.

Show Jay The Money

Jay Reding is sending bills to companies that spam his site, charging them for advertising on his space.

$1000 per item. And he's found the law that backs him on it.

We'll be following this. Especially since spam comments have finally started popping up in this space.

The Top-Secret Garden

Actually, it's not so much of a secret, mostly due to the blood-curdling shrieks of pain.

Let me tell you about my day.

Plan A for this year, along with the Painting Party (more tomorrow) is to move my garden from its current chain-link enclosure (which I built, and built very stoutly indeed, during my marriage to create a dog-free zone for growing vegetables) across the yard to a space next to the grape trellis, and build a patio where the garden is. That in itself will be an interesting project - I sunk the fenceposts in to the ground in pads of cement to well below the frost line...well, that's a subject for another post.

So here's how things went.

• I walked to the hardware store - three long blocks away - to rent a tiller for the new garden space. I found a major drawback to globalization; tiller manufacturers assume that anyone with enough money to buy or rent a tiller will also be able to hire an immigrant laborer to run it. Since most immigrants are of fairly short stature, they make the handles on the tillers the perfect height - for someone who's 5'7. So I had to push the tiller - basically an engine driving couple of blades, perched way high above two tiny wheels, with a center of gravity to high the Beijing Acrobats would have to work hard to get anything done. I pushed this contraption the three long blocks to my house, bent over like an arthritic. By the time I got home, I was pretty well exhausted already.
• But not for long! Once engine began put-putting its mighty throaty chorus, the testosterone perked me back to life. I started breaking sod, just like my great grandparents. Until I ran over piece of chickenwire that had grown into the sod after my trellis project. The thin wire got hopelessly tangled in the churning blades.
• It took me a while to find my wire-cutter; little boys love playing with wire cutters, but not so much with remember where they put them last winter.
• I came out to cut the wires out of the blades. I leaned down to tip the tiller back, I inadvertently rested my forearm on the cylinder head.

  Insert sizzling sound.

  Discerning readers will note that this is where the "blood-curdling shrieks" in the intro come in. My fore-arm now sports one two-inch long blister that looks like an albino Sei whale broaching the surface, and two more that are six-sided bas-reliefs of the header bolts that put them there. I feel like I've been branded by the "Bar Hardware" ranch.

• However, I got things untangled, finished the new garden, tilled the old garden (the better to shovel out the dirt and replace it with sand, my pretty), and even went out front and plowed up a part of the boulevard to put in a decorative flower arrangement along my front walk.
• Walk the tiller back to the hardware store. It's no more fun going back.
• Naturally, since I impulsively plowed up my front walk, I needed to have some plants to put there - that, or have a community mud plot for the coming season. The local "Friends" Quaker school was finishing its annual plant sale today - a neighborhood institution, these days. Now, I have no problems with "Friends" and their beliefs, but the school itself is particularly aggressive about peddling their near-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil brand of pacifism around the neighborhood. And they - the school and the plant sale - draw a crowd that visibly thinks Dennis Kucinich is almost too far to the right (and the bumper stickers on the neighborhood streets bore this out). However, the last two hours of the sale everything is half off - which I think is a nice compromise between principle and value. Got salsa fixins (16 tomato plants, four kinds of peppers, onions) and perennials for the front (to mix with transplants of the hostas that overrun my yard), all for under $20.
• Back to the hardware store for Miracle-Gro.
• Home to see every robin in the neighborhood congregated on the plowed patches, guzzling the junebug larvae that I'd turned over while plowing. Good riddance, and thanks, feathered friends.
• Too tired to plant. Going out to cook hot dots and ponder the perfect hexagonal symmetry of blisters 2 and 3.

Updates as the situation warrants.

It's All About Kerry

I don't know what bothers me most about this post by the leftyblogger Hesiod: His slug line:

GOING BACK TO CALLEY

...as if what happened at Abu Ghraib is anything like what happened at My Lai...

...or this little interjection at the end:

God help these two soldiers if they ever run for public office in, say, 20 years.

Their "fellow veterans" might try to smear them, and accuse them of being unfit for office or something.

Big difference; the two men who turned in the Abu Ghraib offenders reported soldiers who committed verifiable crimes against real people. John Kerry slandered the services of everyone who served in Vietnam. He labelled two million Americans, in front of the Senate, as war criminals.

"Hesiod" also refers to the men who reported the abuses as "this generation's John Kerry's" (sic). That insults the two MI troops; none of their words will ever be used in POW interrogations against American soldiers by future enemies. And unlike Kerry, these men didn't cherry-pick their duty, and they didn't run home to slander all their comrades at the first decorous opportunity.

Write Big Lie. Rinse. Repeat As Necessary

Fareed Zakaria has spoken.

The left pays uncritical yet predictable obeisance.

The cycle repeats.

The left's only real strategy toward the war on terror - the terror they feel at the notion of being defeated again in November - is to continue a set of basic, misleading, wrong tropes until enough of the mushy, uninformed middle is swayed.

Tack an Arabic name on it, and it's supposed to be more credible.

Enter Zakaria:

The basic attitude taken by Rumsfeld, Cheney and their top aides has been "We're at war; all these niceties will have to wait."

He's referring to the Geneva Conventions, which he rightly notes are the law of the land, but wrongly states were ever written to cover terrorists.

Dispatching the following string of lies is, of course, becoming pro-forma:

As a result, we have waged pre-emptive war unilaterally,

...where "Unilaterally" means "with the complete support of the only two militaries in the world with the training and equipment to make them capable of fighting alongside the US...

spurned international cooperation,

...from the 30-odd nations currently in Iraq...

rejected United Nations participation,

...after 18 months of begging for it - about 12 months more than we should have spent...

humiliated allies

...who were largely on Hussein's payroll in the Oil For Influence Food program...

discounted the need for local support in Iraq

Hang on.

Discounted what? In the Clintonian world that Zakaria inhabits, presumably that means had Bush bloviated about "local support" - from people who'd had any concept for "Grassroots organizating" shredded out of them over thirty years of Hussein's rule, it would have worked better?

...and incurred massive costs in blood and treasure.

As we, and the Israelis, and most of the West did on and since 9/11, and which we'll lose much more of if we don't root out and destroy Islamofascist terror.

On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq—troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani—Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong.

Only if judged by the transient standards of the Monday Morning Quarterback with an agenda.

It's a new kind of war. There is no textbook on the subject.

Well - there was none.

This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world.

If we're considered "outlaws" in the eyes of the part of the world that ignores Hussein's brutality (or, to be accurate, can have their silence purchased), then I'm proud to be an outlaw.

Interrogation Techniques

The Guardian obliquely notes something that's fairly common knowledge; the "abusive" interrogation techniques are not only specialized, extreme forms of interrogation well-known to military intelligence; they are a part of training for many of our own people.

Using sexual jibes and degradation, along with stripping naked, is one of the methods taught on both sides of the Atlantic under the slogan "prolong the shock of capture", [a former British special forces officer] said.

Female guards were used to taunt male prisoners sexually and at British training sessions when female candidates were undergoing resistance training they would be subject to lesbian jibes.

"Most people just laugh that off during mock training exercises, but the whole experience is horrible. Two of my colleagues couldn't cope with the training at the time. One walked out saying 'I've had enough', and the other had a breakdown. It's exceedingly disturbing," said the former Special Boat Squadron officer, who asked that his identity be withheld for security reasons.

Many British and US special forces soldiers learn about the degradation techniques because they are subjected to them to help them resist if captured. They include soldiers from the SAS, SBS [British equivalents of Delta and the SEALs, respectively], most air pilots, paratroopers and members of pathfinder platoons.

A number of commercial firms which have been supplying interrogators to the US army in Iraq boast of hiring former US special forces soldiers, such as Navy Seals.

Unmentioned - British firms wrote the book on hiring former SAS/SBS troopers - it was in fact a bit of a scandal in the UK in the '70s.

Given that this rather specialized technique - or, if you prefer, abuse - was being used by a group led by a "dirty" prison guard from Pennsylvania, you can see where the problems start:

[The same] former British special forces officer who returned last week from Iraq, said: "It was clear from discussions with US private contractors in Iraq that the prison guards were using R2I techniques, but they didn't know what they were doing."...When the interrogation techniques are used on British soldiers for training purposes, they are subject to a strict 48-hour time limit, and a supervisor and a psychologist are always present. It is recognised that in inexperienced hands, prisoners can be plunged into psychosis.

If you know anyone who's ever been in jail or prison, it's no secret; prison guards in America include a shocking number of truly defective people. My most shocking revelation before this past week; a woman who spent a few weeks in a women's prison for a particularly egregious DWI told me how common it is for the (male) guards to get away with flagrant abuses - groping, gratuitous strip searches, things bordering on the sort of behavior we saw at Abu Ghraib but a few notches below "newsworthy." Corrections seems to draw quite a few people who enjoy playing out power fantasies on inmates. [1]

Combine that seemingly-common personality defect with the uninformed knowledge of the extremely sensitive techniques described by the British officer, and you have a recipe for...

...for...

...systematic low-level abuses that are campaign fodder for a Kerry campaign that is increasingly desperate, and a media and left-wing of the blogosphere that is digging harder and harder for something, anything, to try to pin on the Administration.

