“How clever of the Los Angeles Times to propose that Judy Miller debate Mike Kinsley on the subject of press freedom. Sadly, Judy is not on a fellowship at some writers’ colony. She is in JAIL. She is sleeping on a foam mattress on the floor, and her communications are, shall we say, constrained.
I have to tell you that Mike’s contrarian intellectualizing on the subject of reporters and the law was more amusing when it was all hypothetical. Back then it was just punditry. But that was before Norm Pearlstine embraced acquiescence as corporate policy, and before Judy Miller braved the real-world discomforts of the moral high ground. Of course this is an important issue, and clever minds should wrestle with it. But at the moment Kinsley and Pearlstine seem perversely remote from the world where actual reporters work.” – Bill Keller, the New York Times’ executive editor, responding to the Los Angeles’ Times’ op-ed page editor, Nick Goldberg.
QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: “I feel the appeal, believe me. You are exasperated with the manifold faults of Tony Blair and George W Bush. Fighting your government is what you know how to do and what you want to do, and when you are confronted with totalitarian forces which are far worse than your government, the easy solution is to blame your government for them.
But it’s a parochial line of reasoning to suppose that all bad, or all good, comes from the West – and a racist one to boot. The unavoidable consequence is that you must refuse to support democrats, liberals, feminists and socialists in the Arab world and Iran who are the victims of Islamism in its Sunni and Shia guises because you are too compromised to condemn their persecutors.
Islamism stops being an ideology intent on building an empire from Andalusia to Indonesia, destroying democracy and subjugating women and becomes, by the magic of parochial reasoning, a protest movement on a par with Make Poverty History or the TUC.
Again, I understand the appeal. Whether you are brown or white, Muslim, Christian, Jew or atheist, it is uncomfortable to face the fact that there is a messianic cult of death which, like European fascism and communism before it, will send you to your grave whatever you do. But I’m afraid that’s what the record shows.” – Nick Cohen, writing yesterday in London’s Observer.
THE FEVER SWAMP ON THE RIGHT: Tom Palmer’s been on the case for a while now.
CONSERVATIVES AND EVOLUTION: Want to figure out which conservative intellectuals are actually intellectuals and which ones will say anything to placate fundamentalists whose support they need to maintain political power? Here’s one useful guide.
The Dish 