The Dish

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.

One the great distinctions between Roman Catholicism and protestant fundamentalism in recent times has been Catholicism’s respect for free scientific inquiry, specifically comfort with evolutionary biology. Reason and faith are not in conflict, the Second Council told us, and the Church has nothing to fear from open scientific inquiry, based on empirical research and peer-reviewed study. Not for us Catholics the know-nothingism of the literalist fundamentalists, who still hold that the world was made in seven literal days, or that Adam and Eve literally existed, or that God somehow directed the random process of natural selection. Well, now we have Benedict in charge and the rush back to the Middle Ages, already seen in fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Protestantism, looks as if it is going to be endorsed in the Vatican. I expected reactionary radicalism from Benedict. But this kind of stupidity? I fear there’s much more to come. Remember that Ratzinger was an anti-intellectual intellectual. Free thought not controlled by Vatican diktat is anathema to him. And so we return to the nineteenth century. The thinking may also be nakedly political. Benedict – in order to pursue his secular war against freedom for gays, or reproductive freedom – needs an alliance with the Protestant right. This is exactly a way to bolster the new anti-modern Popular Front. It would be depressing if it weren’t also infuriating.

IRSHAD: The Huffington Post is full of part-time bloggers calling for negotiating with al Qaeda, withdrawing from Iraq, and generally laying the blame for the mass murder of innocents on George Bush and Tony Blair. But as part of Arianna’s attempt to credentialize her blog as something more than a collection of far left paranoids and Bush-haters, she does have a few non-Fiskies. Among them is my friend Irshad Manji. Here’s her post demanding a stand from Muslims, and not just public rhetorical blather. It was written on the day of the massacres in London:

The preachers will express condolences for the victims and condemnations of the criminals. Then they’ll add, “But Britain should have never invited this kind of response by joining America in the invasion of Iraq.”

The trouble with this line of reasoning is that terrorists have never needed an Iraq debacle to justify their violent jihads. What exactly was the Iraq of 1993, when Islamic radicals tried to blow up the World Trade Center? Or of 2000, when the USS Cole was attacked? Hell, that assault took place after U.S. military intervention saved thousands of Muslims in Bosnia.

If staying out of Iraq protected anyone from terrorism, then why did “insurgents” last year kidnap two journalists from France — the most anti-war, anti-Bush nation in the West? Even overt solidarity with the people of Iraq, demonstrated by CARE’s top relief worker in the area, Margaret Hassan, didn’t shield her from assassination.

These are the facts that ordinary Muslims must take to their preachers at Friday’s sermons. A clear repudiation of the London bombings will not bring back the dead. What it can do is help the rest of the world differentiate between the moderates and the apologists.

You can find some encouraging responses here. One step, as Irshad implies, could be to abandon the noxious bill now before parliament making it a crime to “defame” Islam. In effect, the bill would make it a crime to abhor Islamist terror and to ascribe murderous intent it to a twisted, but still vibrant, part of modern Islam. In other words, the bill would make it much harder to make distinctions between legitimate Islam and murderous Islamism. Such a distinction is critical to winning this war. Making it legally perilous to speak out about this is a step quite firmly in the wrong direction.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “The most dangerous of devotions, in my opinion, is the one endemic to Christianity: I was not born to be of this world. With a second life waiting, suffering can be endured- especially in other people. The natural environment can be used up. Enemies of the faith can be savaged and suicidal martyrdom praised.” – E. O. Wilson, “Consilience.”

Another wonderful collective blog of images – sending a message to the medievalist murderers of New York, Bali, Aldgate and Baghdad. Check it out.

Charles Moore asks an important question. I have to say I’m disappointed by how weak the Muslim response seems to have been in Britain. Money quote:

It is only when you start thinking about what we are not getting from leaders of British Muslims, and indeed Muslim religious leadership throughout the world, that you start to see how much needs doing. The moderates are not pressed hard for anything more than a general condemnation of the extremists.
When did you last hear criticisms of named extremist groups and organisations by Muslim leaders, or support for their expulsion, imprisonment or extradition? How often do you see fatwas issued against suicide bombers and other terrorists, or statements by learned men declaring that people who commit such deeds will go to hell?
When do Muslim leaders and congregations insist that a particular imam leave his mosque because of the poison that he disseminates every Friday? When did a British Muslim last go after a Muslim who advocates or practises violence with anything like the zeal with which so many went after Salman Rushdie?

That last question is particularly acute, I think.

THAT BRITISH COP: You may have seen him on TV. Always calm, authoritative, he’s Brian Paddick, London’s Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner, and the chief police spokesman in Britain’s capital. And yes, he’s openly gay. It really isn’t an issue over there any more. One more reason to be proud of my homeland.

“JOE SCARBOROUGH: Mr. Hitchens, is Senator Clinton correct?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I have no idea. My presumption would be that she’s just fooling with the numbers. But that’s just because I don’t like her and can’t stand the sight of her.”

Give him points for honesty. (Hat tip: Crooks and Liars, who, of course, have no sense of humor.)

Here’s a piece of idiocy, approvingly quoted by Glenn Reynolds:

I bet if the media voluntarily stopped showing any pictures of all terror attacks, that the terror would stop. Thus ending the GWOT without a shot. This policy would be NO DIFFERENT than how they cover folks who run on to baseball fields: they do NOT show them on TV; they ignore them. Would the media ever put peace above their ratings/profits? Never.

Glenn comments: “Sadly, that’s probably right.” I suppose I see the underlying point: that terror needs media oxygen to survive. But the notion that we should somehow not cover mass murder, or that it’s equivalent to misbehavior at sporting events, or that the only reason for covering it is “ratings/profits” is nutty. People have a right to know what’s going on in their own countries and around the world. If the MSM decided to stop reporting terror attacks, bloggers would fill the gap. Yesterday, for example, was remarkable for the first-hand accounts of terror we were able to read – within hours of the massacres – by citizen journalists. Would Glenn like to see them silenced? Yes, these events shouldn’t be hyped; yes, they should be put in context. But this out-of-sight-out-of-mind mentality is a form of denial. The same goes for abuse and torture accusations. Instapundit won’t actually link to credible accounts. By ignoring them, he somehow thinks they don’t exist or will go away. They won’t. Similarly, exposing the violence perpetrated by the Islamists is simply what the media does. Moreoever, it doesn’t always help the terrorists; it also hurts them. We need to see the atrocities these fanatics commit, however appalling, however vile. The job of the media, even in wartime, is to relay facts, not to skew coverage for purposes of morale.