[1] I don't mean to paint with an overly broad brush. I'm sure that there are prison guards who are people of great principle. It's been my fortune to meet very few yet. Let's call it an as-yet unrealized opportunity.

Wonder In The Commonplace

Check here and in the next couple of hundred posts for an amazing list of thoughts, sayings and aphorisms.

Best of all: Franklin Covey has mutilated very few of them.

Since I'm someone whose greatest source of aphoristic advice is the Demotivators calendar and PJ O'Rourke's "Modern Manners", this is a bit of a revelation :-)

The Righteous Gentile

Arutz Sheva has an interview with Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs.

Johnson, a lightning rod for the hatred of the antisemitic left, deserves Israel's thanks - and everyone's who believes in freedom and in fighting the dark:

If the title of Righteous Gentile is ever bestowed upon friends of Israel in this war, Charles Johnson will deserve a place on the list of candidates for the honor. If anyone ever compiles a list of Internet sites that contribute to Israel’s public relations effort, Johnson's site will probably come in first, far above the Israeli Foreign Ministry's site.

Johnson isn't Jewish. He's an American, born in New York, who grew up in Hawaii and currently lives in Los Angeles. He was raised Catholic, considers himself an agnostic, and is not one of the Zionist Christians, whose support for Israel is based on messianic faith. He is an educated American, brilliant and multi-talented, who comes from a liberal artistic background, and yet struggles for us in a way that commands respect and warms the heart. The man is simply very much on our side, because of the war, because we are here, because of who he is and because of who we are.

Read the whole thing for a fascinating insight on Johnson.

I'd like to point out to Arutz Sheva, though, that Johnson is far from alone among bloggers; many of us have been unstinting supporters of Israel, especially since the Palestinians rejected Barak's proposals.

Northern Alliance Logo Contest

You know what they say: "If you can, you draw a logo. If you can't, you kvetch about the logo the guy who can did."

That's the current situation; when we were filling in for Hugh Hewitt a couple of weeks ago, James Lileks noted that the logo on the Northern Alliance Radio Network website looked like someone did it in MS Paint.

And, indeed, it was. It's the result of about three minutes' work one evening between cooking dinner and working on kids' homework. I'm a usability guy, not a graphics guy; but it was three minutes of bad drawing more than anyone else put in on it...

...but the pack of baying divas other guys from the Northern Alliance have decided that the show and site should have a new logo, what with State Fair season coming on and all - so we're throwing it open to the audience. We're having the NARN Logo Contest.

In exchange for the winning logo, you'll win a valuable (and still to-be-determined) prize, and the satisfaction of keeping me from throttling the roomful of prima donnas doing a logo for a plucky bunch of local talk show hosts. It'll get plenty of exposure!

The usual rules apply - we claim the rights to the winning design, yadda yadda.

So - if you have an entry, send it to:

logo

at

northernallianceradio.com

Go to it!

Captains Quarters Adds an Executive Officer

Captain Ed over at Captain's Quarters has the most ubiquitous new blog out there; in business less than a year, he already gets more traffic than CBS, CNN and Persiankitty combined.

I made that last bit up. But Ed definitely has a very successful blog.

Now, he's expanding:

So I'd like to introduce my new partner, Whiskey, who will start posting tonight. She's an American attorney, a graduate of Cornell Law School, living in East Asia, who has had military experience and so can speak to those issues from a more personal perspective when she desires. Whiskey undoubtedly will tell you more about herself as she adds posts, which will most likely appear while we're asleep, here in the States. We're going to be a 24x7 operation here at Captain's Quarters. In fact, to borrow a phrase from the British Empire, the sun will never set on this blog!

So, CQ will now feature two mysterious savants. Actually, Ed's not that mysterious, and I think we can figure out this "Whiskey" person, too.

"Whiskey", sources tell me, is short for her full name, "Whiskey and Four Packs of Cigarettes". Ladies and Gentlemen, Captain Ed has co-opted FrankenNet's Randi Rhodes!

You heard it here first!

Senator Moron

Here's a transcript from today's Senate testimony, with Mark Dayton grilling Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs' chairman General Myers:

DAYTON: "General Mayer...er...Myers, er...when did you stop beating your wife?"

MYERS: "Er, I have never beaten my wife. Ever."

DAYTON: "Right, but with that in mind...er...I'd...um...like you to tell the nation when you stopped beating your wife?"

MYERS: "Er...Senator Dayton? Nobody, least of all my wife, has ever suggested that I did any such..."

DAYTON: "Right. Beating your wife is antithetical to democracy. When did you stop?"

RUMSFELD: "Senator Dayton, we're talking about the situation at Abu Ghraib prison, not General Myers..."

DAYTON (scowling): "Mr. Renfield, I'm asking the...er...um...er..."

RUMSFELD: "Questions?"

DAYTON: "...the questions here. Beating ones wife is anti...antithetic al to democracy..."

OK, I'm exaggerating.

Barely.

Minnesota has contributed its share of embarassing politicians to the national stage; John O'Connor, Gus Hall, Floyd Olson, Rudy Perpich, Jesse Ventura.

None of them were as gapingly ill-equipped for their office as is our current state embarassment "senior senator", Mark Dayton.

The Fraters Saint Paul and Elder have been ringing up Dayton's incoherence and wide-eyed befuddlement for years. Saint Paul put it well:

To Hugh Hewitt and America, we’re sorry about Sen. Mark Dayton. His performance today in accusing Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Dick Meyers of attempting to “withhold the truth from the American people” by surpressing information was political grandstanding at its worst. Although none of us voted for him, he's our Senator. He’s ours, we got him, and we apologize.

Through gritted teeth.

Here was part of the exchange:

Senator Mark Dayton said the request [to CBS news, to hold off on running the "Girls Gone Wild/Abu Ghraib" photos] went against the principles of the United States.
"Attempts to suppress news reports, to withhold the truth from Congress and the American people is antithetical to democracy," charged Senator Dayton, a Democrat from Minnesota.
"The President who wants to expand democracy around the world, by actions of his own administration, is undermining that democracy in the United States."

Repeatedly, and patiently, Myers and Rumsfeld explained to vapid silver-spooned pinhead senator that that was exactly not what had happened - and again and again, Dayton repeated the allegation. Three or four times that I could count.

Getting rid of Dayton needs to be a top priority.

Counting FrankenNet's Hours II - Hurry

If I were working at FrankenNet right now, I'd be more than a little nervous.

Thankfully, the little double-wide in Eagan isn't run by a bunch of left-leaning business geniuses.

Here's the latest:

In yet another sign of trouble for Air America Radio, the liberal talk network's co-founder and chairman, Evan Cohen, resigned Thursday along with his investment partner and vice chairman, Rex Sorensen.

The company also failed to make its scheduled payroll Wednesday, leaving its staff of roughly 100 writers and producers unpaid until Thursday.

Two points:

1. They've been on the air five weeks. And they're already sucking pond water.
2. Let me read that again. Did it really say "100 writers and producers" to produce 17 hours of weekday programming (and maybe 8-10 more on the weekends)? No, I must have mis-read that...

   ...er, no, it does say 100 writers and producers. To produce six weeday and three weekend programs. A lavish commercial talk operation would hire, er, maybe six producers, four engineers, and maybe some interns to screen the calls.

Simply amazing.

From the Baghdad Bob archives:

"We're on a wild ride," said Jon Sinton, the network's president, acknowledging that Air America has suffered "the typical bumps and bruises faced by any start-up."

"But the bottom line," he said, "is that we are on the air to stay."

Last week, according to two sources familiar with the matter, paychecks to some of the network's talent--a group that includes Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, and Randi Rhodes--bounced, and Rhodes joked on the air about not being paid. [I bet she "joked" off the air about it, too - Ed.]

A scheduled payday for the staff on Wednesday came and went without checks, though the staff was paid on Thursday. Sinton chalked up both cases to "technical issues."Yeah. Technically, they don't know what they're doing, and they're doomed.

I predicted FrankenNet would last 18 months. I'm going to have to go back to my original post on the subject and start seeing who wins the big pool.

I think I'll have to hurry.

So the liberal challenge to conservative media hegemony will have to resort to NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, the NYT, the WaPo, the AP, Reuters, the BBC and the entire entertainment industry.

UPDATE: WMNN in Minneapolis is supposed to carry Franken's show until probably early June. Wouldn't it be ironic if the network folded before WMNN could bail on it?

Isn't It Amazing...

...that the Abu Ghraibh scandal has erupted into full peals of demands for resignations, and a full-court press to try to tie it as high in the Administration as they can...

...the week after the WMDs turned up in Jordan and the Sudan and John Kerry's campaign veered sharply into the weeds?

So much concern for the Iraqis (whose plight has gotten more press in the last four days than it got in the preceding thirty years!), and at such a perfectly convenient time.

Who knew?

Note to Blumenthal: Read the Book

Sidney Blumenthal has a piece in, surprise, the Guardian, about Abu Graibh.

The kicker?

Bush has created what is in effect a gulag.

No. He has created a system to hold accused terrorists.

The Gulag, lest Blumenthal forget (or try to make the weak-minded who consider him credible, forget), imprisoned the innocent. Tens of millions of people disappeared from the face of the earth into the real gulag - sixty million at least, say most credible estimates.

