The Dish

“In Jazz the unconscious describes itself almost in its own terms,” – Philip Larkin. I stumbled across that quote today. Has anyone come up with a better one-line description of an art-form?

A far more credible person with some serious questions about the death of her son in combat. Her name? Mary Tillman. Did you know that one of Pat Tillman’s favorite authors was Noam Chomsky and that he opposed the Iraq war? I didn’t. It makes his patriotism and service more admirable, in my view. And the obvious lies and obfuscation and contradictions from the military all the more reprehensible. Of course, the Tillman family have only one real powerful ally in D.C.: John McCain. With every day, we
realize just how big a loss it was when George Bush smeared his way to primary victory in South Carolina five years ago.

From several sources, it seems a fair estimate that tens of thousands of anti-war protestors were in Washington this weekend. The D.C. police chief estimated a probable 100,000 in all. Reports of as few as 2,000 may have been from one of the minor rallies, and I misread them. I still don’t see why the NYT could not make a reasonable guess. The AP managed it, in what was, to my mind, still a somewhat breathless puff piece on the event. Anyway, apologies on the numbers.

I’m just applying Margaret Thatcher’s definition. My column is now up.

Record numbers seem to be signing up to vote on the new Iraq constitution (and we may be having more success against the insurgency). It strikes me that the voting number is both good and also worrying news. It’s good news because the simple experience of actually changing things through voting, rather than killing, changes a political and social culture. (Hey, one day, those of us who live in D.C. may get the same democratic rights as Fallujans!) But what happens if there’s a massive Sunni turnout to vote against the Constitution and they don’t win a majority in the necessary three provinces to derail it? Wouldn’t that bring home to recalcitrant Sunnis that they cannot win through democracy even when they participate? Isn’t there a danger that this could really be the moment when the paramilitary and terror groups can rally the Sunni base? Or that we could be forced to witness the two majority groups – Kurds and Shia – essentially wage a civil war against their previous rulers? Or would it be the moment when the Sunnis finally realize – and accept – that their time is over? I guess we could have a result in which surprising numbers of Sunnis vote for the constitution, which would be wonderful. But I don’t know of many sources who would predict that. The balance between measured hope and intermittent despair seems particularly hard to maintain right now.

THE OTHER IRAN: Ledeen is, as ever, must-reading.

Not a good week for Paul Krugman. He loses a huge chunk of his audience, his website no longer carries his most recent columns for free, and his occasional dishonesty as a journalist is attacked by the NYT’s own Public Editor. Gotta hurt. No amount of Bush-related unemployment or poverty could cheer him up. In the Geraldo-Stanley slug-fest, Geraldo scores a knock-out – and the umpire is the NYT’s! This really is a test of MSM versus blog accountability. Both Stanley and Krugman need to retract their untruths in their own words. Or someone needs to tell them to. It appears Gail Collins refuses to do her job, or cannot do it. So Sulzberger must surely step in and tell Krugman and Stanley that they must correct. It’s not that hard. We all screw up. I’ve run corrections when I’ve goofed, the most recent being here. But blog corrections are actually up-front on the blog itself, not minimized or buried in spinach, as Calame implies some significant NYT corrections are. Kudos to Calame for his balls; and to Keller for allowing him to expose even his own misjudgments. But this cannot be the end of this.

BEYOND PARODY I: I’m beginning to wonder whether the MSM writes up rallies by extremist anti-war groups from some kind of Politburo template devised by Michael Moore. What’s up with this:

Vast numbers of protesters from around the country poured onto the lawns behind the White House on Saturday to demonstrate their opposition to the war in Iraq … A sea of anti-administration signs and banners flashed back at a long succession of speakers blah blah blah

How many people were in DC? The reporter, Michael Janofsky, is, apparently, blind:

Organizers of the rally and march had a permit for 100,000 people, but the National Park Service no longer provides official estimates for large gatherings in Washington.

Memo to Janofsky: how many did you figure were there? I’ve seen no accounts that come even close to 100,000 and several that put the number at 2,000 or so. The NYT had two reporters there – Holli Chmela and Lakiesha Carr. Were they blind too? The piece was laughable, boilerplate propaganda, pure and simple.

BEYOND PARODY II: Still, this NYT piece brought a chuckle. Amtrak delays kept many of the throngs stuck in NYC:

A group of young women known as the radical cheerleaders, dressed in pleated short skirts, with pompoms made of plastic trash bags, shouted: “Let’s get on the right track. Get the troops out of Iraq.” Another chant went “Money for trains, not war.”

So now Iraq is responsible for delays in Amtrak?

