FROM THE SCENE

A British reader writes:

Just some notes from the UK
– Thur 6 pm news BBC, only about a minute’s coverage on the demonstration!!
– Wed 7 pm news Ch 4, a postive headline about Bushs speech!!
– General, lots of people in the media condemning the demonstrations!!
– Dinner party at mine Wed night, room fell silent when Bush spoke followed by applause!
I think the visit has gone down pretty well!

What a difference al Qaeda makes.

ARE BLOGS OVER? Reading this particularly bitter-sounding piece, I’d say not. John Dvorak’s argument that many blogs don’t pan out and people can’t keep it up is obvious. When you have 4 million blogs, of course you’re going to have people fade out. It’s tough. And then Dvorak concedes: ” Luckily for the blogging community, there is still evidence that the growth rate is faster than the abandonment rate. But growth eventually stops.” What can that mean? That eventually we’ll reach a stable number of blogs, as the market is finally saturated? And that’s failure … why? Then Dvorak claims that blogs by professional writers are somehow “scams.” Here’s his brilliant insight:

They have essentially suckered thousands of newbies, mavens, and just plain folk into blogging, solely to get return links in the form of the blogrolls and citations. This is, in fact, a remarkably slick grassroots marketing scheme that is in many ways awesome, albeit insincere.
Unfortunately, at some point, people will realize they’ve been used. This will happen sooner rather than later, since many mainstream publishers now see the opportunity for exploitation. Thus you find professionally written and edited faux blogs appearing on MSNBC’s site, the Washington Post site, and elsewhere. This seems to be where blogging is headed-Big Media. So much for the independent thinking and reporting that are supposed to earmark blog journalism.

Suckered? No one who writes a blog has been suckered into it. They do it because it’s fun and if it ceases to be fun, they might stop. What’s so hard to understand about that? And there is a distinction between writing blogs and reading them. Many more will read than write – and that’s where much of the growth is, which is why Big Media will of course want to shift its strategy online to bring blogging to the mainstream. And this is … failure? Mickey Kaus, for example, is paid by Microsoft. Does that mean his blog is somehow less valid than mine, because mine is directly supported by readers? None of this rant makes any sense to me. Except some guy who’s bitter that plenty of amateurs now have the kind of access to readers he used to have as a monopoly. Three words: get over it.

AL QAEDA LOSES IT

What exactly is the strategy behind going after Turkey and Saudi Arabia? We know the motivation – they despise Turkey’s secular form of government and they loathe Saudi Arabia’s connections to the West. But doesn’t this strike you as spectacularly dumb from a strategic point of view? They have only helped make the West’s case to the Saudis – that they cannot ignore this threat and certainly cannot buy it off. They may well alienate Turkey’s Muslim population. And by murdering Brits, they have hopelessly undercut the anti-Western demonstrations in London. Your average Brit, after all, may be a little queasy about American military power. But when al Qaeda starts murdering British subjects abroad, the sympathy for Arab terrorists (which is a clear under-current of the far left in Britain) begins to look to waverers as sickening as it genuinely is. We may have made errors in Iraq – disbanding the army in May seems in retrospect an obvious screw-up. But the enemy is not without flaws itself. Perhaps al Qaeda is now so disorganized that it is practically incapable of any intelligent strategy. Either way, these terrible murders are indicators of something worth noting: the enemy may be falling apart. This may make it more dangerous in the short term. But it bodes well for eventual victory.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “What people have got to remember is that Sept. 11 happened in 2001 and not in 2003. It was planned under the presidency of Bill Clinton.” – British foreign secretary, Jack Straw. The point, of course, is not to blame Clinton for 9/11, but to show that al Qaeda terrorism is not some kind of response to the Bush administration. It predated it, and will probably outlast it.