The law as it applies to them is whatever the executive deems necessary.

Because - you need to remember this - there is no international law for dealing with terrorists!

The Geneva Convention dealt with regular armies. It was later expanded to cover guerrillas.

Not terrorists.

Bluementhal then goes on to completely leave any moral or intellectual plane any rational human can recognize:

There has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Abu Ghraib: Worse than North Korea's horrible (and semantically accurate) gulag. Worse than Bosnoserbian death camps, or than Rwanda. Worse than Hussein's prison system itself, in Sid Blumenthal's warped, sick world.

Top off moral bankruptcy with ignorance:

The US military embraced the Geneva conventions after the second world war,

It was before the war.

It goes on.

I don't know what's more depressing - that a vile little tumor like Sidney Blumenthal gets published at all, or that so many intellectually-underequipped chuzzlewitsgive him credence.

Now Go Enjoy the Weekend...

The Belmont Club has become my favorite foreign policy blog.

Which is not to say it's the feelgood hit of my blogroll.

Especially this piece.

My first thoughts at the news of the Abu Ghraib abuses, the Taguba Report and the Presidential mea culpa which followed was whether posterity would recall the incident in the same way the Christmas Truce in the first year of the Great War is remembered today. The last grasp at enforcing civilized standards of conduct before the brutality of the trenches coarsened men completely. The fraternization of that first December so alarmed the generals that "special precautions were taken during the Christmases of 1915, 1916 and 1917, even to the extent of actually stepping up artillery bombardments" to prevent its recurrence.

The brass didn't have to worry: it was never to be repeated. After the Somme in the following year, infantrymen on both sides filed saw-teeth into their bayonets to make the thrusts more painful. The history which remembers the Second World War as 'the Good War' forgets how four years of fighting transformed Allies that refused to bomb German cities in 1940 into those that planned thousand plane raids on Hamburg and Dresden in 1945 to rain incendiaries on tens of thousands of Western Europeans as policy. There were no reprimands, only medals, for the B-29 crews that incinerated 100,000 civilians in Tokyo in the raid of March 9, 1945. And the sad balance of probability is that Abu Ghraib will be displaced from the front pages by the next terrorist outrage, the next Bali, the next Madrid, the next 9/11 until we find ourselves wondering why it upset us at all.

While it is important to punish everyone responsible for the outrages at Abu Ghraib, the only effective way to stop the corrupting influences of war is to achieve victory. Read the whole thing.

What does the future hold?

One day Ted Koppel will read, in addition to the names of American soldiers who died in Iraq, the names of friends who will have died in another attack on New York. One day Nicholas de Genovea, the Columbia professor who called for a "million Mogadishus" will understand that it means a billion dead Muslims. And then for the first time, perhaps, they will understand the horror of Abu Ghraib while we all raise our glasses, sardonically like Robert Graves, "with affection, to the men we used to be".

I can't argue with that.

Unfortunately.

And the alterntives are worse.

Question

When did the phrase "What did (someone) know, and when did he know it" become a cliche, and when did it become it?

What Did CBS Know, and When Did It Know It?

Via Blackfive, we get the timeline by which CBS discovered the Abu Ghraib "torture" "scandal".

Except it wasn't CBS.

It was the Army. I've added the emphases:

While some accusations of abuse go back to 2002 in Afghanistan, the incidents at Abu Ghraib that triggered this week's news occurred last autumn. They came to light through the chain of command in Iraq on January 13. An Army criminal probe began a day later. Two days after that, the U.S. Central Command disclosed in a press release that "an investigation has been initiated into reported incidents of detainee abuse at a Coalition Forces detention facility." By March 20, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt was able to announce in Baghdad that criminal charges had been brought against six soldiers in the probe.
By the end of January, meanwhile, Major General Antonio Taguba was appointed to conduct his separate "administrative" probe of procedures at Abu Ghraib. It is his report, complete with its incriminating photos, that is the basis for the past week's news reports. The press didn't break this story based on months of sleuthing but was served up the results of the Army's own investigation.

By February, the Secretary of the Army had ordered the service's inspector general to assess the doctrine and training for detention operations within all of CentCom. A month after that, another probe began into Army Reserve training, especially military police and intelligence. Those reports will presumably also be leaked and reported on, or at least they will be if they reach negative conclusions.

This is a cover-up? Unlike the Catholic bishops, some corporate boards and the editors of the New York Times or USA Today, the military brass did not dismiss early allegations of bad behavior. Instead, it established reviews and procedures that have uncovered the very details that are now used by critics to indict the Pentagon "system." It has done so, moreover, amid a war against a deadly insurgency in which interrogation to gain good intelligence is critical to victory--and to saving American lives.

But why would the media let mere facts get in the way of a opportunity to pillory the administration that they hate more than Hussein himself?

How many pictures of mass graves did we see - ever? Certainly not as many as we've seen of the naked guys - who are, to the best of our knowledge, still alive.

How many interviews with people whose entire families disappeared into Abu Ghraib before last March?

How many photos from those very cells from the previous thirty years?

Why isn't Katie Couric asking Kofi "UNScam" Annan "What he knew and when he knew it?"

I'm about to have a Gisleson moment. I need to stop.

Posted by Mitch at 06:19 AM | Comments (2)

Bush: Don't Think About It

Bush rejected calls for Rumsfeld's resignation.

This is absolutely correct. If anyone out there thinks the Secretary of Defense is stupid enough to have countenanced the sort of things that happened at Abu Ghraib, feel free to convince me.

And to sack Rumsfeld over such dubious (and let's be honest - media-hyped) pretenses would not only be a political victory for Bush's political opponents - it'd be one for our military opponents as well.

Unless we find evidence that Rumsfeld ordered the "torture", it's a non-story that the media is whipping up to support their own agenda.

FrankenNet: Counting the Hours

Go to FrankenNet's website. What's the first thing you see?

"11 Stations Nationwide!"

Let's take a look at that.

The stations on their list include:

• New York City - WLIB 1190
  
• Minneapolis - WMNN 1330
• Portland, OR - KPOJ 620
• Riverside, CA - KCAA 1050
• West Palm Beach, FL - WJNO 1290
• Plattsburgh/Burlington - WTWK 1070
• Key West, FL - WKIZ 1500
• Portland, ME - WMTW 870
• Chapel Hill, NC - WCHL 1360
• XM Satellite Radio - 167
• Sirius Satellite Radio - 125

What does this list tell us?

First, XM and Sirius aren't "stations". They're satellite operations; there's nothing wrong with that - they may or may not be viable media in the future - but claiming them as "stations" in your network is at the most like the Northern Alliance claiming webstreaming as the Second Station! in our network, and at the very least like comparing apples and axles.

But I have a hunch that even the nine remaining stations is a little over-played.

Remember - FrankenNet produces seventeen hours of original talk per weekday; most of the shows are team efforts, with two or three big showbiz or MPR egoes hosts and at least one producer (I'd bet more, given the NPR roots of so much of the network's staff) - which adds up to a lot of money. So - nine stations should be airing a total of (9*17), 153 hours of FrankenNet programming per day among them.

Let's look at the list again:

• New York City - WLIB 1190 - The website is still stuck in its pre-FrankenNet iteration, and makes no mention of the networks - although it features a screed by former WLIB personality and "Morning Sedition" co-host Mark Riley. Let's be charitable and assume WLIB carries every blessed minute of every show.
• Minneapolis - WMNN 1330 - On the other hand, WMNN carries exactly three hours of FrankenNet - the O'Franken Factor. And it's basically money-making filler for the station while they change ownership; they've been bought by a Catholic network. FrankenNet has about thirty-odd days to go (sources in the local broadcast industry say there is zero chance WMNN will continue to carry FrankenNet)
• Portland, OR - KPOJ 620 - This is actually the best signal in the whole network; this used to be KGW, a 50,000 watt blowtorch. But being in the Pacific, they are three hours behind the network's New York time. So Franken bumps Lizz Winstead and Chuck D to run live from 9 to noon, while the Fast Eddie Schultz show runs live following it. All the other shows run tape-delayed; certainly not the same as running live.
• Riverside, CA - KCAA 1050 - Far from being a FrankenNet affiliate, KCAA plays four hours of FrankenNet programming a day; three hours of "O'Franken" on tape delay, and one hour of Randi Rhodes, presumably live.
• West Palm Beach, FL - WJNO 1290 - The station broadcasts exactly four hours of FrankenNet - the Randi Rhoads show. Oddly enough, the four-pack-a-day-voiced Rhodes was on WJNO before FrankenNet, and will likely be on WJNO long after FrankenNet is long gone. For FrankenNet to claim the station as an affiliate when it's caused zero net change in the station's programming is technically correct - but still disingenuous.
• Plattsburgh/Burlington - WTWK 1070 - The station doesn't seem to have a website. There's one reference that says the station plays FrankenNet during its "daytime hours". Let's be charitable for now and assume that means they carry everything from "Morning Sedition" through "Randi Rhodes", 13 hours worth.
• Key West, FL - WKIZ 1500 - WKIZ carries 12 hours of Air America per day.
• Portland, ME - WMTW 870 - It sounds like this station plays the entire lineup.
• Chapel Hill, NC - WCHL 1360 - WCHL, on the other hand, plays exactly two hours of Al Franken per day. That's it.

