Category: Old Dish

In a word: condescension.

“Where are the country singers threatening to put boots up peoples’ asses? … Who grieves this privately? This American likes his sorrow in t-shirt form” – Rob Corddry, from the Daily Show, in reference to London. We don’t have TV up here on the beach. It’s good to detoxify for a couple of months. But I sure miss Jon Stewart.

Yes, there are some good posts on Huffington Post. In my cranky diss of the place, I cited one such by Irshad Manji. Anywhere Eugene Volokh contributes has something worthwhile in it. But even Rich B. has to concede that the place is dominated by paranoid Hollywood liberalism; and maybe it was reading guff like this, and this, and this on the day terrorists murdered dozens of Londoners that made me cranky. My claim that the blog is full of people in favor of “withdrawing from Iraq, and generally laying the blame for the mass murder of innocents on George Bush and Tony Blair” is fully documented by those posts. As for negotiating with al Qaeda operatives, I concede hyperbole. Deepak Chopra just wants us to give them a hug.

A pretty devastating expose by Tom Gross. The Orwellian fixing of language – by going in and changing online wordage after the fact – is particularly amusing:

Early on Friday morning another BBC webpage headlined “Testing the underground mood,” spoke of “the worst terrorist atrocity Britain has seen.” But at 12:08 GMT, while the rest of the article was left untouched, those words were replaced by “the worst peacetime bomb attacks Britain has seen.”… In its round-up of world reactions, BBC online was also quick to highlight the views of conspiracy theorists. The very first article listed by the BBC started by quoting Iranian cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Emami-Kashani saying Israel was behind the London attacks. It was followed by a commentary on Iranian state radio explicitly blaming the Mossad.

I guess we should be grateful that for around 24 hours, the BBC saw reality, called it terrorism, and reported it accurately. Then the p.c. police took over.

They’re a pragmatic bunch, but they’re not natural appeasers. The latest YouGov poll for the Daily Telegraph finds that 72 percent blieve that Britain’s role in Iraq helped make the country more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. But that’s statistically unchanged from before 7/7. The change has been in the following question: “Do you think that Britain should retain its close alliance wth the United States in the war on terror or should it distance itself to a much greater extent from US policy?” Last March, 44 percent said stick with the US; 47 percent said: more distance. Today, 52 percent say stick with America; and only 36 percent say distancing would be a good idea. Al Qaeda’s stupidity is revealed again. You don’t bully Brits.

At some point earlier this summer, my webmaster and I were trying to figure out when we actually started this blog. Andrewsullivan.com went live in November 1999, but it wasn’t till the following spring that we brainstormed and figured out we needed live updates to keep the thing fresh. Then we found Blogger; and the first blogged posts as such began (we think) in early July 2000. We’re not sure exactly when, and maybe someone out there with more time on their hands could tell us. But I remember writing immediate responses to the conventions that year; and so, in semi-arbitrary fashion, we’ve designated this month as our fifth blogiversary. In blog years, that’s a long time. As many of you know, I tried to put you all out of your misery last February but couldn’t stop myself. And so here we are. I say “we” not simply because without Robert taking care of everything technical, financial and mind-numbing, this wouldn’t have happened; but also because, this is a group phenomenon and some of you have been with me from the very beginning. It’s you, the readers who have provided me with many of my best links, tips, ideas, facts and arguments. I’d like to say thank you again.

