A recent pc definition, made part of a mandatory training program at the University of Delaware:
A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e. people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture, or sexuality.
Montreal, Canada, 9.15 am.
Pretty rough for a "nice guy". And the gay-bashing is ubiquitous. He’s got to be worried about the Dumond story too, his very own Willie Horton moment.
Chris Allbritton has the email he sent to NRO’s The Tank two months ago. Here’s the text:
Sirs, Your posts by W. Thomas Smith Jr. are hilarious! Great fiction reading. Such as this one: “The general briefed me regarding the battlefield at Nahr al-Bared, near his camp, and what I would see today as the first American journalist to visit the site of Lebanon’s defeat of Al Qaeda-affiliate Fatah al Islam.” Ah, no. You do know that almost every American journalist living in Beirut has been up to Nahr el-Bared several times during and after the fighting? I myself filed stories for the Washington Times and the Newark Star-Ledger, the day after the fighting stopped — and I was in a hell of a lot more danger than your man is in today. (Star-Ledger seems to have archived the story, so that link goes to my personal site, but that’s the story that ran there. WaTimes is still available.)
You know, for a publication that went after the New Republic so hard for its soldier-in-Iraq stuff, your guy here is horribly, horribly inaccurate and sensationalist.
I’m an American and I never have bodyguards and never needed one. He is making Beirut seem much more dangerous than it is. He also is — as are you, since I assume he’s expensing it — getting fleeced by some Lebanese con artists. He doesn’t need weapons and he’s making a big problem by carrying them and publicly writing about his “recon missions” in the Dahiyah. That’s not what journalists do; it’s what spies do, and by his actions, he’s making everyone suspicious of western journalists. That is the height of irresponsibility.
Secondly, he’s a liar. Hezbollah never invaded east Beirut on the 29th. And they don’t have 200 “heavily armed” militiamen downtown. I passed by today. There are about 40 guys down there with no weapons at all. They sit around, smoking shisha in jeans and t-shirts.
Perhaps your man in Beirut should not rely solely on March 14 guys and get a wider perspective. And stop lying and making careless errors. It’s your credibility on the line, after all.
Sincerely,
Christopher Allbritton
It’s propelling Huckabee to national status; and it allows him to rally an informal national network of pastors, whom he’s addressing in Iowa this week, Ambers reports.
He’s advising Condi on WMDs. Curveball wasn’t available?
I don’t think TNR comes out of the Beauchamp affair looking good. Beauchamp, from a distance, seems like a major douche whose reliability is weak. The anecdotes in question, however, are pretty trivial when compared to things that happen in every war, and can be viewed on Youtube if you look, as soldiers goof off. That’s why I’ve never quite grasped why this story was so maddening to the Bush right. But when you read a usually mild-mannered Pete Wehner accusing TNR of hating the troops and wanting to smear them, you realize how deep the nuttiness has gone. Here’s Wehner this morning:
The magazine had turned against the war, and this piece would help turn people against those serving in the war. What has happened instead is that the situation in Iraq is turning around — and the TNR piece has utterly collapsed.
Poisonous poppycock. There is all the difference in the world between turning on the war – which Wehner’s former bosses criminally bungled and he recklessly spun through years of failure – and turning on the soldiers. I know most of the editors at TNR. I don’t think any of them has a scintilla of dislike for any soldier put in harm’s way by this president. They are hawkish Democrats with a very long record of support and respect for the military. I cannot speak for Frank Foer but it seems to me that the obvious motive behind the Beauchamp piece was to get some vivid first-person war-reporting in the magazine, to convey what it’s actually like to be a soldier. They picked the wrong soldier; and they were too defensive in trying to figure out what happened (which is still unclear to me); and they should never have assigned his wife as his fact-checker. But to ascribe a treasonous or anti-troop motive to them is beyond the pale. The legitimate factual questions, moreover, either happened or didn’t. The fate of the broader war is utterly irrelevant to the issue at hand.
Similarly, the NRO story is obviously not one of bad motives on the part of Kathryn-Jean Lopez. She didn’t want to run anything fallacious.
But she dilly-dallied, on her own account, for over a week before coming clean with the issue. She even waited a week after being contacted by Tom Edsall. Her stated reason for not immediately airing the issue is the following:
I also had a sense of collegial respect for Edsall, i.e. to let him tell his story.
Oh, please. When a reporter contacts you with questions about whether a blogger on your site has been fabricating easily disproved stories, you don’t wait for that reporter to publish out of "collegial respect." And Lopez still has not said whether she received emails over six weeks ago alerting her to the question, as Mitch Prothero says. Did she? And what basis does she have for continuing to trust Smith’s reporting and continuing to publish his blog?
A teacher asked here. It turns out that new research is rehabilitating it as an educational tool.
An interesting wrinkle a reader points me to.
"Competence, courage, and conviction are enormously important for our next President to possess. No one has a better understanding of U.S. interests and dangers right now than does McCain. He was right on the mistakes made by the Bush administration in prosecuting the Islamic terrorist war in Iraq and he is being proved right on the way forward both there and worldwide. McCain is pro-life. Always has been. He fights against special-interest and pork-barrel spending, and high spending in general, which ticks off liberals and many in the GOP who have wallowed at the public trough. Yet he also has the proven ability, unique among the contenders, to work across the political divide that has led our government into petty bickering when important problems need to be solved," – the Manchester Union Leader endorsing John McCain in New Hampshire.
My only qualm with this assessment is the notion that the best way ahead in Iraq is an indefinite continuation of the occupation. But on this, I still trust McCain’s judgment more than I do Romney’s or, God help us, Giuliani’s. And he was right in predicting tactical success for the surge, and I was too pessimistic. I’ll be interviewing the senator tomorrow. A reader seconds:
I’d been leaning McCain for a few days now, but the debate the other night clinched it for this disenchanted Republican who voted Democrat in ’06.
Rudy came across as the small and petty man that he is. His attacks on Romney were immature and sleazy, just like the man himself, as we now know from his use of taxpayer dollars and government property to tend to Judith Nathan. Romney, meanwhile, continues to be the most cynical candidate around, parroting lines that he thinks conservatives want to hear, even though everyone can see through them. Fred Thompson is good but pointless. He clearly doesn’t want to be in this race. His wife must really want to be First Lady. Paul is hopeless. Huckabee is at least sincere, but I just feel that nominating him is tantamount to giving away the store. He’s a big-government liberal with the compassion of Jimmy Carter and a nanny-state busybody of the highest order. I’d rather have the Bitch. At least she’d balance the budget. You know, like her husband did.
But McCain is a man of honor who is reasonably conservative and who would move the Republican Party forward in lots of important ways. Finally we would have a president that agrees that it’s not okay to torture or wiretap without a warrant or suspend habeas corpus. Finally we would have a president who agrees that climate change is real and who wants to do something about it. Finally we would have a president who believes in science. And all of this without giving in to a big-government liberal agenda with Huckabee or Obama. McCain wouldn’t raise taxes, would cut spending, and would be able to tackle immigration and entitlements in a bipartisan way. He was right about the surge and he could finish the job in Iraq with honor. Sure, McCain has pissed me off over the years on this or on that, but he remains the least imperfect choice in a highly imperfect field of candidates on both sides.
As such, I’ve made my decision. I’m backing McCain. Further, I hope that Obama takes down Hillary and clinches the Democratic nomination. A McCain/Obama race would be one about policy, not personalities, and would be a unifying event, not a polarizing one.