So, among nine (for the moment) stations and a potential total of 153 potential live station/hours per weekday, we have a current total of 69 hours of the possible total of 153 station/hours of programming actually being broadcast. 42 of those hours are at small-market stations. 14 additional hours are tape-delayed.

So - of 153 potential station-hours of programming per weekday, a total of 83 are actually broadcast. Anywhere. At all.

Even more depressing (if you're a FrankenNet supporter) is the number of stations airing each program:

• Morning Sedition: Six stations (one shortened, one delayed).
• Unfiltered: Four stations. What must it be like, being Lizzzzzz Winstead, going on the air after leaving "The Daily Show" and knowing you're on the air in NYC (on a pot-warmer station), Portland Oregon, Portland Maine and Key West?
• Franken: Eight stations (one shortened)
• Randi Rhodes: Seven stations, one carrying one hour
• So What Else Is News: Three stations, one of them via delay
• Majority Report: Three stations, one of them via delay.

Joe Soucheray is in more markets than FrankenNet.

Worse than that? Yawping cretin and instaliberal Fast Eddie Schulz can probably claim a bigger audience.

That's gotta hurt.

Michael Moore is a Grossly Obese Liar

Surpise, Surprise:

Less than 24 hours after accusing the Walt Disney Company of pulling the plug on his latest documentary in a blatant attempt at political censorship, the rabble-rousing film-maker Michael Moore has admitted he knew a year ago that Disney had no intention of distributing it.

The admission, during an interview with CNN, undermined Moore's claim that Disney was trying to sabotage the US release of Fahrenheit 911 just days before its world premiere at the Cannes film festival.

In other words, he was creating a false sense of victimhood.

But who predicted that this was more like the truth?:

Instead, it lent credence to a growing suspicion that Moore was manufacturing a controversy to help publicise the film, a full-bore attack on the Bush administration and its handling of national security since the attacks of 11 September 2001.

Won't be the only thing manufactured.

In an indignant letter to his supporters, Moore said he had learnt only on Monday that Disney had put the kibosh on distributing the film, which has been financed by the semi-independent Disney subsidiary Miramax.

But in the CNN interview he said: "Almost a year ago, after we'd started making the film, the chairman of Disney, Michael Eisner, told my agent he was upset Miramax had made the film and he will not distribute it."

OK, leftybloggers - yet another symptom of a conservative media?

Host On Her Own Petard

Air America's FrankenNet's program "The O'Franken Factor" plugs itself as "Drug Free Radio' - a jape at Rush Limbaugh's late painkiller jones.

As Elder and Saint Paul from Fraters Libertas pointed out at Keegans last night, the irony is positively rich.

Here she is:

That'd be Cacklin' Katherine "Six-Martini" Lanpher, AKA "Minnesota's Most Elegible", AKA "The Swerving Diva'. On the right (I have to specify - many of the women at NPR do look like Al Franken).

This is the pic the Fraters like the most...

...taken after her DUI arrest last year.

As the Strib put it:

Lanpher, 43, of St. Paul, was charged Tuesday with two counts of gross misdemeanor drunken driving and one misdemeanor count of leaving the scene of an accident.

At the time of her arrest, Lanpher's blood-alcohol level was 0.21 percent, more than twice the legal limit of 0.10 percent, according to a Ramsey County criminal complaint.

No one was injured in the April 12 incident. Lanpher is accused of hitting a car while turning onto a street shortly after midnight.

Drug-free, indeed.

How many people a year are killed by painkiller addicts?

Strings Attached

I started playing guitar 27 years ago last month.

In that time, I've heard a lot of guitar players. A few have influenced me, even moved me, greatly.

I've been bouncing back and forth for a while; "do I do a self-absorbed, navel-gazing post about guitar players that have influenced me the most, or do I do an arrogant, navel-gazing post on the guitarists that I think are the absolute best?"

But when I thought about it, I realized that if we assume "perception is reality", then truly the lists are one and the same.

So - I submit for your approval the following arrogant and self-absorbed work of abject navel-gazing: The Ten Best Guitarists Ever.

10. Jimmy Claptonbeck. Yeah, I know - Page, Beck and Clapton should each be on everyone's list, yadda yadda. Yes, they're all great, and I learned a lot of guitar copying their stuff, note by note. But yaaaaagh, blues-based guitar is starting to bore me stiff.

9. Hendrix. Duh.

8. Bob Stinson. The late Stinson - original lead guitarist of the Replacements - was a manic genius. His frenetic, disjointed style suggested a game of chicken - speeding to the edge of doom and then pulling out at the last second. Amazing, and very underrated. He gains a point for having met me twice. But he loses it right back because both times, bombed out of his mind, he tried to buy bolivian marching powder from me. (no, I've never tried it, much less sold it - although that was at a time in my life when a lot of people wouldn't have guessed that...)

7. Pete Townsend. Pete Townsend made the tone do the talking; anger, joy, what have you. Without Townsend, there would have been no...

6. Dave "The Edge" Evans. The Edge was the first guitarist to harness - and initially, depend on - technology as a key part of his style. Before the Edge, people who plugged in racks of effects to sound better than they were were laughed at. After that, it became the dominant style in pop-rock for a decade.

5. Mike Campbell. Tom Petty's long-time guitar player is quite simply the best rock and roll guitarist alive. Not blues, not esoteric, not multi-ethnic mishmash, not a style-spanning virtuoso - rock and roll. If Chuck Berry were dead, Campbell would be his reincarnation - but since Berry is alive, I have no explanation.

4.David Gilmore. Pink Floyd bores me stiff. Seriously - other than The Wall, they have not one album I'd care to waste an hour of my life listening to. I've tried - oh, lord, I've tried - and all Pink Floyd arouses in me is boredom (can boredom be aroused?). But if someone were to listen to me play, they'd probably say I sound more like Gilmore than anyone - and I'd take it as a compliment. Gilmore is a slow player, and so am I. He wrenches endless nuance out of a long, feedback-drenched note where lesser guitar players would riff away like monkeys on meth to no commensurate effect. His genius is all the more notable when you realize that his guitar work is the only thing keeping you from drifting off into a coma listening to the rest Pink Floyd's wretched oeuvre.

3. Mark Knopfler. If you have to ask...

2. Nils Lofgren. Yes, I was a Lofgren fan before he joined the E Street Band (an event that rates up there with having Kate Beckinsale show up at your PowerBall award ceremony wearing a camisole...er, what was I talking about? Oh, yeah - guitar players). Lofgren's finger-style picking is pure, bottled soul - like Knopfler's style, but much more interesting over time.

1. Richard Thompson. I've seen Thompson in concert three times. Each time, he's been a revelation. As in, reading the Book of Revelation and realizing you had to get your life right. Every time I see Thompson, I vow to start over from scratch and learn to play guitar right. I don't know what amazes me more about Thompson; his effortless virtuosity (which crosses between electric and acoustic guitar, which is actually pretty rare) or the fact that is virtuosity is so effortless (he routinely switches between bizarre open tunings by ear, as he patters with the audience). I spent five years of my life learning "1952 Vincent Black Lightning", and that leaves about 200 more to go. Essential.

That is all.

Shame

Two of my guiltiest blog reading pleasures - Sheila "Red" O'Malley and Michelle Catalano - have great meme, "Things I'm Not Ashamed to Admit, But Should Be".

Michelle's even doing an open mic night on the subject at A Small Victory, which is a lot of fun.

Let's see, where to start:

• I love blind dates. Going to a blind date is like walking down the stairs on Christmas morning when you're a kid; you know the odds are you'll get more underwear than cool toys, but it's still fun wondering what's in the package. I don't always like how they end, but the run-up to a blind date is one of life's great pleasures.
• I love "Blind Date", the TV show.
• I thought Marisa Tomei deserved the Oscar.
• I just taught myself "Comfortably Numb" on the bagpipes.
• I also once "serenaded" a woman I was (briefly) dating on the pipes.
• Not only did I, too, love the Bangles - I got backstage passes to one of their gigs, and hit shamelessly on Vicki. Or Lori. Maybe both.
• My old band did country versions of "Erotic City" and "Anarchy in the UK" and a lounge-jazz version of "Bastards of Young"
• I have had at least one date with 76 different women in the last four years. No, 77.
• Although I am a really good rock'nroll guitar player, I taught myself to play off a John Denver record.

Bored enough yet?

Oh, hell, if you're with me this far:

• I watch very little TV - but I used to catch the first couple of seasons of China Beach and Party of Five pretty religiously.
• However, I always, always hated Ren and Stimpy

Oh, I've had enough fun for now.

Pity Me

Most of my working career - actually all of it - I've worked in some of the most wretched offices in the Twin Cities; converted railroad sheds, converted storerooms, closets...

...so I don't feel at all bad that after 11 years in the business, I finally have an office I enjoy sitting in.

Oh, I know that it was probably an administrative glitch that stuck me in a window cube on the ninetheenth floor of a local office tower. I'm sure it can't last forever, and that heads will roll.

But until they do, this is what I come in to see in the morning:

Or this:

Oh, don't worry. I'll tough it out.