LOOKING BACK: In 2000, the word ‘blog’ barely existed in common discourse; and I had to beg TV producers to cite it under my name. Those were the Clinton years, believe it or not. And the last five years have contained as much news and drama as most decades. But looking back, I can honestly say I have not been taken completely by surprise by the blogosphere’s amazing success. It seemed clear to me from the very start that once you allowed publishing independently of editors or publishers, a revolution was imminent. In the early days, I played a part in pioneering some blog tropes: media micro-criticism, instant news judgment, phony awards, political mini-campaigns (against Lott, Raines or torture), money quotes, etc. These are now staples of the genre. I also hoped that one day, a lone writer could finance himself this way – and so really break the MSM monopoly. It took a while, but advertising now pays most of the bills, and the expenses themselves have come down a lot since the early days. Five years is an infinity in technology. The site now looks dated (and is way more expensive than it need be), which is why we’re in the middle of a sleaker, cheaper-to-run redesign, which we hope to unveil in September. But my main gain as a writer has been the ability to be part of pioneering a new way of writing provisionally and instantly, of thinking out loud, of changing my mind, of engaging in what amounts to a conversation rather than a monologue. That would not have been possible without you and so I consider this a joint anniversary as much as anything. We don’t rely solely on pledge drives to sustain ourselves any more (and haven’t had one in a long while), but if you feel like throwing a contribution in the tip jar at this point, feel free. After five years of daily blogging, donations from our loyal readers are still very much appreciated.

My take in Time Magazine.

“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.

More evidence that the poison of al Qaeda’s Islamist fascism is not a function of poverty, but often of affluence. The Brits have been too tolerant of these fascists operating in plain sight. Michael Portillo disagrees.

ROVE WAS COOPER’S SOURCE: Well, we kinda knew this already, but it’s good to have it confirmed. The salient fact is that Rove appears to have told Cooper about Wilson’s wife working at the CIA before the Novak column appeared. Rove was clearly coordinating a message to discredit Wilson by linking him to his wife, and implying that Wilson had no real authorization from the senior levels of the administration. Rove may not be guilty of a crime, if he did not disclose her name and did not know she was undercover. He is guilty of sleaze and spin. But then that’s also hardly news, is it? Kinsley differs from the NYT in an interesting piece of counter-intuitive reasoning here.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “[M]ore than two years after the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was ousted, there is much we do not know about the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. We do know, however, that there was one. We know about this relationship not from Bush administration assertions but from internal Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) documents recovered in Iraq after the war–documents that have been authenticated by a U.S. intelligence community long hostile to the very idea that any such relationship exists.
We know from these IIS documents that beginning in 1992 the former Iraqi regime regarded bin Laden as an Iraqi Intelligence asset. We know from IIS documents that the former Iraqi regime provided safe haven and financial support to an Iraqi who has admitted to mixing the chemicals for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. We know from IIS documents that Saddam Hussein agreed to Osama bin Laden’s request to broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda on Iraqi state-run television. We know from IIS documents that a “trusted confidante” of bin Laden stayed for more than two weeks at a posh Baghdad hotel as the guest of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.” – from an article in the Weekly Standard that is well worth reading. Some of the material presented strikes me as unpersuasive – at least beyond a reasonable doubt. But that some relationship existed between Saddam’s government and agents and Osama bin Laden’s operation seems to me indisputable. What’s at issue is the depth or coordination of the relationship. Much of the new evidence makes the connection seem stronger, not weaker. What might have transpired if we had not deposed Saddam is anyone’s guess.

CATHOLICS AND EVOLUTION: A lively debate over at Amy Wellborn’s.

ON THE FAR RIGHT: Not enough attention is paid, I think, to the paleocon attacks on the war against terrorism. The loony left is rightly exposed, but the loony right is more often ignored. This week, they have peddled theories that the Jews knew about the London bombings in advance; and Paul Craig Roberts, writing in the right-wing website, Newsmax, calls Blair “a war criminal under the Nuremberg standard.” The religious right leaders, Falwell and Robertson, as well as Watergate criminal, Charles Colson, have also blamed America’s alleged depravity for 9/11. Fred Phelps, a religious nutcase, delighted this week in the London massacres. I see little to distinguish these people from the Democratic Underground types. Except that the mainstream right is too squeamish sometimes in condemning them. Ever seen one of these guys ripped up on O’Reilly? Thought not.

RURAL METH: More important coverage of how this drug is ravaging rural America – in this case, Kitsap County, Washington.

More encouragement, as well as some cowering, and Blair-blaming.