In general, it’s a good idea for the administration not to expand existing entitlements for Katrina victims and to rely on once-only measures. In so far as they are doing that, good for them. Once you create an entitlement, it lives for ever. But this strikes me as bizarre:

Instead of offering $10,000 [rental housing] vouchers, FEMA is paying an average of $16,000 for each trailer in the new parks it is contemplating. Even many Republicans wonder why the government would want to build trailer parks when many evacuees are now living in communities with plenty of vacant, privately owned apartments.

We have a unique chance to fight poverty by dispersing some of New Orleans’ underclass across the country in places with empty rental markets. Instead, the Bush administration is creating trailer-ghettoes that cost more. Newt Gingrich is right to be livid. Isn’t this a no-brainer?

Picked up by Instapundit and the Corner as more evidence of wretched BBC anti-American bias, I read the piece assailed by Ann Althouse. It’s an opinion piece, not news reporting, so obviously a little more lee-way for bias should be allowed. And yes, there’s a bizarre assumption that there is no welfare net in America – or that we haven’t just expanded it to cover millions of wealthy seniors, or that welfare rolls haven’t been reduced by almost a half in a few years, and so on. Statements like this – “But the system’s fundamentals – no limit on how far you can fly and little limit on how low you can fall – remain as intact as they were in the San Francisco gold rush” – are so nutty and ill-informed that you have to wonder whether the guy knows anything about 20th century American history. But here are other sections of the piece, which do not seem to me to be anti-American bias:

Speeding along a relatively unscathed motorway between the wonderfully exotic-sounding towns of Pascagoula and Biloxi, I switched on the car radio and heard the tobacco-stained drawl of a southern politician comparing the destruction in his district to that of Hiroshima.
Tasteless I thought. A typical example of American inability to see that suffering in other nations at other times dwarfs anything the average American ever sees.
Then we arrived in Biloxi, Mississippi.
The real question is whether there is going to be a revolution
There are streets where nothing stands, corners where one house or one wall has survived. Everything around it is matchwood.
The destruction is awe inspiring. After 10 minutes in the town, the Hiroshima comparison seems less jarring.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t that stand as an example of the BBC criticizing its own knee-jerk anti-Americanism? Glenn Reynolds echoes the judgment that this piece is “unbelievably smug.” Did he read it? Then there’s this:

Charity is part of the warp and weft of American life and it is telling that Hurricane Katrina has encouraged an outpouring of giving on a scale never seen before.
Americans are cross with the government and disappointed with the response from Washington, but they have not sat on their hands and waited for the government to sort itself out. Much the opposite.
Americans have given with unbridled enthusiasm and generosity.
Is that not something governments do? Americans do not think so and never will.
This is unquestionably a source of strength and spine in troubled times, but boy does it put a dampener on revolution.

Well, yes. But there’s a small matter of $200 billion in federal aid. And who on earth thinks ‘revolution’ is now some kind of necessary event in the most succesful, powerful and wealthiest country on the planet? This was a dumb and ill-informed piece. But if you’re going to pick on BBC bias, and there’s plenty of material, this seems pretty milque-toast to me. And it undermines legitimate criticism of the Beeb to single it out.

From the stage at the far left anti-war rally today in D.C.:

“[Name of Missing Person]… Please meet your Mom at the Socialist Liberation tent. I repeat: [Name of Missing Person] Please meet your Mom at the Socialist Liberation tent. Thank you.”

Monty Python meets Bush’s most effective, if unwitting, allies.

“Well, yes. As Americans, we should be ashamed that we’re systematically torturing our enemies (real and imagined).
Most of us are not, though, and I hope your starry-eyed optimism about the great people of this country will allow you to see the truth. It’s true, the media has done a crummy job of exposing our government’s approval of torture. And it’s true, the government itself has – as governments always do – done its best to hide the truth.
But let’s be honest about this, Andrew . . . There have been enough vivid reports, enough stomach-turning photos, that anybody who has the slightest amount of interest must know what’s been happening since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. And the fact is that if we really cared, we would have demanded, from our political and military leaders, some real accountability. We haven’t demanded anything because we do not, in the end, care about people from other countries, particularly if those people 1) don’t look like (most of) us, and 2) might wish us harm.
We like to think we’re special. We’re not. Which is why we need laws that are enforced, and responsible adults in positions of great power. At the moment, I’m afraid we have neither.”

For further evidence, check out the most trafficked sites of the conservative blogosphere, Instapundit, Powerline, National Review, Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, Hugh Hewitt, and Red State. Yes, there’s other news. But the universal silence is telling, I think. Defending this adminsitration’s record on the treatment of detainees is simply impossible any more. So let’s forget the past, shall we? Can we have an agreement that the McCain-Graham proposed legislation to legally enshrine new detention policies that bar inhumane treatment should be passed as soon as possible?