Mitch Van Winkel

In so many areas of my life, I feel like Rip Van Winkel.

It was bad enough starting in radio again, for the first time in twelve years; radio studios are all computerized these days; no turntables, reel to reel decks or even cart machines. I could not run a radio program, in a technical sense, if I tried today. Scary.

Then there's Minneapolis.

The last time I spent any serious time in the Warehouse District of Minneapolis, especially in daylight, it was the mid-eighties. Back then, it was exactly that - a district of warehouses; trash blew in the streets, walls crumbled around you, and the buildings were...warehouses. A zillion bands rented dirt-cheap space in ratty hovels; I auditioned for all of them and practiced with most.

So I took my first walk north of Third Avenue North in probably 17 years.

Oy, vey.

It's all gentrified. Most of the warehouses have been converted to lofts, apartments, tony stores, comedy/theatre spaces...everything but warehouse space. All new. All expensive.

It was as if someone had dropped a whole new city on top of the one I knew. I almost got disoriented by the time I got to the Strib plant, up on Eighth Avenue.

I have to get out more.

A Conspiracy Theory

The left is in a tizizzy over Disney's decision to bar Miramax from distributing Michael Moore's latest epic of paranoid neo-fiction movie.

Disney's call - to follow through on its promist not to distribute "Fahrenheit 911" is being spun - predictably - as a conservative-dominated Disney, in collusion with the Bush family, squatting on the plucky indie filmmaker (including by some people who should be smarter than that...).

Let's look this over for a moment.

Michael Weinstein has never been shy about his Democrat bona-fides. Never. In addition, he and Moore have, according to Captain Ed, a pretty sweet deal sewn up that guarantee them both an immense amount of money. And despite Disney's explanation:

Mr. Moore's film is deemed to be against Disney's interests not because of the company's business dealings with the government but because Disney caters to families of all political stripes and believes Mr. Moore's film, which does not have a release date, could alienate many.

...Moore and his crowd are crying "censorship".

Buncombe. This is a goldmine for Moore and Weinstein - and the Democrats.

For starters - Miramax has known for a year that Disney would refuse to distribute the film. If you think a project that high in profile, and for which Harvey Weinstein's financial, political and personal stakes are so high, comes within six months of release without a distributor, I suggest you think again.

Everybody wins:

• Weinstein gets to outflank Disney - with, I suspect, Disney's full connivance.
• Moore and Weinstein get buckets of free publicity - "notoriety", it might have been called in a more innocent age and place - by caterwauling about "eeevul corporate censorship - which the dimmer and duller bulbs of the left's echo chamber will repeat verbatim.
• Moore's movie goes on to exactly the same release it would have had.
• Moore and Weinstein, as Ed noted, scoop up the North American profits, a fair chunk of which finds its way into Democrat coffers.
• The Democrats get the nourishment on which they run; victimization.

Don't believe the hype.

Friends=Toast

"Friends" ends its very, very long run tonight.

I've still never seen it.

Unfit To Command. Unable To Rebut

As noted in Powerline, the Boston Glob has been covering the story of Kerry's former commanders and shipmates' statements.

The left, predictably, is reacting predictably.

You've seen the quotes:

''I do not believe John Kerry is fit to be commander in chief," said retired Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann, who helped organize the news conference and oversaw all of the swift boats in Vietnam at the time Kerry commanded one of those crafts. ''This is not a political issue; it is a matter of his judgment, truthfulness, reliability, loyalty, and trust -- all absolute tenets of command."

There was much more, of course.

The blogging left, of course, has reacted as expected. The generally-coherent Oliver Willis notes:

They also reveal the people (along with Joe Conason) behind the new round of anti-Kerry smears, spread by the usual suspects at the WSJ

That's right. It's a conspiracy! A vast, right-wing one, even!

Other leftybloggers noted that most of the former sailors were linked with the GOP. Shocking, isn't it - that people who'd fought for this country align with the party that didn't repudiate their efforts and sacrifices?

NOTE TO INSTAPUNDIT READERS: The comment that Glenn called out was from my good friend Brian Jones at Boviosity. If you're not reading Brian, you should be (although you're welcome here too!)

Demonstrations

John Kerry spent parts of two days in the Twin Cities - which must mean that Minnesota is in play, as far as the Dems are concerned.

There were, of course, counterdemonstrations:

Hm. No huge head puppets. No "Naked For Dubya" groups. No fly-eaten students handing out tracts.

What kinda protest is that?

Good Angel, Bad Angel

A few days ago, I posted a piece on why I think the Battle of Fallujah isn't going as badly - nearly as badly - as some think, including some who I'd think would know better.

Someone said my posting was "Baghdad-Bob-like" in its optimism.

Nah.

I wasn't being optimistic - I was being realistic, and looking at the most reliable information I had, filtered through my own knowledge of military history.

Viewed in that context, I have not a single doubt that CENTCOM will handle the battle at Fallujah properly, both in terms of the military operation and the theatre-level politics involved. I think that Fallujah was handled very badly at first - we kept our hands off to too-great an extent, allowing the terrorists and their foreign supporters (including, say some, Syrian or Iranian special forces) to turn the city into an armed camp) - but once the massacre of the contractors occurred, the Marines did the right thing:

• They didn't charge to the rescue because the incident was a carefully-staged provocation, intended to ambush the relief force; a company of Marines in Humvees would have been hammered in a Mogadishu-like morass
• The response since then - methodical, slow, squeezing the terrs like a python rather than like a monkey - has been vexing for stateside hawks, and a false sign of hope for anti-Americans at home. But from the perspective of an effective urban counterinsurgency, it's been exactly right.
• Politically? Andrew Sullivan is more dead-wrong on this issue than any other; the fact that the Administration has allowed this to happen this way - operationally correct without fussing extensively over the political fallout at home - is a testament to the administration's moral strength.

But am I optimistic?

For the first time in this war, not so much.

I think the miltiary will do the right thing. Likewise, I think the Bush Administration will do just fine, as long as they're in office

No, it's the American people I'm not optimistic about.

I worry that the media onslaught - the constant drumbeat of Quagmiritis coming from the horde of media that want to be remembered for the next Cronkite-y "...this war is unwinnable" moment - is starting to win over converts in the great middle; people who haven't drunk the blue-state koolaid, but still don't know better than to relentlessly fact-check the media. People who believe that the media isn't backing a horse in this election.

I worry that one of these next events - the next battle that doesn't play out like a Bruckheimer production, the next "scandal", the next time the news is manipulated, it'll be the tipping point that drives that critical mass of Americans around the bend.

I don't worry that the military will win. I worry that the great mass of the American public won't know the difference between foreign-instigated violence done to derail and discredit the handover of power, and genuine setbacks that will truly matter in five years.

I worry that, like the Tet offensive, the enemy will launch an attack (like they've done at Fallujah and Najaf and Ad Diwaniyah, and for that matter Mogadishu) that they know full well has no chance of affecting us militarily, but is enough to sway a media that is, in effect, an active participant in the campaign against George Bush - and that, like Tet, it'll work.

Challenge Yourself - and your Toadies

Yesterday, I ripped on Atrios' take on this article, about Pat Tillman's funeral.

I termed the article a "hatchet piece". Was I hasty? Perhaps a bit, although on a fourth read I'm still not sure.

The piece is a bit of a fraud; it wraps itself in Tillman's challenge to the false, unthinking piety of others (the "others", natch, being the middle-Americans who might both support the war and, horror of horrors, believe in God), and yet in its subtext it entirely supports the even-more-vacuous, self-satisfied piety of the anti-Bush, anti-war audience.

Which brings us to the original Atrios piece.

In the comments to my original post, someone named "TK" wrote:

Of course "He's F---ing Dead" is a quote from the actual article.

You did read the article didn't you?

Or, maybe, like your President, you are waiting for some toady to read it for you?

Sure, "TK", but brownnosing bloggers in other peoples' comments section hardly qualifies as true "toadying" experience. Sorry, buddy; you'll need to put on some pants and get a real job.

However - yes, I read the article. And I thought, before I wrote my original post - "of all the things that Mr. Atrios could have chosen as a slugline for his piece, why his brother's "he's f*cking dead"? There were many other things said about Pat Tillman at the funeral, after all; things just as jarring, things much more revelatory, things that actually taught us something. But at the head of all that was the brother's repeated "he's f*cking dead", delivered by a guy who'd seem to have been really horribly (and justifiably) affected by his brother's death (and, if it were a child of mine pissing on mourners like that, I'd kick his or her ass after the service, Ranger or no; it's not about you.) Why, oh why indeed?

Because in the context of Atrios' site - essentially an online tribal hangout for the "Hate Bush Now!" crowd to drink Koolaid and engage in their Sixty Seconds of Online Hate - it's the part that best expresses the Crushing Irony that the left wants us all to be left with when it comes to Tillman; it was expressed most clearly by Ted Rall's cartoon on the subject (Tillman was really a racist thug - it's the only reason anyone's join the Army, after all - and the fact that he died merely proves he was a sap and an idiot, doncha know). Atrios' selection of that line - and that line only - as his headline, in the context of the rest of his publication - is a nod to the same idea; "he fought for that thing we hate most [Bush], and now he's f*cking dead! His brother said it himself!"