LOOK, IT’S COMPLICATED: You’ve got to feel for the poor guy:

The queen gave her toast, noting that, unlike presidents, she was not term-limited. The president smiled, Prince Charles did not. When the queen finished, the president raised his glass, but Her Majesty did not return the gesture, instead waiting for the American national anthem to begin. Hearing the music, Bush put down his glass and placed his hand on his heart, then took it off, then put it on again. “The Star-Spangled Banner” over, he clinked glasses with the queen, then turned to clink glasses with Princess Anne, who was already sipping from hers.
The awkwardness continued after Bush’s toast, when he again picked up his glass to clink with the queen, who stood motionless, waiting for her own national anthem. Bush put his glass back down and, as the orchestra played “God Save the Queen,” winked at somebody in the audience. Finally, the anthem finished, president and queen consummated their clinks.

MEANWHILE, IN FRANCE

“The Chief Rabbi of France, Rabbi Joseph Sitruk, called on that country’s Jewish community to wear baseball caps instead of skullcaps while not in their homes, in order ‘to prevent being attacked in the street.’ Daily newspaper Le Parisien reported in its Wednesday edition that Sitruk made the comments Tuesday in an interview on Radio Shalom, a Jewish community radio station.” It gets worse, doesn’t it?

BURKE AND MARRIAGE: Along with Hayek, let me suggest that Burke might also have been in favor of including gays in marriage rights, if he were alive today. He was a conservative but he was also a Whig. Unlike many of the Tories of his day, Burke favored American independence and had an independent streak. He believed that society changes and that laws and institutions should be open to accommodating such changes – not resisting them to the bitter end. And when you look at, say, civil society in Massachusetts today, you see that gay relationships are widely accepted. Many such couples have children. The state already provides all sorts of legal protections for these people and even the dissents in the Goodridge case had nothing against accepting the reality and dignity of gay relationships. Polls have shown a small majority of Massachusetts residents favor same-sex marriage. The legislature has considered granting them many of the benefits of marriage already. The court’s nudge of what is already a pretty wide consensus is not abject tyranny. Compared to what most Virginians thought of inter-racial marriage in 1967, the residents of Massachusetts are crazy homophiles. Gay marriage is already, in most substantive respects, a reality in that state. The question is whether the laws should now reflect that reality, and provide real protection for families that already exist. That’s why this move is far less radical than some are suggesting – and why it wasn’t crazy for the court to find no rational reason to maintain the exclusion. Sure, it would be a radical move in parts of the South, where gay families also exist, but do so in a climate of fear and hatred and widespread hostility. But that’s the point of federalism, isn’t it? It can be tried out in one state before it is tried out in another. The flip-side of leaving Mississippi alone is that we should also leave Massachusetts alone. Deal?

LEAVE THE CONSTITUTION ALONE

So far, we have Bill Frist distancing himself, Tom Delay getting cold feet, Bob Barr dissenting, Lyn Nofziger opposed, a Weekly Standard piece calling it hopeless, Jim Sensenbrenner queasy, and every single Democratic candidate in opposition. Aren’t Constitutional Amendments supposed to gain overwhelming national support before they succeed?

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “The more I read about the Massachusetts ruling, the more I become convinced that it is unlikely to be undone by the state legislature. And what a beautiful thing that is. I’m beginning to feel what it’s like to be a complete human being in the eyes of the law for the first time since since I was twelve or thirteen years old. I didn’t realize how much the deprivation of basic rights affected me psychologically, affected my whole view of the world, until the prospect of having those rights was in sight.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

A TOM FRIEDMAN PARODY

It goes off the deep end toward the conclusion, but this has its moments. (I should add, I think Friedman has been good this past year, even when I’ve disagreed with him).

KRUGMAN’S DECLINE: Lying in Ponds blog – a champion of Paul Krugman’s columns on the California energy crisis – updates its statistical analysis of the NYT columnist’s writing. From relative sanity in 2000, every single column Krugamn now writes is partisan to an almost absurd degree. He has come undone.

BOORTZ ON GOODRIDGE: Another conservative keeps his cool.

EMAIL OF THE DAY

“About two years ago my nephew traveled to Syria with a group from the German university where he studies. Since he looks German, speaks German, and was with a German organization, he ‘passed’ for German on the trip. He also speaks good Arabic, and talked to many Syrians. He was shocked by the number Syrians from all walks of life, who told him quite openly that the Germany and Hitler had the right idea when it came to the Jews. It was about the first thing out of their mouth when they discovered that he was visiting from Germany.” Figures. Yet Europe looks the other way.