Atrios disputed the notion of the added meaning in a later comment;

no added meaning, mitch. I had nothing but respect for Tillman from what I knew previously, which wasn't much, and then I had some more after reading the article.

I liked the unscripted unconcerned personal expression of his brother. I always like when people at memorial services feel free to say what they want to say, rather than what they're supposed to - especially when TV cameras are there.

Fair enough. I'll take that - at least the bit about the admiration - at face value; a cursory Google didn't turn up any examples of Mr. Atrios ridiculing Tillman before his death.

Question, then, Mr. Atrios: Why did you like "the unscripted unconcerned personal expression" of the brother?

I'll admit I have a preconception here - I suspect you admire it because it's a metaphor for what the left wants all all of America to think about the war - heroism come to naught. Am I wrong?

Because if the brother had said instead "He's f*cking dead, but he's in Heaven, and he was proud to be a Ranger, and you better vote for Bush, a***oles", I suspect it's more likely you'd have ripped the brother's "unscripted expression", and used a different headline.

Maybe "Ranger Wore A Dress"?

RTFC!

Much of the blogging left has wet themselves with joy.

George Will dissed the president!

They needed, of course, to read the whole thing - and, perhaps, so did Will.

George Will is a classical Conservative writer - but he's not right about everything. He favored repealing the Second Amendment on fairly bogus "conservative" grounds until probably a decade ago (he was reasonable enough to change his mind), and reading some of his columns from the mid-eighties is fascinating; he was getting a whole different vibe from the Reagan Administration than most of us get these days.

Yesterday's column latched onto one of President Bush's periodic rhetorical lapses, and expanded it into a critique of neocon nation-building (and is it just me, or is "Neocon" becoming the most meaningless term since "Band of Brothers"?)

He ends with this bit here:

Being steadfast in defense of carefully considered convictions is a virtue. Being blankly incapable of distinguishing cherished hopes from disappointing facts, or of reassessing comforting doctrines in face of contrary evidence, is a crippling political vice. [But it remains to be seen whether that's a pervasive problem in the Administration. You've been wrong about these things before; vide Helsinki - Ed]

In "On Liberty" (1859), John Stuart Mill said, "It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say" that the doctrine of limited, democratic government "is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties." One hundred forty-five years later it obviously is necessary to say that.

Ron Chernow's magnificent new biography of Alexander Hamilton begins with these of his subject's words: "I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be." That is the core of conservatism.

Traditional conservatism. Nothing "neo" about it. This administration needs a dose of conservatism without the prefix.

Which is something a lot of us conservatives - including me, who supported Steve Forbes until the convention ended - have been saying about Bush for years.

Still, the blogging left needn't get too exercised: neither Will nor I is telling Bush to move to the "middle" - merely to be a better conservative.

It's all bad news for you guys in the long run.

Posted by Mitch at 02:57 AM | Comments (0)

The Opposition

The left's most overrated Blogger, "Atrios", has this to say about Pat Tillman on the occasion of his funeral:

He's F**king Dead

...while introducing a hatchet piece from SFGate.

"Atrios" goes on to say:

It's a shame our media is always desperate to force all heroes conform to the standard cartoon script, instead of letting them just be human.

No specifics are given, of course - how ARE we supposed to treat heroes in "Atrios"' world?

Does that world recognize the concept of heroism?

Anyone?

Band of Bothers

Captain Ed finds some ghastly reporting at the Boston Glob.

Peter Canelos writes:

The mute testimony of the veterans ennobled Kerry, shining more light on his character than the loyal gazes of Nancy Reagan or Laura Bush could ever confer on their men. Kerry seemed to grow more formidable, and his sudden surge to the nomination coincided with the veterans' arrival at his side. [Really? It seemed to coincide with the wheels coming off Howard Dean - Ed.]

Now, Kerry mostly campaigns alone, with aides, local politicians, and a cranky, sleep-deprived press corps as his entourage. His much-decorated service in the Vietnam War has become a dry fact on his rsum (sic), something to be parsed and debated. The mystical bond with others who've seen combat is no longer palpable. It's vanished into the political haze.

Part of that is because it's a charade; as the upcoming open letter from a veritable flotilla of Kerry's former comrades attests, the ranks of Vietnam Veterans are far from closed behind Kerry.

But then there's this:

Bush is embracing veterans to link his ''war presidency" -- and the ongoing battles in Iraq -- to the ''good war" of his father's generation. Kerry's veterans offer standing testimony to how disputed wars can haunt the nation for generations. Whatever their individual views on Iraq, Kerry's veteran supporters apply a truth test to Bush, and remind voters of the sacrifices beneath Kerry's rich life of today.

So what will the average American think about this?

Forget the blue-state Americans who've drunk the Koolaid; for them, all war is bad unless Bill Clinton justified it.

To win this election, Kerry's going to have to keep every single voter that went for Algore, and win a bunch of red-staters.

What do they remember of Vietnam?

Immense sacrifices - all squandered by the elites that John Kerry represents.

(Via the Captain)

Saint Paul is Better - Reason #32,422

Even Doug Grow gets it right once in a while:

What's wrong with St. Paul? Here it had a perfect chance to learn from its big twin. Instead, it's gone its own way in selecting a new police chief.

No muss, no fuss, no big fees to national head-hunting firms, no slamming the door on members of its own force.

How uncreative. How ... effective...it's both stunning and boring to watch St. Paul go about finding a chief to replace Bill Finney. Stunning because of the contrast with Minneapolis. Boring because of the efficiency.

Grow could have mentioned that that chief, once chosen, will lead a department that is not constantly mired in boneheaded scandals, like its neighbor force across the river.

Read it all.

Seriously - I've lived in both of the Twin Cities, several times. And while the public services in Saint Paul can be as arrogant and sclerotic as any municipal government services, they are head, shoulders and ankles better than those in Minneapolis, on a policy level and, frequently, in the street. (I have many friends on the Minneapolis Police Department - and I can say the problems over there come in at the leadership level...)

We have about half the violent crime per-capital that Minneapolis has, the best urban fire department in America, and we've never elected a Sharon Sayles-Belton or R.T. Rybak as mayor.

Waiting For '08

Don't worry about Al Franken.

When FrankenNet's death spiral finally and inevitably concludes, he's got plans.

He still wants to be a Minnesota senator.

At this rate, he'll have plenty of time:

Comedian and liberal talk show host Al Franken put the odds of a challenge against Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., in 2008 at better than 50-50, and said he would make a decision by late next year.

I can see the slogan already; "Vote for Franken, or he'll body slam your grandfather.

Franken, over a bite at a Thai restaurant (he ordered tom yum goong soup with shrimp and seafood salad), also said he's happy with the direction of his new radio show, "The O'Franken Factor," despite unenthusiastic early reviews.

No.

Ishtar and Howard the Duck got "unenthusiastic" early reviews. FrankenNet has a ways to go before they get to "unenthusiastic".

Franken, who first floated the idea of running for Senate last year, said he's spoken to state and party officials, political operatives, and a couple of senators, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., about it.
"I asked Hillary, 'Can you give me some suggestions about running for Senate in a state you haven't lived for in a while, or in your case, ever?' " he recalled, laughing heartily.

"And she said, 'This will be a long conversation,' so we agreed to have a long conversation about it."

Now, if Saturday Night Live were remotely funny or topical anymore, that'd be a great skit; America's Evita having a "long conversation" with a man whose entire public persona is built on being a simpering pain in the ass with passive-aggressive tendencies.

But how's that keen Franken wit holding up under the pressure of doing dailiy radio?

Franken said he would probably not take political action committee money but would also not put in any of his own money into a race.

"Absolutely not," he said, laughing. "If the staff went out for beers, I'd pick it up. But you're paying for this, right? Am I right? I'm right, right?"

Forget I asked.

OK - next question: How are those keen radio instincts coming along?

His cell phone rang.

"Hi, Norm," Franken said. No, not that Norm. It was Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (and native Minnesotan), who Franken plans to book on his show.

Norm Ornstein.

I remember listening to Ornstein talking at the Capitol in 1988. 500 people were almost audibly praying for the sweet release of death.

One month into the show, Franken said he's pleased with how it's going.

"I feel like the show's growing every day, and the show in a year will be different than the show was the first day," he said. "But I feel like we're totally on the right track."

But Franken did acknowledge that it was harder being funny in this format.

"It's certainly difficult to be funny for three hours, because you talk about very serious things," he said. "I'd like to loosen it up a little bit, and try to write a little bit more comedy for it, maybe make it a little less guest-heavy."

Al. Bubbie. One radio ersatz radio amateur to another - then why not do it? It's not like you have anything to lose?

Although he's not a candidate yet, Franken is already taking shots at Coleman, calling him a "shill" for the Bush administration.

Coleman declined to comment, but the chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party, Ron Eibensteiner, said, "This is a joke, right?"

"Minnesota experimented with one Ventura-type of candidate," Eibensteiner said, referring to professional-wrestler-turned-governor Jesse Ventura. "I would be extremely surprised if Minnesota experimented with another one. It just didn't work the first time."

Of course it's a joke.

So is the DFL, these days; it's a perfect match.

Posted by Mitch at 07:14 AM | Comments (2)

State of Grace

From Sheila A-Stray's Redheaded Ramblings, a fascinating question:

How would you define the word "grace"?
Not "grace" as in: "Anna Pavlova was extremely graceful". Not that kind of grace. The OTHER kind. The intangible kind.
How would you define it? (thanks, bp. Good call.)
This is a continuation of a conversation I had last night, which intrigued me, and got me to thinking about "grace", as an entity, a sensation, an actual thing.
What do you think it actually is?

This, by the way, is one of my two favorite discoveries in the blog world lately. Worth a frequent read.

Message From The Front

Hugh Hewitt is circulating a letter from a Marine in Iraq, which contains a request.

First off, I'd like to say that this is not a political message. I'm not concerned about domestic politics right now. We have much bigger things to deal with, and we need your help.

It seems that despite the tremendous and heroic efforts of the men and women serving here in Iraq to bring much needed peace and stability to this region, we are losing the war of perception with the media and American people. Our enemy has learned that the key to defeating the mighty American military is by swaying public opinion at home and abroad. We are a people that cherish the democratic system of government and therefore hold the will of the people in the highest regard. We love to criticize ourselves almost to an endless degree, because we care what others think. Our enemies see this as a weakness and are trying to exploit it.

There's much more...:

By making this a place where liberty can finally grow, we are making the whole world safer. Your efforts at home are directly tied to our success. You are the soldiers at home fighting the war of perception. So I'm asking you as a fellow fighting man: Do your duty. Stop the attempts of the enemy wherever you are. You are a mighty force for good, because truth is on your side. Together we will win this fight and ensure a better world for the future.

God Bless and Semper Fidelis,
1st Lt. Robert L. Nofsinger USMC
Ramadi, Iraq

Read it all.

While doing so, imagine dedicating the whole thing to Ted Rall.

Ted Rall: Pustule

I try to avoid inflammatory rhetoric. I really do.

I try to avoid letting my baser side have free rein. Ever.

But sometimes, it's just not easy.

Michelle Catalano does this sort of thing better than me, anyway:

Dear Ted,

Should you and I ever cross paths one day (and the time is getting close to where I will do my best to make that happen), I will risk the chances of going to jail just for that one moment of joy I will feel when my fist meets your face. You are a blight upon the human race and a disgrace to your profession. Yet, you are too stupid and self-absored to realize just how much of an idiot you are. I don't know whether to pity you or kick you in your small, shriveled balls.

Part of me wants to offer to hold Rall while she does it.

The part of me realizes that Ted Rall is like that little jagoff who sat in the back of English class making rude noises and giggling at the ruckus he caused.

Too stupid to worry about, really.

Dirtbags

Read this piece on TalkLeft...

...and then read the comments, wherein a bunch of people second-guess Thomas Hamill's escape from the terrorists who were threatening to kill him.

One priceless quote:

Is nobody finding it a tad convenient that Hamill was released only days after the Fallujah Brigade began?

I wonder if the escape is really just that he was released and some of the captors didn't leave fast enough.

Scum. Simply breathlessly moronic scum.

UPDATE: In the wake of a comment from Talkleft, I'd like to point out that the site is generally one of the few left-of-center sites that I generally genuinely enjoy reading. Unlike the likes of Kos, Atrios and Hesiod, TalkLeft is civil, responsible and enjoyable.

At the Top Of My Must-Read List...

...is "Brothers In Arms", a new book by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Yes, that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

The book is a history of the Army's 761st Tank Battalion, an all-black unit formed mainly as a PR exercise - but which served with great distinction throughout the European campaign in World War II, as well as a history of Afro-Americans in the US military.

It looks fascinating, so far.

Another Flipflop

Tagorda notes a new Kerry flipflop:

John Kerry, March 5, 2004:
At this rate the Bush administration won't create its first job for more than 10 years. Americans have a clear choice in this election. They can either suffer with more and more job losses that rip the heart out of our economy or they can give George Bush a new job in November and start putting america back to work.
John Kerry, May 3, 2004:
I think we'll probably have a pretty good job market this month and the next four or five months. That's great. That's not the problem. The problem is that we're not creating the kinds of jobs that pay more. On average, the jobs are paying $9,000 less than the jobs we're losing and American wages are going backwards....

Read the whole thing.

Cue The Violins

Dane Smith is one of Minnesota's best political reporters. I don't know his personal politics, nor do I care. But he has a reputation for relative fairness and detachment.

But this piece in this morning's Strib?

Oy, vey.

Background, in case you don't live in Minnesota and you've been under a rock for the past 40 years: Minnesota traditionally trends left. It's a place where the dominant media culture calls Arne Carlson a "Republican" and doesn' giggle and blow its martini out its collective nose.

All by way of saying that the Minnesota DFL doesn't operate under the same handicaps as, say, the Utah Democratic party. They are big. They are an integral part of this state's infrastructure, controlling most of the larger city governments, the universities, the teachers' union, and the state's bureaucracy. Until about 1998, they controlled the entire state apparatus of government in a joyless, politically correct headlock.

So here's what they say about the Kerry Kampaign here in Minnesota:

Sen. John Kerry's Minnesota campaign still operates out of a tiny office at the DFL Party's St. Paul headquarters. Unlike President Bush's campaign, with 10 paid employees and spacious Energy Park headquarters, Kerry's still doesn't have a single full-time paid staffer in the state.

Its chief operative is state director Ken Martin, at age 30, a veteran of several congressional and statewide campaigns, including Al Gore's win in Minnesota in the 2000 presidential election. Martin is working as a volunteer, and his cell phone rings to the tune of "Mission Impossible".

But Martin says the mission is not even close to impossible. He predicts the Kerry campaign will catch up soon on signs of competitiveness and viability.

"We have energy like I've never seen before in this party, 55,000 people at the precinct caucuses, five times as many as 2002, a built-in army," Martin said.

"Bring it on, George Bush," he said. "We will defend and keep Minnesota."

Those plucky underdogs!

OK, readers: which of these scenarios is closer to the real truth - and which do you think the Strib wants you to believe:

1. "Just like the Strib article says: Bush's campaign, funded by big plutocrats, is rolling in money, while the plucky blue-collar hero John Kerry is operated by a bunch of plucky, gleaming-eyed volunteers with ripped-out knees in their jeans but pure of heart! And doggone it, they got spunk!
2. Kerry has been spending his money in states that have primaries and that are much more in play; he doesn't need to spend so much money yet in Minnesota, because he has a powerful base, and the state's liberal media carrying his water for him.

Placed your bets yet?

Let's look at the rest of the plucky underdogs:

The personalities on the Kerry team are in place. The roster includes old names, up-and-coming young professionals such as Martin, and borrowed talent from other candidates and causes.

At the top of the pyramid is a quartet of "state chairs" that includes the most distinguished and wealthiest patrons of the DFL Party and its most experienced hands.

The foursome consists of:

Former Vice President Walter Mondale, who will lead Minnesotans as official delegation chairman to the national convention in Boston.

Minneapolis attorney Sam Kaplan and his wife, Sylvia, the key financial backers and advisers of the late Sen. Paul Wellstone. Kaplan said late last week that soliciting money for Kerry's fundraising visit on Monday has been easier than he's ever seen it. "People are calling up and actually saying they feel badly that they hadn't been asked. ... In 20 years I've never seen such enthusiasm for giving."

Minneapolis businessman Vance Opperman and his wife, Darin, who have been at the top of donor lists for Democratic candidates for many years. Opperman's son-in-law, David Morehouse, is national communications director for Kerry.

Minneapolis attorney Mike Ciresi and his wife, Ann. He's the celebrated lawyer who helped Minnesota win a multibillion-dollar settlement against tobacco companies and ran for the Senate unsuccessfully in 2000.

Well, there's a big surprise.

Smith describes Martin:

The day-to-day running of the Kerry campaign will fall to Martin, who grew up in Eden Prairie and cut his teeth on politics as a high-school junior working for Wellstone's first Senate campaign in 1990.

I already want to smack him - even if he were a Republican.

And when he says:

Minnesota and the Upper Midwest could be the Gettysburg of 2004, "the central battleground," where the race is decided, Martin said.

Let me just take a moment to say that people who use metaphors drawn from warfare to describe politics should be drafted and sent overseas to clear mines. Yeah, it's the norm, but it's still disgusting.

He noted that the Twin Cities is the largest media market in three pivotal states -- Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa -- that together offer as many electoral votes, 27, as Florida.

Unstated - they were all Gore states in '00.

Is the generally-excellent Smith seriously trying to pass off the idea that Kerry is an underdog in this state? Or that he's being outspent for any reason other than the Bush team sees Minnesota as a place to pull off an - note the adjective here - upset win?

Fallujah

In the late spring of 1942, the First Marine Division left Hawaii, turning defense of the islands over to a couple of National Guard units.

"We're retreating! We should be kicking Japanese ass!" cried a bunch of conservative bloggers. "This is a major defeat to the Nixon Administration" said Markos "Daily" Kos, not aware that Richard Nixon would not be elected president for another 26 years.

"The war is already over, and we've lost" cried amateur pundits from coast to coast.

A few weeks later, the Marines went ashore on Guadalcanal.

The situation in Fallujah is vexing to Americans, used to watching our military roll with seeming (and illusory) impunity over enemies, in campaigns both large and well-prepared - the march up to Baghdad - and small and extemporized (Afghanistan).

The mysterious but seemingly knowledgeable military blogger Belmont Club, has been all over this story from the beginning:

One of the risks to taking the town was always that the defenders would use the opportunity to stage their own Viking funeral pyre by torching the town and roasting as many civilians as they could with it. The answer, it seemed back in April 3 was:

However, if the Marines exert only gradual pressure, and use neighbors or Iraqi police from outside Fallujah to guide other neighbors into processing areas, the defenders will never be presented with a clear opportunity to precipitate a crisis. Once the Marines get the momentum of processing going, the tribal leaders will lose control and the whole structure will start to crumble. The Marines can exploit their physical domination by offering clemency or even rewards to those who rat out on other perps. The inner bastion of Fallujah will collapse like a termite-eaten post as each man looks out for himself.

It is in this context that the perplexing cycle of ceasefires punctuated by nocturnal assaults can be understood. The Corps, besides incorporating the Chinese word Gung Ho into it's vocabulary, may have finally proved to the Arabs that they can out-hudna anyone who ever stood on a patch of sand. By alternately throttling and releasing the enemy, or in cruder terms, by a process of talking and shooting, the USMC seems to have squeegeed the foe into the 'Golan' without ever precipitating the feared crisis. ("Like a cut flower in a vase, fair to see, yet doomed to die" -- Winston Churchill)

Is "Wretchard" from the Belmont Club right or wrong? We don't know.

But it's interesting, watching the current situation and hearing a lot of the same questions (phrased just a little differently in most cases) popping up on both the left and the right.

I'm going to take a semi-educated stab at some of them - and hope some of my military readers "got my six":

• Why aren't we kicking their asses? Everyone knows the Arab world favors the "strong horse"!" Yabbut, everyone favors the strong horse. How many of you gave a rat's ass about the Twins when they were going 70-92? Every culture respects fears the cultures that can pulverize the hometown team and build a pyramid of the locals' skulls. Is that the best way to end the situation? In the long term, I tend to doubt. As Wretchard implicitly notes, we'd gain nothing, and lose much, by "kicking ass" and creating half a city full of martyrs - and that has nothing to do with coddling the "Arab Street" and everything to do with showing the Iraqi street that we are omnipotent enough to win without napalming the Golan neighborhood even further into the stone age.
• "But we're losing face by handing part of the front over to the Iraqi police!" Huh? First of all, it's not "the front". It's a district that the Marines took weeks ago. It's rear-area security - just like the National Guard units holding Hawaii after the Marines shipped out.

  Second - it's not the Iraqi police, whose performace has been so spotty (albeit sometimes quite good). It's a separate unit, created and trained by the Marines themselves. Not much is known about this unit (and rumors that it's "commanded" by a former Republican Guard general are apparenty not only exaggerated but irrelevant - the unit, according to the Belmont Club, is fully integrated into the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, not subordinate to the CPA.

  Do you think the US Marines would hand over a chunk of their front - or even fob off security duties in their rear area - to Iraqis they didn't trust? If so, let me know why. I'll need convincing.

  And for all of you who call the Marine handover a "retreat" - only in the world of Baghdad Bob, I'm afraid. The battalion of Marines is, most likely, moving out of the front line to rest up for any final push that might be needed to end the stalemate.

• "Whaddya mean, "rest up?" They're the Marines! They're supposed to be good at this! If they have to rest up after only a month in action, what good are they?" That's the danger of getting your information about warfare from Hollywood or the evening news, I guess. There is an immutable clock facing all battlefield commanders, and it starts ticking when the first shot is fired at their men, and the clock measures a nearly-unavoidable cycle; tradtionally, a fighting man starts out fairly green in his first actions, while he's getting used to combat. It's here that soldiers suffer their worst casualties - for the 30-60 days it takes for a new soldier to learn the ropes of living under fire. (It's been one of the US military's great achievements that it has managed to repeal this first part of the cycle to some extent - training like "Red Flag" and "Top Gun" and "OPFOR" seek, with some success, to teach the lessons of those first 30 days under fire before the shooting starts).

  For the next 30 to 90 days, the soldier operates at peak efficiency; even troops that went into action without much training are generally top-flight soldiers if they survive this long. Then, at around 90 to 120 days under fire (depending on the individual), the fatigue and stress of all that time under fire starts to take its toll; the soldier becomes fatalistic, and increasingly prone to complete breakdown, what used to be called "battle fatigue".

  This cycle, and the timing involved, are almost completely immune to training, and doesn't even depend so much on the troops' equipment, quality, or even time spent out of action. Whether a soldier is a draftee, a Green Beret, a militiaman, a Marine gunnery sergeant or a fighter pilot - after four or five months under constant fire, their ability to be effective in action, and their value to their units and missions, erodes drastically.

  It's this reason that our units revolve out of Iraq periodically (as opposed to the practice in Vietnam, where individual troops shuttled in and out after a one-year tour was over). And it's one of the reasons that our military, grossly eroded in size under the Clinton Administration, has to be careful exactly how much combat it exposes our troops to; those 120-odd days under fire per man can't be bought back, and it takes a lot more than 120-odd days to replace the men that have to be cycled out of fighting roles at that time.

  The stress and fatigue of endless action also affects command decisions. So - if the commander of the 1MEF thinks the battalion of Marines needs a rest, especially if they're getting ready for a potential big push, I'm inclined to believe them, absent evidence to the contrary.

• So why don't we just attack the place now? We can! One of the key lessons the US military learned - or re-learned - in the wake of Vietnam is to always fight the battle in such a way as to maximize your own strengths. It's called "Shaping the battlefield", and it involves using all the tools of the military trade to ensure that every possible factor - terrain, technology, positioning, pacing and tempo, relative fatigue and endurance, firepower, and even time - favor you.

  In Fallujah right now, everything favors the Marines. They control most of the city, and all the worthwhile parts. The guerrillas are herded into a flimsy slum, "Golan", a place of flimsy construction but cluttered sightlines, a place where a guerrilla can launch a dandy surprise attack - once. The Marines control when the battle will begin. They control how it'll end. They can rest - the enemy can't. The Marines can move about pretty much at will - the guerrillas move in fear of Marine snipers and infantry ambushes and AC130s in the dark and tanks plinking at them 24/7. The Marines are the cat, the guerrillas are a mouse being batted back and forth between the cat's paws before the kill.

  Under these circumstances, with the hearts and minds of an awful lot of Sunni Iraq at stake, there is no legitimate reason for the Marines to allow themselves to be bullied into acting stupidly or rashly.

  Except for politics. And if the Bush Administration is willing to put the Marines' operational realities above transient, temporal politics (or, as I personally suspect, they know that the situation will be resolved by summer, and forgotten by election-time), it's testimony to its integrity, not a slam on its strategery.

In "Tunnels of Cu Chi", a Vietnamese general noted in retrospect that Americans' historical attention spans last about six months, while that of the average Asian is around 25 years.

We're dealing with a culture that, on a superficial level, respects the "strong horse". But that same culture still fumes at the loss of Andalusia in 1492, and is still in a snit over the partition of Jerusalem. This is as opposed to our culture, much of which can't name all of our World War II allies.

All I'm saying is this; while they will certainly favor the "strong horse", that determination doesn't happen in a week, or four weeks, or even a year. The "strong horse" isn't a bouncy quarterhorse in the Arab world; it's the Clydesdale.

The bet has been placed among the Northern Alliance - if this situation isn't resolved by June 1, I'll owe Captain Ed, JB Doubtless and Rocketman a beer.

I'm confident I'll be collecting.

Hamill Escapes

Truck driver Thomas Hamill not only escaped from his terrorist thug captors...:

American hostage Thomas Hamill, kidnapped three weeks ago in an insurgent attack on his convoy, was found by U.S. forces Sunday south of Tikrit after he apparently escaped from his captors, the U.S. military said. An official said he was in good health.
Hamill, 43, of Macon, Miss., was discovered when he approached a U.S. patrol from the 2nd Battalion 108th Infantry, part of the New York National Guard, in the town of Balad, 35 miles south of Tikrit, a spokesman for U.S. troops in Tikrit said.
Hamill's wife, Kellie, spoke to her husband early Sunday by telephone. She said Hamill told her that he was locked in a building
"He said he heard a military convoy come by and pried the door open. He said he ran half a mile down the road and got with the convoy," Kellie Hamill said.

...he managed to turn the tables on them:

Hamill identified himself to the troops, then led the patrol to the house where he had been held captive. The unit surrounded the house and captured two Iraqis with an automatic weapon, said the military spokesman, Maj. Neal O'Brien.

If Thomas Hamill ever comes to Saint Paul, the first round is on me.

As I Enjoy...

...this lovely day, I have to temper the joy I feel by asking myself...

...does Nick Coleman feel joy today?

Or is he off prowling the streets around the Strib building, trying to find people for whom sunshine and warm temperatures are a hardship?

And then finding a way to blame Tim Pawlenty and other "big cheeses" for it?

I'm just wondering.

Not that it makes it any harder to enjoy the day...